An agency of the Health & Safety Executive

Measuring the safetyclimate in organisations

Reduce injuries and costs through cultural change

Enabling a better working world

Human Sciences

Written in association with

Contents

Introduction....................................................................................................................................... 1

About the authors............................................................................................................................. 2

Background...................................................................................................................................... 3

What is safety culture?.................................................................................................................... 4

Legislation....................................................................................................................................... 5

Can safety culture be measured?.................................................................................................... 6

Benchmarking.................................................................................................................................. 7

Safety Climate Tool in use - Case study 1........................................................................................ 8

Safety Climate Tool in use - Case study 2......................................................................................... 9

Lessons to learn.................................................................................................................................. 10

Cardinus Risk Management Limited4th Floor3 East Grinstead HouseWood StreetEast GrinsteadWest SussexRH19 1UZ

Tel: 0207 469 0200Fax: 0844 338 8589

Email: info@cardinus.comWeb: www.cardinus.com

Health and Safety LaboratoryHarpur Hill Buxton Derbyshire SK17 9JN

Tel: 01298 218000Fax: 01298 218986

Email: hslinfo@hsl.gsi.gov.ukWeb: www.hsl.gov.uk

Pg l 1 Measuring the safety climate in organisations

Introduction

The Health and Safety Laboratory(HSL) has been at the forefront of understanding organisational safetyculture and its impact on businessperformance for many years now.

Not only did we develop the highly respected Safety Climate Tool (SCT),we also help employers like you tomeasure and improve their safetyculture through the application of evidence based approaches and effective behavioural change programmes.

Whatever the business sector, whatever the company size, we knowthat every organisation has the potential to improve their safety culture. Our work with a wide rangeof organisations, including theOlympic Delivery Authority, hasdemonstrated that making safety anasset, rather than a liability, will notonly improve your health and safetyperformance but strengthen yourbusiness performance too.

In order to know where to begin, HSLand Cardinus, our first official salespartner, have created this documentto help you understand organisationalhealth and safety culture and how itcan be improved.

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Caroline Sugden is technical lead on human and organisational factors, working inHSL’s Human Sciences Unit and has more than 18 years’experience in the field ofhuman factors (HF). Caroline is a Fellow of the Institute of Ergonomics and HumanFactors and has worked in consultancy and the rail industry.

Her work interests include human factors in the major hazards sector, including assessment of HF issues in COMAH safety reports, human reliability assessment, control room assessment, alarm handling and competence assurance.

Recent work includes the revision of HSL SCT, identification of good practice casestudies on the construction of the Olympic Park, and consultancy work on safe and reliable operations.

Dr Caroline Sugden Technical leadHealth & Safety Laboratory

Karen RobertsProduct ManagerHealth & Safety Laboratory

Mark PrestonHead of Safety ConsultancyCardinus Risk Management

Karen Roberts is a product manager at HSL. Karen works with the laboratory’s scientific and technical experts to turn the knowledge they generate into a range ofproduct solutions that help industry become healthier, safer and as a result more productive.

Karen is currently working to take the HSL SCT on-line, and has recentlylaunched products in a diverse number of subject areas including publications on loadsecurity for the transport industry and hazardous area classification software for organisations with responsibilities under the Dangerous Substances and Explosives Atmospheres Regulations (DSEAR).

Prior to her current role, Karen was a business development manager at HSL for theUK chemical, pharmaceutical and manufacturing sectors.

Mark Preston is the head of health and safety consulting at Cardinus Risk Management.He has more than 25 years’ experience in providing environment, health and safety guidance and training to a wide range of commercial, industrial and public organisations.Mark has worked in a number of European countries and the US advising on internationalsafety management. He has been invited on joint UK and US safety delegations to Chinaand Eastern Europe. He has worked with a number of major blue chip organisations including Microsoft, The British Museum, Thames Water, Air Canada, BP, Mastercard, Dell,and Wembley London Ltd. He has developed a number of safety management systems(SMS). His experience includes a number of serious incident investigations. He has a BA inEconomics and Politics is a chartered member of the Institute of Occupational Safety andHealth, a member of the International Institute of Risk and Safety Management, a lead auditorand a member of the American Society of Safety Engineers. Mark has run a number ofsafety behavioural development programmes within construction. These programmeshave helped to develop the health and safety culture within a number of companies.

