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Safety Management and Safety Culture The Long, Hard and Winding Road
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Safety seems so easy – just make sure people don’t get hurt. In practice it is a lot harder to achieve a safe organisation that is capable of sustained safe performance in the face of significant hazards. This paper will examine the role of systematic management systems in helping to ensure that organisations become safe and stay that way. The possession of a management system, no matter how thorough and systematic it may be, is not, however, sufficient to guarantee sustained performance. What is also needed is an organisational culture that supports the management system and allows it to flourish. This paper discusses the notion of a safety culture and how it might be constructed. The bad news is that creating a management system and keeping it alive is not a particularly easy task. The good news is that it is worthwhile, both in terms of lives and in terms of profits. Finally the other good news is that it is not as hard as it may seem.
This paper will examine briefly the history of systematic safety management systems and safety cases, drawing on my personal experience of the petrochemical industry and Shell in particular. While I attempt a balanced view, my experience has been constrained to the Oil and Gas industry and, more recently, the commercial aviation environment. It will take the view that, while safety management has a long tradition, what has often been lacking was a systematic basis for safety management that allowed organisations to see if they had any gaps in their coverage. To proceed further it is necessary to develop organisational cultures that support processes beyond prescription, such as ‘thinking the unthinkable’ and being intrinsically motivated to be safe, even when there seems no obvious reason to. The paper will examine the notion of Safety Cultures and High Reliability Organisations and put them in a context accessible to small and medium-sized businesses. Finally the paper concludes with a discussion of how to achieve such a safety culture and of the pitfalls that await the unwary. This will include a look at the regulatory environment that can encourage the development of systematic safety management and safety cultures without burdening those organisations that are supposed to be being helped. The road to safety may seem long and hard, and appear to wind, but the destination makes it well worthwhile.