What is Safety Culture?
Put simply, safety culture is “the way we do things round here”, in other words how well employees and managers work together to tackle safety issues. A good safety culture means that everyone shares a belief in the importance of safety and strives to ensure health and safety is done properly and that safety is always given a high priority.
Why is safety culture important?
Today, it has generally become accepted that a high proportion of accidents, incidents and near misses on the railways follow unsafe acts (behaviours) by people, for example, improper equipment use, not following procedures, positions/reactions of people, housekeeping. But, rather than being the instigators, it is typically the case that unsafe (organisational) conditions, that have been long developing and that have been inherited by people, represent the root cause(s) of accidents and incidents. Examples of systemic organisational weaknesses include lack of supervision, ill-defined roles and responsibilities, inadequate training/assessment/procedures/instructions, poor leadership and safety communications, competing job demands, ineffective planning and safe systems of work. Such examples are often cited as symptoms of a poor safety culture.
Safety Culture Development
Organisations (and industries) will typically be at varying levels of safety culture development across different facets of their operations. This is important to recognise as safety culture development requires certain key elements to be in place, and working reasonably well, before the next steps can be taken.
Safety Culture Assessment
A safety culture assessment allows an organisation to better understand how its people perceive safety and the company’s approach to health and safety management. It allows an organisation to identify both strengths and weaknesses which then allow it to improve its approach to health and safety. The Office of Rail Regulation (ORR) has set out its vision for the development of a positive railway industry safety culture in its 5-year strategy. This highlights ORR's expectation that rail companies will measure and act on safety culture assessments.
About this toolkit
The aim of the overall RSSB Safety Culture Toolkit is to enable registered users to:
- Conduct a self-assessment of their organisation’s safety culture;
- Analyse & interpret the outcomes;
- Identify an overall safety culture improvement strategy;
- Refer to industry safety culture enhancement good practices, eg. examples of interventions and approaches that have worked well in the past.