Building a Safety Culture

In one of the earlier articles on this blog, I have listed some principles of workplace safety programme. In all, eight principles were highlighted in the article and one of them is that ‘safety is a culture not just a programme.’

Let me start by giving a definition of culture. Culture has been defined in many ways and there are quite a number of controversies with the concept of culture. However, for the purpose of this write up, I will define culture as a shared, learned, symbolic system of values, beliefs and attitudes that shapes and influences perception and behaviour of a people. Simply stated therefore, culture is a way of life.

Now to the principle under discourse– safety is a culture. Safety is a responsibility and accepting this means that it could be learnt and shared over a period of time. This automatically translates to a culture because every culture started from a point of learning and sharing. Instructions were laid down and either willingly obeyed or otherwise. This information gets transferred from one generation to the other and over a period of time, it becomes the way of doing things. Sometimes, you may not even know the genesis of the things you do, but you just want to do it because it is your culture.

Safety is a culture. It’s not just a programme. In a culture of safety, people are not merely encouraged and compelled to work safely and towards a change; they are expected take actions when it is needed. They have to be proactive, take decisions and acts to ensure the safety of lives and property. Inactions in the face of safety problems and challenges are never the acceptable standards or values in a culture of safety. Everybody takes responsibility for his safety and that of others. There is no room in a culture of safety for those who point fingers, or refuse to accept responsibility for safety.

Every member of a community protects and advances the course of his culture. In fact, many a times, you consciously and unconsciously persuade others to accept your culture based on either the values you exhibit or the success that you achieve. This is exactly, what happens when you work, play and act in a safe way. It’s even more important in organizations because, new employees will eventually fit into the culture that permeates the system, either trained or otherwise.

Accident records in an organization is not a function of how comprehensive and detailed the safety programme is (although this is the starting point), but on the culture of safety in the workplace – how workers take responsibilities for themselves and others through hazard identification and analysis, near miss and reporting, obedience to safety rules and regulations and total adherence to workplace safe system of work. The programme is important since it will include training plans and the commitment of the management to safety ethics, but it cannot achieve anything positive until it translates to actions by all in the organization.

Building a safety culture in homes, schools, organization, society and the country as a whole is a task which must be accomplished in order to prevent losses of lives, environment, time, money, asset and property. When we loose all these resources to accidents, fire, disasters and pollution, growth and development are stalled and the populace suffers in poverty rather than live in affluence.

Building a safety culture is possible and doable! It’s a responsibility!