Workplace culture describes the character of an organisation, including the values, attitudes and traditions its employees hold. Workplace culture also includes the behaviours, norms and social interactions that you encounter in a workplace, which have a significant impact on innovation, productivity, growth and employee wellbeing, writes IOSH's technical lead, Angela Gray.
Defining safety culture revolves around individual and team beliefs, values, attitudes, risk perceptions, competencies and patterns of behaviour that directly impact health and safety performance. As OSH professionals, we are constantly being driven to improve our workplace safety culture – but what does that really mean? Do you know what constitutes your own culture, bearing in mind that no two workplaces are the same? There will be significant differences between industry sectors, risk profiles, working environments and new and traditional businesses.
Don’t forget that, in the pursuit of an overarching culture, it would be naive to think of any organisation as having a single, uniform, cohesive culture. Many studies have identified the presence of subcultures within organisations. These are likely to develop where different work groups are faced with different tasks, levels of risk, working conditions and a range of personal circumstances and backgrounds.
So, when thinking about the goal of improving your workplace safety culture, you first need to visualise and define ‘what good looks like’ in your industry; what would that picture look like for you?
Focus shift on journey to OSH cultural maturity
Wouldn’t it be great if we had:
- authentic leaders, managers and supervisors all behaving with consistently positive attitudes to OSH, holding themselves accountable for identifying improvement opportunities and upholding policy and procedures?
- workers fully engaged and invested in working safely and searching for the gaps?
- high levels of risk perception across the business?
- a safety management system that is risk-appropriate yet simple enough for everyone to understand, that is designed to empower good decision-making and improvement activity
Then, of course, you need to understand where you are, at this moment in time, on the maturity curve.
There are several tools and models available for an OSH professional to use to gauge their organisation’s current status (the Hudson model or Dupont Bradley Curve are just two examples), but they can all be loosely broken down into a few key areas:
- workplace and legislative compliance to general and/or specific obligations
- OSH management systems to demonstrate and maintain control
- human factors and behaviours that impact performance and compliance to the above two points.
Prevailing attitudes towards OSH
Typically, this is the sequence of an organisation’s focus when developing its OSH management and performance.
Underlying this are the prevailing attitudes towards OSH of leaders and workers alike. If the general attitude across the organisation is that OSH has nothing to do with anybody other than the OSH professional(s), then you can be fairly confident that that organisation is at the bottom of the culture curve.
Conversely, if the OSH professional(s) is considered an integral part of the senior leadership team (a ‘critical friend’) providing guidance, coaching and insight for leadership decision-making, strategic direction and risk mitigation activities, then it will be quite obvious that the OSH maturity of the organisation is at a much higher level up the curve.
Safety culture is, after all, an outcome. It is the result of how well an organisation has approached good OSH management, and how well it has been led and supported from the top. Change of this nature takes time, often years. There is no ‘silver bullet’.
But ask yourself, to what degree does your leadership team take accountability for OSH performance? How well do they support the cultural improvement activity? This must be your starting point.
Read more on workplace culture: how to speak up without fear