Asking ‘why?’ about incidents several times and answering, ‘because … ’, inevitably leads to the answer, ‘culture’—the climate of practices, values, accountability and communications pervading in an organisation, summed up in the phrase, ‘the way we do things around here’.

Understanding safety culture is part of the journey towards improving organisational reliability. Organisations have responsibilities for the management of their risks, and to ensure adequate and appropriate risk mitigation. Obviously, the various Work Health and Safety Acts and Regulations exist to protect workers of all Australian organisations. 

Understand What You Want to Acheive:

Do you want to improve, or benchmark your organisation against others, or evaluate the impact of change initiatives? At the outset, you need to consider why you are carrying out the survey, what you hope to achieve and how the information gathered will help meet your goals.

As a health and safety professional within a company, you will know that a positive safety culture is good for business, not only from an ethical standpoint, but also in terms of productivity and efficiency. But how do you convey that to the decision makers within your organisation, to allow you to invest in resources to measure your safety culture, and improve it?

Decision makers are usually motivated by one of three arguments: legal, moral and financial. In this article we will focus on the financial argument as it relates to improving your company's safety culture, to help convince colleagues, up and down the management chain, of the value of a positive safety culture.

Safety culture, or the way safety is perceived, valued and prioritised in an organisation, not only has an obvious and direct effect on accident rates, it also impacts on productivity, reliability, competitiveness and even employee morale.