About the authors

The endpoint of this journey would bean organisation well on the road towards being labelled a ‘High Reliability Organisation’ – a termused to describe an organisation thathas avoided major catastrophes whileengaged in high risk activity.The name comes from studies conducted in the aviation and nuclearpower industries in the 1980s, as described by Lekka and Sugden(2011).

Pg l 3 Measuring the safety climate in organisations

Central to the effectiveness of safetymanagement is the concept of safetyculture. Figure 1 provides a model developed by HSL that shows thesteps to becoming a successfuland highly reliable organisation.

The first two steps: ‘understandsafety management systems’ (SMS)and ‘investigate safety culture’, arethe elements about understanding thestatus quo; determining whether theprocesses, standards and systemsare adequately designed and implemented. The assessment ofsafety culture will provide informationthat will help you to understand theefficacy of the safety managementsystems and help to prioritise theimprovements to your organisation.

The next step following an investigation would be to ‘improve’,which could involve developingKPIs and procedures, or improvingaccident investigation, based on signposting from your safety cultureevaluation or your SMS audits.Other steps could include the development of behavioural safetyprogrammes to address unsafe behaviours, once organisationalreadiness has been determined andtactical improvements derived fromthe safety culture assessment havebeen delivered.

Background

Understanding safety culture is part of the journey towards improving organisational reliability. Organisationshave responsibilities for the management of their risks, and to ensure adequate and appropriate risk mitigation. Obviously, the Health and Safety at Work Act and the Management of Health and Safety at Work Regulations exist to protect employees of all UK organisations.

Understand SMSEvaluate adequacy of Safety Management Systems including the efficacy and appropriateness of risk controls

Inves"gate safety culture•Use Safety Climate Tool to inves!gate Safety Culture

•Inves"gate issues arising and their impact on the organisa!on

ImproveImprove SMS systems and risk control systems, including: KPIs, Procedures, accident inves"ga"ons, competence assuranceAddress behavioural issues such as viola!ons, poor adop!on of risk controls through Behavioural SafetyDevelop posi!ve leadership behaviours throughout the management hierarchy

Aspire to organisa"onal reliability•Determine organisa"onal priori"es & implement change

•Develop Mindful leadership & just culture

•Understand the impact of ac!ons

•Ensure Knowledge Management and organisa"onal learning is embedded and enacted

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And it’s not just major hazard industries that need to be concernedabout safety culture, organisationsfrom all industry sectors with aneffective safety culture have realisedthat by making safety an asset, ratherthan a liability, brings positive, demonstrable results throughout theirbusiness.

Where does the concept comefrom?

Safety culture, as a phrase, was firstused by the International Atomic Energy Authority to describe the issues at Chernobyl at the time oftheir major incident (IAEA, 1986). Theinterest in culture arose in responseto a realisation that organisationalstructure (i.e. the roles and theirrelationships, rules and procedures)was limited in achieving an organisation’s health and safetygoals.

Since Chernobyl, a number of othermajor disasters including King’sCross, Texas City and more recentlyDeepwater Horizon have highlightedthe impact of organisational factorson safety performance, with numerous inquiries identifying ‘safetyculture’ as having a definitiveimpact.

Safety culture, or the way safety isperceived, valued and prioritised in anorganisation, not only has an obviousand direct effect on accident rates, italso impacts on productivity,reliability, competitiveness and evenemployee morale.

Put another way it’s “the way thingsare done around here”. It’s a combination of all the attitudes, beliefs, values, taboos, peer pressureand perceptions that your organisation or subsections of yourorganisation hold, that influence howsomething is actually done where youwork, rather than how it shouldbe done. Importantly, our attitudes, orour culture, influence our behaviour,and in turn our behaviours influencethe efficacy of risk control.

An organisation’s culture will influence human behaviour andhuman performance at work.Poor safety culture has contributed tomany major incidents and personalinjuries. Indeed, the culture of an organisation can be just asinfluential on safety outcomes as thesafety management system itself.

Traditionally ‘safety climate’ was usedto describe a snapshot of the safetyculture at a particular time point.However the terms ‘culture’ and‘climate’ are now used interchangeably.

What is safety culture?

‘Safety culture’ is defined as “the product of individual and group values, attitudes, perceptions, competencies,and patterns of behaviour that determine commitment to, and the style and proficiency of, an organisation’shealth and safety management” (HSC, 1993).

