Promoting a positive Health & Safety culture

The culture of an organisation makes the greatest contribution to its Health and Safety performance. A careless culture can lead to a reduced level of productivity in the workplace, through low morale, ill health and time off work through injuries and maladies.

What is a Health & Safety culture?

There are three key points to having a good Health & Safety culture, trust, values, and attitude. It can take a very long time to build up a good culture (most estimates are five to ten years). Be warned, though, it takes no time at all to create a bad one. Erosion will occur more quickly than growth, a few examples of where it can all go wrong are:

•    Failure to respond to issues raised by employees

•    Forgetting to talk about Health & Safety, or turning it into a joke

•    Failure to consult the workforce on decisions relating to Health & Safety

Cultures will continually evolve, and attention must be paid to ensure that changes are positive. High staff turnover and inconsistent decision-making can make it very difficult to maintain a positive culture.

How can I make improvements to the Health & Safety culture?

There are no shortcuts. It is not possible to improve the culture directly, but there are some areas that influence the culture, these can be improved and through that a better Health & Safety culture will develop, these are:

•    Improve knowledge and understanding of Health & Safety through training

•    Don’t put profit before safety

•    Ensure that you invest in providing a better workplace, such as segregating traffic flows, better equipment and the quality of the environment

•    Be proactive, don’t react to an accident, prevent it from happening in the first place

•    Ensure excellent communication, up, down and across the organisation

•    Promote job satisfaction and morale

•    Increase the amount of time managers spend amongst the workers (i.e. management by walking about)

•    Avoid an unjust blame culture, only attribute blame to workers who take unnecessary risks

•    Involve your workforce in:

o    Hazard identification

o    Risk Assessment

o    Training

o    Workplace monitoring

o    Investigations

Remember, a healthy culture can improve your business, and save you money at the same time; it is worth investing in improving your workplace culture now, for the future.

HSE Link – A review of the safety culture and safety climate literature for the development of the safety culture inspection toolkit http://www.hse.gov.uk/research/rrpdf/rr367.pdf