Safety performance improvement through culture change

Achieving exemplary safety performance requires more than attention to systems and procedures. More and more companies are pursuing culture change as the key to delivering and sustaining safety improvement. In order to achieve culture change, it is vital that the right issues are tackled, but culture is complex and it can be difficult to have confidence with regard to what is the right kind of intervention. This paper introduces an approach to safety climate assessment that has been developed to enable cost-effective assessment of an organization. The tool that is described has also been used to track changes in safety climate, allowing improvement plans to be updated and refocused to maximize the effective use of resources. Some real examples of safety climate assessment and culture change in industry are reviewed.