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reserved for receptive companies, oras part of an overall incident investigation. However there can beenforcement to address outcomes ofpoor safety culture. For example, if acompany is unsuccessfully relying onprocedural controls to avoid major accidents, there could be enforcementof management arrangements to either ensure compliance or providealternative safeguards through the hierarchy of control.

It is not just the rail industry whereassessment of the safety culture maybe investigated. An investigation intocultural factors took place as part of abroader investigation following threeincidents in 2000 at BP Grangemouth.

Whilst it is not, in itself, a legalrequirement, standards of safety culture can be investigated followingan incident and could contributesignificantly to any prosecution,including a corporate manslaughterprosecution. Putting in place aprogramme for measuring andimproving such culture will thereforehave a positive impact not only inreducing incidents but in helping showthat the organisation takes health andsafety seriously.

... the need for a positive safetyculture is the mostfundamental thought before theinquiry.

(HSC, 2001a, page 60).

The reports resulted in 295 recommendations. A section of therecommendations fell underthe title ‘Culture, Safety Leadershipand Health and Safety Management’.This section presents twenty-five recommendations relating to theinternal structures of companies,safety culture,and the managementof health and safety.

Following the recommendationsmade from public inquiries into theSouthall (HSC, 2000) and LadbrokeGrove rail crashes (HSC, 2001); HerMajesty’s Railway Inspectorate(HMRI) requested that a safety culture inspection toolkit be developed. Thetoolkit was required to providea pragmatic approach for the measurement of safety culture.

The toolkit states that safety cultureitself is not enforceable, and interventions are generally

Following the investigation into theClapham Junction accident (Hidden,1989), Sir Anthony Hidden suggestedthat development of a ‘positive safetyculture’ was the key to improvingsafety in the railway network (Clarke,1998). It had become generally accepted that a high proportion of accidents, incidents and near misseson the railways follow unsafe acts bypeople, whether frontline workers ormanagers.

The Southall and Ladbroke Grovetrain crashes, that happened in September 1997 and October 1999respectively, led to three separatepublic inquiry reports. The inquiriestook a fundamental look at thegeneric issues surrounding safetyin the British railway industry. A principal conclusion focused on theimprovement of safety management,specifically safety culture:

If an organisation has the right culture in place, it will find theright people and the right technology to deliver safe and effective performance.

(HSC, 2003).

Legislation

There are legislative requirements regarding employee involvement, management arrangements and competency assurance but not for culture per se. So although safety culture and its assessment is not a legalrequirement, safety culture assessment is recognised as important as it has a direct impact on the safety ofemployees, contractors and the public. In fact, a number of regulatory and industry bodies, including those inthe rail and air traffic control sectors, recommend the assessment of safety culture and it was a requirementduring the construction of the Olympic Park to guide the development of a positive safety culture. Althoughsafety culture is not directly required, it is considered to be a side effect of good demonstration of legislative requirements; the high profile accidents outlined earlier highlight consequences of a poor safety culture.

Reduce injuries and costs through cultural change Pg l6

n Indicate organisational readiness for embarking on behavioural safety programmes.

n Provide a baseline measure - outputs from the tool can help to assess where to invest resource and evaluate whether subsequentinitiatives have had the desired effects on performance.

Once the survey is complete, the toolproduces a series of automatedcharts that allow detailed analysis ofthe results.

The software also generates a summary report highlighting the keyfindings from the survey, and providing hints and tips to improve the organisation’s safety culture.

Learning about the safety culturewithin an organisation has many benefits. The informationgenerated can, among other things:

n Assist with the proactive management of health and safety- the results provide objective data that allows companies tohighlight areas of concern as wellas good practice.

n Demonstrate credentials as an organisation continually striving to improve its health and safety performance.

n Raise the profile of health and safety - participating in a survey engages the workforce and encourages them to talkabout health and safety issues.

In 2010 HSL launched its Safety Climate Tool (SCT). The HSL SCT is a revision of the Health and Safety Executive’s (HSE) original ClimateSurvey Tool, produced in 1997. Theoriginal HSE tool quickly became abyword for best practice incompanies.

Using its specialist knowledge oforganisational safety culture, HSLrefined the HSE tool to make it amore reliable and robustpsychometric instrument formeasuring safety climate.

The HSL SCT consists of 40statements which map onto eight keyfactors and measure employee’sattitudes on health and safety issues.

