Company culture provides the context within which employees judge the appropriateness of their behaviour. An organisation’s health and safety culture impacts how people think and feel about health and safety, and how this informs their behaviour.
Safety culture explicitly refers to the behaviour of a group of people who do things as ‘the norm’, or as second nature. These behaviours can only be described as ‘culture’ if majority of the workforce display the same behaviour patterns and share the same attitudes and values around safety.
Typically, safety culture can either be categorised as positive or negative. Negative safety systems are inherently reactive and therefore unable to prevent workplace safety incidents. In a negative safety culture, workers tend to feel pressured to ignore safe working procedures and break safety rules in order to meet deadlines and complete tasks on time.
On the other hand, a positive safety culture is built around having the right attitudes and working practices supported by effective policies and procedures that are consistently followed and enforced across the entire business. Just as negative safety cultures are caused by, and are a consequence of, reactive safety systems, positive safety cultures and proactive safety systems work hand-in-hand.
