Just what is a safety culture? And what is a corporate culture?

I ask these questions because I have heard a lot of talk lately about safety having to be an important value that is part of the corporate culture. Count me among the cynics of this concept. Don't get me wrong. Research and practical application of corporate culture is worthwhile. At least it makes for interesting reading. But I find the notion of culture as the cure-all for safety hard to take. Or, at the very least, it's an oversimplification. Let's see if we can put the whole culture business into proper perspective.

Beyond Safety Fads & Hype

Those of us who work in the safety field are constantly looking for ways to keep safety new, exciting and relevant to day-to-day operations. Sometimes it feels like we are drowning in hype, buzzwords, clichés, one-liners and sound bites.

In our eagerness to keep safety fresh and "sexy," we sometimes forget something very important: the basics. Behind all the hype, there must be substance. Or, in modern parlance, we must be prepared not simply to talk the talk but walk the walk.

Safety Culture: Trend or Something More?

The need for substance is nowhere better demonstrated than in the recent safety and corporate culture trend. What's the relationship between safety and corporate culture? One way to explain the interaction is by noting that corporate culture drives and controls the success of any recognition system that an organization might consider implementing. That would include safety systems.

In Bringing Out the Best In People, Audrey Daniels notes:

"Business professors and consultants have succeeded in making corporate culture change into a complicated and expensive process. The concepts and activities associated with typical attempts to change the culture are not based on solid research and are not implemented in a way that demonstrates cause-and-effect relationships between what was done and what was achieved."

William E. Conway, author of the book, The Quality Secret: The Right Way To Manage, notes that every organization has a different culture and way of working. As have countless others, Conway recognizes that it is not necessarily the substantive programs or technical aspects of business which ensure its success, but the culture or organizational climate in which these programs exist.

Conclusion

The analysis done by Daniels, Conway and others strongly suggests that corporate culture - albeit a nebulous concept - does exist and does exercise a decisive influence on the performance of operations an organization undertakes. The lesson for safety professionals is that the safety and corporate cultures must somehow harmonize to ensure successful performance. In other words, even the most technically sound of safety programs is unlikely to work if it is forced to operate in a dysfunctional culture. But harmonization of safety and corporate culture is more easily said than done. I will talk about how to achieve harmonization next week.

INDUSTRY TALK

The Chernobyl disaster: Gave us the term "safety culture"

The Roots of 'Safety Culture'

By Glenn Demby

Wayne's isn't kidding. The term "safety culture" is everywhere. Google it and you'll get 780,000 hits. But where does the term come from, and what does it mean?

Most sources trace the origins of the term "safety culture" to the nuclear power industry and the Chernobyl disaster of 1986. More precisely, the term appeared and figured prominently in the post-accident report of the International Nuclear Safety Advisory Group (INSAG). Nuclear accidents in Chernobyl, Three Mile Island and other places, according to INSAG, were attributable to not just technical failures but faults in organizational procedures and attitudes. The belief in the safety of these facilities was "a mirage." Systems were inadequate and operator errors commonplace. "From top to bottom, the body corporate was infected with the disease of sloppiness," INSAG concluded. 

In 1991, the International Atomic Energy Association defined safety culture as: "That assembly of characteristics in organizations and individuals which establishes that, as an overriding priority, nuclear plant safety receives the attention warranted by their significance."

The use of the term "safety culture" to describe an organization's attitude and commitment to safety caught on and began being applied to other dangerous industries such as aviation. For example, the National Transportation Safety Board blamed the 1991 Continental Airlines crash of Flight 2574 in Texas on management's failure "to establish a corporate culture which encouraged and enforced adherence to approved maintenance and quality assurance procedures." Before long, the term was being used in all industries.

As Wayne notes, the term "safety culture" also came into vogue among safety's intellectuals, spawning more than 100 articles in academic journals between 1987 and 2000. It remains a subject of fierce debate today.

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