The HSL SCT is accessed via an on-line account. After creating an online account, users access the questionnaire wizard (Qwizard) toproduce and customise a questionnaire that can then beprinted or distributed electronicallyacross their organisation.

The questionnaire can be customisedto reflect the look and feel of an organisation. It can incorporate acompany logo, include statementsof support from management and tailor the language to that used by theworkforce.

Can safety culture bemeasured?

The good news is that it can. Safety climate is typically measured through questionnaires that explore an individual’sattitudes and perceptions regarding safety.

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At present HSL can map an organisation’s SCT performance relative to 4 quartiles derived fromtheir all industry dataset. This allowsan organisation to understand theirperformance relative to otherorganisations.

Benchmarking

HSL is exploring the use of SCT data as part of a benchmarking service, to allow users to compare thesafety climate of their own organisation to those of other organisations of similar size, within the same industrial sector, or to all other organisations as a whole.

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Outcome/benefits

2010 became a year to remember forVale’s Clydach refinery. It establisheda new record low for work-related injuries – down 20 per cent from theprevious year. However, the mostimpressive thing about this statisticwas that for the first time in the refinery’s 108-year history, none ofthe injuries represented a lost-timeinjury. Not a single worker from the200 full time employees or 100 contractors who work at the refinerymissed work due to a work-relatedinjury.

This is an outstanding achievementfor us and demonstrates our commitment to the safety of our employees. Measuring the perceptions of our staff to safety waskey to understanding whereimprovements could be made. Wewon’t be resting on our laurelsthough, as the challenge now is tosustain this performance and movecloser towards our goal of zero harm.The Safety Climate Tool willbe instrumental to us achieving this.

Chris Thomson, Environment, Healthand Safety Manager, Vale.

Actions

n HSL worked with Vale to tailor theSCT question set to ensure that the survey was specific to its circumstances.

n HSL provided impartial analysis of the survey’s results in order to identify the key issues.

n HSL human factors specialists used the key issues from the survey as the basis for a series ofstaff focus groups and interviews.

n HSL used the information from the focus groups and interviews to make recommendations to the Senior Management Team for a strategy of continuous improvement.

Case study 1: Vale

Vale is a global mining company anda leading producer of iron ore, potash,nickel and other base metals. TheClydach Refinery is in Swansea,Wales and employs about 300 people. It produces high purity nickelproducts.

The problem

As a responsible employer and as anorganisation aiming to become thelargest and best mining company inthe world, Vale recognised the impactthat improving safety culture couldhave on its business. At the coreof a series of initiatives to encourageemployees to communicate more frequently and identify issues beforethey became problems, was therecognition that safety must beeveryone’s concern. The assessmentof the prevailing safety culture wastherefore seen as the first step in thedevelopment of a sustainable programme of continuous improvement, so Vale chose the HSLSCT to do this.

Safety Climate Tool in use

Since its launch in 2010, the HSL SCT has been used to survey more than 40,000 people, from organisations across arange of industry sectors, including manufacturing, construction, rail, mining and other major hazardous activities.Companies can use the SCT to ‘track and trend’ their performance, and to ensure that they are constantly improving. The Vale case study below provides an illustration of how the SCT can be used to target areas forimprovement, and to carry on the pursuit of excellence in the area of health and safety.

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The HSL SCT was used to exploresafety culture on the Olympic Park.The development of a climate thatvalues workers, fosters fairness (i.e.‘just’ consequences for unsafe behaviours) and invests effort in actively managing relationships andrecognising and rewarding workers’contributions helped to increasehealth and safety trust during the BigBuild.

This environment encouragedpositive worker attitudes towardshealth and safety, and anappreciation of the importance of usable procedures and positive peergroup attitudes. This in turn influenced the attitudes that alsorelate to other areas captured underthe HSL SCT, so that positive attitudesand actions in one area could affectother areas, with a collective effect.

The outcome of the project was anaccident frequency rate on-site of just0.16 per 100,000 hours worked – farless than the building industry average of 0.55, and less than the allindustry average of 0.21. There wereno work related fatalities on thewhole London 2012 construction programme.

The construction industry has beenknown for contributing disproportionately to reported workplace accidents and resultinginjuries, so achieving excellent healthand safety performance on such ahuge project was a challenge.

If the UK Olympic Delivery Authority’s programme of construction mirroredthe sector average, there would havebeen approximately 1000 accidentsreportable under RIDDOR (HSE 2012)on the project with a considerablenumber leading to major injuriesand permanent disabilities. Theseprojections are taken from an Institution of Civil Engineers article,Delivering London 2012: health andsafety.

