Health and Safety Culture

We are often asked what is the most important issue facing us as health and safety consultants. Key to helping our clients is encouraging them to recognise the importance of instilling a good ‘safety culture’ throughout their organisations.  When we provide on and off-site health and safety consultancy support to organisations, we emphasise the importance of the following in creating a good organisational health and safety culture.  The strongest influence on the safety culture in an organisation is the ‘message from the top’.  The following activities are vital in achieving a good safety culture:

1. Genuine, visible leadership and commitment from the top on health and safety issues.

2. Acceptance that achieving good health and safety performance is a long-term strategy that requires sustained interest and efforts.

3. Treating health and safety performance as a business objective, and resourcing it adequately.

4. Ensuring that health and safety is a line management responsibility and that managers understand their own role in promoting and protecting their own health and safety and that of their staff.

5. Creating ‘ownership’ of health and safety throughout all levels within the organisation.  This requires employee involvement, training and communication programmes so that staff can identify hazards/risks, suggest control measures, provide feedback, and feel that they ‘own’ safety procedures.

6. Providing high quality training that is properly managed, meets the requirements of the organisation, has well-chosen, high quality content.

7. Setting realistic and achievable targets, receiving adequate and up-to-date performance information, and measuring performance against the targets.

8. Ensuring that incidents (injury accidents, non-injury accidents and near misses) are thoroughly investigated and actions taken to prevent their recurrence.

9. Ensuring audits and assessments are carried out and resultant actions taken promptly.

10. Making good safety behaviour a condition of employment, part of the job description, and part of the employee performance review.

If your organisation carries out all these activities, you are sure to have an excellent health and safety culture.  If not, and you would like advice on how to achieve any of these goals, please contact Tanya Heasman on 020 7240 3388 or tanya@system-concepts.com

First published: 2004

Last reviewed: Jan 2008