What is Safety Culture?
Safety culture is the beliefs, perceptions, and values that your employees have in relation to safety within your organisation. The “way things are done around here”. It is important for your business to develop a culture of safety compliance.
Many workplace related disasters have been attributed to a breakdown in an organisation’s policies and procedures that were established to deal with safety, with the breakdown flowing from inadequate attention paid to safety issues.
A good safety culture can be encouraged and grown by ensuring there is a genuine commitment to safety. This commitment needs to be led and upheld in combination with realistic practices for handling hazards, continuous organisational learning, and care and concern for hazards shared across the workforce.
How do you build a Safety Culture?
The Construction Safety Competency Framework identified nine broad behaviours, or culture actions, that are considered essential to the development of a positive safety culture.
These are:
- Communicate company values
- Demonstrate leadership
- Clarify required and expected behaviour
- Personalise safety outcomes
- Develop positive safety attitudes
- Engage and own safety responsibilities and accountabilities
- Increase hazard/risk awareness and preventive behaviours
- Improve understanding and effective implementation of safety management systems
- Monitor, review and reflect on personal effectiveness