Signs of a Poor Health and Safety Culture

Signs of a Poor Safety Culture

Health and safety culture is a combination of the attitudes and values of everyone within the business, so it’s often difficult to pinpoint the problems. Having a negative health and safety culture results in increased injuries, accidents and absence days as well as a decrease in profits and productivity. There are several factors that can undermine an organisation’s health and safety culture.

Signs of a Poor Safety Culture

High accident rates

The first indication of a poor health and safety culture is a high accident rate. If there are lots of accidents - even if they’re minor - the organisation’s health and safety culture needs addressing to understand what’s going wrong.

If rules aren’t in place, why?
If procedures are unsafe, how can they be improved?
If controls aren’t working, can they be fixed or replaced?

Ill-health and absenteeism

Just like accident rates, high levels of ill-health and absenteeism could be the result of a negative health and safety culture. Employees may be forced not to work due to an injury caused by a lack of compliance. For example, not wearing the PPE provided or lifting a load unsafely. High levels of absenteeism have a large cost associated to them due to loss of productivity, sick pay (if applicable) and replacement or temporary staff.

Poor incident/accident reporting

Employees should be encouraged to report every incident - even if it’s a near miss - so that it can be thoroughly investigated to ensure it doesn’t happen again or have more dire consequences. If accidents are consistently going unreported, or investigations only occur in the event of a serious or fatal injury, then employee safety and health and safety culture will be suffering as a result.

Profitability over safety

Prioritising profit at the expense of employee health and safety instantly fosters a negative safety culture. If employees are under the impression, for any reason, that safety rules must be broken to achieve the results that management wants, any existing safety system, no matter how great, cannot protect them.

Blame culture

Pointing the finger at someone who hasn’t done their job properly is an inherently negative act. In organisations where a negative safety culture exists, workers are often scared of being reprimanded or punished for incidents and therefore try to shift the focus away from themselves.

Lack of communication

Communication is the cornerstone of a positive health and safety culture. Whether it’s important information on the rules and procedures that have been put in place, gathering feedback or collecting ideas on how to make things safer, or getting details on a near-miss event, communication should flow in all directions. Ineffective safety-related communication breeds inconsistency which will contribute to a negative safety culture. For example, having one manager telling staff to wear helmets at all times on site and having another manager walking around site without a helmet on sends a confusing message.