Safety culture information > Safety culture assessment
Safety culture assessment
Measuring safety culture seems to be the equivalent of the “holy grail” for the safety world, made more difficult by the lack of an agreed definition and scope.
However, the assessment of safety culture is key to measuring key elements of safety culture and identifying an organisation’s current level of development (or ‘maturity’) in order to learn and improve.
There are a variety of different assessment methods including:
• Safety attitude surveys (using questionnaires to elicit workforce attitudes);
• Safety management audits (using an audit process and trained auditor to examine the presence and effectiveness of safety management systems);
• Safety culture workshops (involving a cross-section of the workforce to consider perceptions of the safety culture and elicit improvement ideas);
• Leading (and lagging) safety performance indicators (eg. analysing data on the number of employee safety improvement ideas suggested and actioned, the number of safety tours performed, or root cause analysis of near misses).
The safety culture assessment and improvement toolkit provided on this website uses a safety culture assessment questionnaire to measure employee attitudes, values and perceptions towards safety and safety management which can be administered to a cross section of your company. The toolkit then allows you to analyse the results of the questionnaire and indicates your level of safety culture development. From here, the results will link directly to both general and specific improvement guidance and to examples of good practice.