Let’s play word association. You say “workplace safety.” I picture industry, machinery and assembly line workers a la Charlie Chaplin in Modern Times. The notion of “safety culture” is a breakthrough because it recognizes that workplace safety is rooted in human behavior and that behavior is shaped by the mindset of the actors who author it.

But when we speak of “culture” in the safety context, we posit human beings as holding the same basic values, beliefs and conceptions. Consequently, we see the workforce as monolithic and assume that the steps we take to “build a safety culture” will affect all of our workers the same way.

That can’t be right. Every person is wired differently. One of the great differentiating factors of human beings is ethnicity. People from Mexico don’t see the world the same way as do people from Japan. This culture of ethnicity is bound to have some impact on the culture of safety.

The Korean Air Experience

In his book, Outliers, English author Malcolm Gladwell uses the example of Korean Air to illustrate how the ethnic makeup of workers can affect a company’s safety record. Airline crashes, mercifully, are a rare occurrence. So for one airline to experience seven of them in a decade is unfathomable. But that’s what happened to Korean Air.

From 1988 to 1998 United Airlines had a loss rate of 0.27 per million departures. In other words, United lost a plane in an accident once every four million flights. Over this same period, Korean Air’s loss rate was 4.79 per million departures. The airline’s safety record was so dismal that Canada almost revoked its landing privileges.

In 2000, Korean Air hired an outsider from Delta Air Lines—an American named David Greenberg—to run flight operations. Greenberg did a thorough evaluation of the language skills and training of the airline’s flight crews. His conclusion: Flight crews “were trapped in roles dictated by the heavy weight of their country’s cultural legacy.” Translation: Certain aspects of Korean culture were increasing the risk of crashes on Korean Air flights.

The specific problem was the Korean deference to authority. Gladwell points out that the Korean language includes six conversational levels indicative of hierarchy. These language levels apparently played a role in the 1997 Korean Air crash in Guam. Tapes from the flight’s blackbox revealed that the first officer and flight engineer recognized that the captain was tired and oblivious to mechanical dangers the plane was experiencing. But they could only “hint” at the problems; confronting the captain directly was out of the question even after it became clear that disaster was imminent.

So, Korean Air completely revamped its language protocols and training procedures. Among other things, flight crews were required to communicate with one another in English during flights to reduce their inhibitions about questioning authority.

Things improved dramatically. From 1999 to 2009, Korean Air had no crashes. In 2006, the airline received the Phoenix Award from Air Transport World for its safety transformation and experts now consider Korean Air to be one of the world’s safest carriers.

Conclusion

Gladwell isn’t suggesting that ethnicity determines or is even a dominant factor in safety performance. But what he is saying is that workers’ nationality, language and culture can impact how safely they do their jobs. This is a point well worth considering when you set out to build a safety culture at your own company.

Story Tools:  Email This Post  Print This Post Top