One of the central tenets of modern safety management is the need to establish a safety culture. However recent Australian research has cast serious doubt on whether this current belief is valid or useful. In October 2014, the Safety Institute of Australia launched several new chapters to the Body of Knowledge (BoK) project. One of …
Recently the UK’s Health and Safety Laboratory (HSL) released its second white paper on safety culture. This paper is called “Making the Case for Culture” and outlines the three arguments for a workplace safety culture – legal, moral and financial – from which a safety business case can be built. Financial seems to get the … Continue reading “Missed opportunity for making the business case on safety culture”
Mohammad Rabbi has recently written that “…safety culture is something that must permeate an entire organization. Its application largely depends on the investment, training, employee attitude, environment, location, laws, customs and practices in the industry. So how can organizations go about developing a safety culture?” He is right that any safety culture has a wide range …
Safety Culture is an issue that has turned up in disaster investigations, training programs intended to change attitudes, benchmarking exercises and reviews into workplace fatalities, overpriced and evangelical corporate products and as pitiful excuses for mistakes. Yet it still remains poorly understood and poorly defined as shown by a recent article in ISHN magazine. The magazine … Continue reading “Safety Culture remains an alchemy”
Defining safety culture is still a tricky proposition. Definitions can vary from what Global Safety Index quotes: ‘the product of individual and group values, attitudes and beliefs, competencies and patterns of behaviour that determine the commitment to, and the style and proficiency of, an organisation’s health and safety management’. to the, arguably more functional, definition … Continue reading “Measuring a safety culture”
Recently a safety professional told me he was investigating an incident on a work site and asked his first question “What do you think caused the incident?” The response was “safety culture”. Of course the next question will always be “what do you mean by safety culture?” and in most cases at this point the … Continue reading “Where are the Codes for establishing a safety culture?”
In late August 2012 at a breakfast seminar, the Director of Construction Code Compliance, Nigel Hadgkiss outlined the 1999 Victorian Code of Practice for the Building and Construction Industry, which complements a 1997 National Code, and recently released implementation guidelines being imposed on many Victorian construction companies by the Liberal Government. The Code and implementation guidelines … Continue reading “Safety culture change through a regulatory-based market mechanism”