How to Create a Positive Safety Culture

Health and safety used to be all about policies, procedures and policing. Now, it is much more progressive with a focus on people that is about changing behaviour and influencing engagement. Achieving a positive health and safety culture is about breeding shared attitudes, values, beliefs and behaviours towards safety that are proactive and preventative and become second nature.

Remember that culture often develops slowly and that fundamental change requires time. If you try to change a culture too quickly, you may just generate resistance to it.

There’s a ‘maturity’ model for culture that can help you choose and implement the right behavioural interventions for your organisation. The following six tips should also help you create and nurture a positive health and safety culture in your workplace.

Safety Culture Maturity® model. © The Keil Centre 2001

Ensure everyone has bought into your solution

For health and safety systems to be fully optimised, buy-in must be achieved at all levels, and senior members of staff should be seen to be leading from the front.

Managers need to be driving a positive safety culture within your organisation, and this can be reinforced through the creation of ‘health and safety champions’ at all levels.

Appointing staff to this role who are strong influencers within their peer group should make this approach all the more effective. As well as engaging senior management and frontline workers, it’s important that staff from all levels of the organisation integrate themselves into its safety culture.

"When implementing our lone worker safety solutions, we should have spent more time engaging with middle management to ensure they had enough knowledge to really get behind the systems. It’s important to create champions at all levels”

Denise Williams, Head of Housing Operations, Blackpool Coastal Housing

Clear responsibilities

It’s imperative that every individual in the business knows and understands what part they have to play in keeping themselves and others safe at work. These clearly defined roles and responsibilities may form part of an employee’s job description, and/or they may be set out in the company’s health and safety strategy.

Accountability is key in creating a positive safety culture so enforce it by making sure people know who and what they are responsible for. Constantly communicate and stress that health and safety is a team effort consisting of individual responsibilities.

When the question of ‘who is responsible for health and safety in your organisation?’ is asked, the default response for most people is to list people with specific health and safety roles. In fact, the answer is ‘everyone'.

Identify problems quickly

Everyone needs to be on board with monitoring and reporting so that crucial health and safety questions can be easily answered, such as:

Are incidents and injuries being reported?
How many near misses have there been?
Is the workforce adhering to the rules?

Staff should know where to turn to or who to talk to if they have any concerns or queries regarding anything to do with health and safety. Concerns need to be taken seriously, and be seen to be acted upon quickly by senior management. Responding to safety concerns and suggestions in a timely manner is at the heart of building trust and credibility in a safety system.

It’s also important to listen to what staff are saying to gauge attitudes towards health and safety. If any negativity is detected, take steps to address it swiftly.

Reinforce positive behaviour

Praise and recognition for safe behaviour goes a long way to boost pride and morale.

Reinforcing good practice can be even more effective than pulling people up when they’re not doing something right. Having other people witness the praise and reward also helps to motivate other members of the workforce to strive for improved safety.

It may be a shout-out in the company newsletter, recognition at a staff awards evening, or as simple as bringing it up at a team meeting. Telling someone when they have demonstrated good health and safety practice makes them more likely to continue displaying the correct behaviours.

Encourage compliance

A plan on paper ticks a box, but a plan in practice can save lives.

Employees need to understand the consequences of non-compliance with examples that are relevant to their job roles and environment. The workforce needs to be prepared to report their mistakes, near misses and accidents, and be accountable for their own non-compliance.

Their level of willingness will depend on how the organisation investigates incidents and handles blame. A blame culture will encourage very little reporting, whereas a completely no-blame culture that allows all mistakes and errors to go unpunished is also unacceptable.

A positive safety culture will be based on a fair allocation of responsibility where all but the most reckless health and safety failures can be reported without fear of retribution. Reporting should be encouraged, even rewarded.

Some organisations use a substitute test to help decide whether an incident was due to unacceptable or reckless behaviour.

Substitute Test

In a substitute test, a small group of employees who weren’t involved in the incident are given information about the incident and what led to it, and are asked to discuss it.

If this group decide that they would have done the same as the person/people involved in the incident, this may indicate that it’s not appropriate to allocate blame. In this instance, it may be better to look at redesigning the process or giving staff additional training.

However, if the test group indicate that they would have done things differently, the organisation may need to consider whether the incident was a deliberate or negligent act, and whether some sort of blame or punishment is appropriate.

Run regular training sessions

Knowledge is power so regular appropriate training will help to maintain and reinforce the safety culture within the organisation. By ensuring your employees are well trained, you give them the necessary skills and knowledge to carry out their jobs safely and effectively.

In order to get the most out of any training session, it’s important to identify gaps in knowledge first to ensure that the training is appropriate to the needs of the workforce and the business. Consultations with staff are a good way to understand what is needed from training sessions.

“We used what we learned from staff consultations to prepare Q&A sheets ahead of the training sessions as we knew the types of challenges we would get from our workforce."

- Sarah Haigh, Quality, Health, Safety & Environment Manager, e.surv

Training is also important when it comes to compliance. If staff don’t know how to use equipment safely or the safety processes to follow, they won’t be able to comply even if they want to.