Case study 2: Safety culture duringthe Olympic ‘Big Build’

London 2012 was an iconic project,attracting world-class workers andcontractors from across the construction industry, and providing aonce in-a-lifetime opportunity forhealth and safety practitioners tolearn from what was achieved.

Preparations for hosting the London2012 Olympic and Paralympic Gamesinvolved large scale construction programmes to deliver new venuesand fit-out existing buildings andinfrastructure.

The Olympic Delivery Authority (ODA)was committed to ensuring this wasthe ‘safest and healthiest build onrecord’. Its aim was unambiguous: toraise the bar for health and safetyacross the UK construction sector, toprove that excellent health and fewaccidents were achievable on aprogramme with a tight timetable, acomplex site and a clear budget.

The workforce on the Olympic Parksite in East London peaked at 12,000and a total of some 30,000 peopleworked on the project.

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The climate surveys were invaluable to us. Too much time isspent discussing both culture andleading indicators in vague andimprecise ways - prejudice not evidence. The data we obtainedfrom each project team and acrossthe programme’s workforce meantthat we could take specificinitiatives to develop the safetyculture, and we knew that attitudesand perceptions on-site were awonderful pain-free surrogate forreacting after accidents hadoccurred. The data and its analysistold us where we were going, andidentified opportunities forimprovement.

Lawrence Waterman, Head of Healthand Safety, Olympic Delivery Authority.

This work has proved that it is possible, through engagement,worker involvement andorganisational commitment, todevelop health and safety trust, andpositive peer group attitudes,supporting a strong safety culture.

In addition, a commitment tocontinuously strive for excellence,alongside the recognition that healthand safety is dynamic and long-termand an appreciation for the impact ofconsistency throughout the supplychain, all contributed to the successes on the Olympic Park.

The practices used on the Park werenot unusual; many of the initiativesare familiar and even typical. However, the key difference was thepersistent effort devoted to leadershipand engagement of staff, such thatthe desired behaviours and attitudesbecame embedded on site.

Leaders on the Park were aware ofthe risks of lapsed attention to healthand safety, and constantly reiteratedits importance and relevance toworkers, investing effort intorefreshing communications. Hencethese initiatives and the style of implementation allowed the OlympicPark safety culture to develop.

London 2012 could be considered exemplary. The Olympic Park hasdemonstrated that it is possible andfeasible to develop high standardsof health and safety, and a culturethat supports this aspiration withinthe construction sector.

Although these areas of good practicewere already recognised, they were previously cited as being too complexto apply to the construction sector.

Lessons to learn

SCT data from the Olympic Park has been compared with HSL’s ‘all industry’ data set, and the Park was found toexcel. This suggests there is a valuable legacy of safe behaviours and working practices from London 2012 thatcan be adopted and applied to other projects. Workers on the Park were keen to promote these standards andsee the practices become embedded on future sites. In fact, there is evidence that this pride within the workforce of their health and safety performance became a key driver for improvement in the standardsin the latter stages of the projects, when there was always the countervailing risk of rushing to complete.

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Understand the attitudes, values and perceptions of your workforce tohelp you evaluate the effectiveness of your occupational health and safetymanagement.

HSL Safety Climate Tool

n An online survey of 40 statements underpinned by researchdemonstrating that the survey is a reliable and valid psychometricinstrument.

n Suitable for all sizes of organisation.

n Can be tailored towards your organisation by incorporating yourcompany logo and terminology.

n Up to nine demographic questions and an additional six open questionscan be added to the survey to suit your needs.

n Data is automatically analysed to produce a written report and a series ofcharts.

n Data allows detailed filtering to suit your requirements.

n Provides hints and tips to improve performance where identified.

Call Madelaine Udall today to request a FREEonline demonstration of the HSL Safety Climate Tool.

HSL also offers a full range of consultancy packages to helpyour organisation achieve a positive safety culture. Call us now for more information.

Improve your Safety Culture withthe HSL Safety Climate Tool

Gain invaluable insight into the ‘safety culture’ of yourorganisation and take the steps needed to improve it.

Health and Safety LaboratoryHarpur Hill Buxton Derbyshire SK17 9JN

T : 01298 218356E : maddie.udall@hsl.gsi.gov.ukW : www.hsl.gov.uk