What is OHS Culture & Climate – Part 1

What is OHS Culture

For the next few weeks, I would like you to take a look at an article I have been reading on OHS Culture assessment.

In this first article, I would like us to be clear on what Safety Culture is.

For employers, business managers and OHS professionals striving for excellence in the field of occupational safety and health, the key issue is to ensure that occupational accidents and work-related ill-health are prevented as much as possible, and that safe and healthy behaviour among all employees is promoted. In order to achieve continuous improvement of workers’ safety and health, a systematic, integrated, proactive, participative, and multiple-strategy approach towards OHS management is needed.

However, OHS entails more than just focusing on formal issues. As risk prevention and OSH is about people – or to put it in a more formal way, about investing in and protecting the human capital of an organisation – attention should also be paid to behavioural aspects, and social and cultural processes, in order to attain safer and healthier working environments and better general organisational performance.

In order to better understand how decisions are made in an organisation, where priorities lie and why people actually do what they do (their attitudes and behaviour), we will take a brief look at how an organisation can be analysed.

OHS culture is about how an organisation’s informal aspects influence OHS in a positive or negative way.

• by setting the values and norms, and underlying beliefs and convictions, through which workers deal with or disregard risks;
• by influencing the conventions for (safe or unsafe, healthy or unhealthy) behaviour, interaction, and communication.

Safety culture

Background

The term ‘safety culture’ appears to have been first used after the Chernobyl disaster in 1986. 5 The investigation report by the International Nuclear Safety Advisory Group (INSAG) of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) pinpointed “poor safety culture” as one of the contributing factors to this worst nuclear power plant accident in history (INSAG, 1986). Investigations of another major, tragic accident in the following years, such as the King’s Cross underground fire in London (1987) and the explosion of the North Sea oil production platform ‘Piper Alpha’ (1988), also identified cultural aspects as causal factors.

From then on the concept of safety culture has been used more and more in safety research, particularly in high-risk industries 7 such as the nuclear and petrochemical industry, and (public) mass transportation (railway, aviation), recognising the importance of the human element and soft organisational aspects in accident and risk prevention (Antonsen, p. 10).

Concepts and definition(s)

Organisational culture and safety culture are abstract concepts, giving researchers a large degree of freedom on how they understand these concepts and put them into practice (Havold, 2005). This implies that there is a lack of consensus on how the safety culture concept is understood, and no widely accepted definition of the concept either have, for example, identified in the research literature 13 definitions of safety culture, each differing slightly from one another. Most of these definitions are based on the definition supplied by the Advisory Committee on the Safety of Nuclear

Installations (ACSNI, 1993). This definition states that:

“The safety culture of an organisation is the product of individual and group values, attitudes, competencies and patterns of behaviour that determine the commitment to, and the style and proficiency of, an organisation’s health and safety programmes.”

“Organisations with a positive safety culture are characterised by communications founded on mutual trust, by shared perceptions of the importance of safety, and by confidence in the efficacy of preventive measures.

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