Development Levels
The toolkit analysis and guidance is based on a generic model of 5 levels of safety culture development (see ‘Safety Culture Development'). The results of any safety culture survey may be affected by a degree of ‘insularity' amongst respondents, particularly if they have limited experience of other industries/organisations. Hence the overall Safety Culture level may be either optimistic or pessimistic. Consequently we recommend that you check this level with other known information about the organisation to ensure that it appears appropriate.
Key areas to use to verify the overall/notional safety culture level are:
- The nature of line management behaviours to active promote safety;
- The level of employee participation in safety improvement;
- The extent that the organisation recognises and manages any short term conflicts between safety and performance.
The toolkit allows a user to access guidance for other levels if a different level is judged to be more appropriate. External verification of the findings can also be sought from the RSSB Human Factors team (see ‘Verification of Findings').
The primary aim of the toolkit survey is to assist in improving the existing safety culture level, whatever that may be, rather than being used as a prescriptive ‘acceptable/unacceptable' judgement tool. It provides a starting point for understanding an organisation’s safety culture and provides a means of engaging with staff to further explore relative weaknesses and to identify key enablers that can be used to build upon existing strengths.