Shaping a safety culture

Safety culture involves shared values, beliefs, and attitudes among organizational members in implementing safety policies and procedures. It is rooted in understanding human behavior and organizational change. The fundamental components of safety culture are leadership commitment, employee involvement, safety training, risk perception, and regulatory compliance.

After recently attending a meaningful seminar on safety and quality approaches in the construction industry, I was inspired to dig deeper into principles for shaping a safety culture. There is ample research on safety culture. However, apart from published research, leadership insights on how organizations continuously grow and adapt that are found in Peter Senge’s influential book, The Fifth Discipline: The Art and Practice of the Learning Organization, have practical applications in shaping a safety culture.

The five principles or disciplines are: personal mastery (self-improvement, lifelong learning, and emotional intelligence), mental models (values, beliefs, and assumptions), team learning (cooperation and collaboration), shared vision (unity of purpose, clear direction, and strategy), and systems thinking (seeing the organization as a whole and understanding the interrelationships among its parts to produce synergy). The integration of these five disciplines in shaping a safety culture can be approached at the individual, team, and organization levels.

At the individual level of organizational behavior and change, personal mastery involves workers and supervisors practicing self-discipline and initiating continuous improvement and innovation in safety quality. A strong safety culture encourages voluntary participation and diligence in hazard recognition. Thus, the starting point of shaping a culture of safety in the workplace is individual behavior. Negligence, recklessness, and human error account heavily in work safety breaches and incidents. Still on the individual level, mental models pertain to assumptions, beliefs, and values held by individuals. Invariably, these have behavioral and moral implications for safety in the workplace. When faced with an actual emergency, a worker may feel justified in prioritizing his own physical safety over a co-worker’s safety. Prudence, or a person’s ability to discern and choose what is morally right despite obstacles or difficulties, will influence human responses during safety emergencies. Humanistic safety practices prioritize the emergency needs of vulnerable groups like PWDs, the elderly, children, and women.

Regarding team-level behavior and organizational change, team learning emphasizes skills training on safety practices such as simulations, drills, and digital methodologies in enhanced safety training. Team learning also includes mentoring and coaching methods anchored on good working relationships between supervisors and subordinates. Motivations for active participation in safety training, such as incentives, rewards, and recognitions, are also important.

At the organization-wide level of human behavior and change, shared vision requires senior management’s commitment to a strong safety culture. Management policies and programs on work safety should have clear and long-term objectives attuned to the dynamic and volatile environment.

Finally, the “fifth discipline” considered crucial by Senge is systems thinking. A holistic view of the organization and interrelationships among its parts (e.g., frontline and backdoor structural divisions, interdependent processes, and leverages in scale and synergy in operations) are critical in shaping a safety culture. Planning, implementation, monitoring and evaluation of safety programs and practices require clear process flows for mapping out key activities, persons responsible, resources required, and allotted schedules. A responsive safety system can spot issues in real time and resolve them quickly and properly. Furthermore, reliable and stable systems are required in communication, coordination, database and information sharing, networking, and outreach service programs involving community participation in implementing safety measures. Concerted efforts in work safety should occur across vertical and horizontal management levels in an organization. Systems thinking for safety culture also promotes partnerships with key agencies, private sector, and academic institutions for leveraging resources and technical know-how in safety.

Therefore, shaping a safety culture goes beyond traditional safety programs that focus only on enforcing rules and compliance conventions. It must be proactive (strategic and long-term), resilient (adaptive and responsive), and human-centered (just and respectful of diversity among persons). Organizations with a strong safety culture tend to have lower accident rates, more self-motivated workers, and highly committed leaders, driving overall productivity, stability, and growth.

Developing a safety culture must be grounded on behavioral and organizational learning principles. It requires key linkages and interactions in individual, team, and organizational behavior. Moreover, it is deeply anchored in organizational change.

Dr. Rachel Alvendia-Quero is an associate professorial lecturer at the Ramon V. Del Rosario College of Business at De La Salle University. She is also an international consultant in social safeguards for public infrastructure projects. Her published research dwells on public-private partnerships in disaster preparedness and aligning human resource management practices in disaster risk management.

rachel.quero@dlsu.edu.ph