SLG on Culture
Observations have led us to speculate on how culture influences safety and has led us to recognize that cultural type is a fundamental determinant of safety outcomes.
An organization's culture forms the context in which individual safety values and behaviours develop and persist over time. Safety requires people to think and act in ways that are often difficult and sometimes unnatural (e.g. reporting one's own mistakes, stopping a job in the middle, etc). Because of this, developing a culture that supports safety is a specific challenge of leadership. Safety neve sleeps and organizations cannot achieve exceptional safety performance without a deep-rooted set of beliefs, values, practices and behaviours that guie people's decisions and actions at all times.
The only way to get sustained high performance in operations and safety is to integrate the world of rules and the world of values. What we are after in the realm of safety is values-based self-governance - people acting safety as a matter of internal belief and self-determined choice (i.e. choosing to follow the rules) as well as from a base of competent know how.
Values-based self-governance: a culture where employees believe in a set of values and uphond them through their actions rather than simply complying to rules. A values-based culture is governed by should. Employees believe in a value; they act on that belief; and they self-govern in the name of it. (Siedman, 2007)
Cultures that achieve exemplary safety performance are those that exhibit values-based self-governance. We refer to this tye of culture as a true safety culture. Safety cultures are tightly aligned around shared values and practices, including the value of safety. A safety culture is one in which HOW you accomplish a goal is just as important as WHAT is required to do so.
Safety Culture is subjective by nature, but because it influences behaviour it drives objective outcomes; it has a very real effect on performance.
In any organisation, culture defines what is:
- Reality (what is perceived)
- Important (what is of value)
- Possible (freedom of choice)
The way culture works is that it shapes what people perceive, what they believe to be important and critically, what is possible within that environment. This means that all cultures are self-fulfilling. Culture, in effect, is like the organisation's DNA. Over time the members of a culture come to act in a manner that is consistent with the shared view of reality, values and possibility.
What is the Difference between Safety Climate and Safety Culture?
The important concept to note at this point is the difference between climate and culture. We can steer and create climate through leadership practices. Understand that your safety climate gets created each and every time you act or don't act. Culure, on the other hand, is a product of many different factors interacting over time. In this regard, we don't directly create the culture; we create the right climate for the culture to develop.
