Safety Culture Excellence®

The safety culture of an organization is the product of individual and group values, attitudes, perceptions, competencies and patterns of behavior that determine the commitment to, and the style and proficiency of, an organization’s health and safety management.It is important to identify the perception of the organization’s safety culture as it represents a critical factor influencing multiple aspects of human performance and organizational safety.There is now a move to apply the concept of safety culture at the individual level. Mearns et al.,highlight that although safety culture was a concept originally used to describe the inadequacies of safety management that result in major disasters, it is interesting that the concept is now being applied to explain accidents at the individual level.A lot of attention has focused on the causes of occupational incidents. When incidents occur in the workplace it is important to understand what factors (human, technical, organizational) may have contributed to the outcome in order to avoid similar incidents in the future. Through developing an understanding of why and how incidents occur, appropriate methods for incident prevention can be developed.However, a number of major disasters have brought attention to the impact of organizational factors (i.e. policies and procedures) on the outcome of safety performance, with numerous inquiries identifying safety culture as having a definitive impact on the outcome of the disaster. Nice information.