2019 Annual Conference

Workforce Development, Continuing Education, and Professional Development

Concurrent Session (45 minutes)

In many manufacturing contexts, companies strive to enhance their "Safety Culture." In this presentation, there will be a brief critical review of prior studies  regarding safety culture with with a discussion of observations of actual performance. The presentation concludes with recommendations regarding implementation of programs to improve safety culture. 

Trainers and managers of organizations that seek to improve aspects of organizational culture.

Educators that teach organizational development in adult education, workforce development or management.

Define what is meant by safety culture and organizational culture.
Discuss ideas of ways to measure culture.
Discuss ideas for improving aspects of the culture of an organization.

Companies have spent a huge amount of money trying to improve their safety performance. Despite the expenditures, news organizations report numerous incidents each year where companies sustain catestrophic accidents that are caused, in part or in whole, by employees circumventing existing safety systems. For example, a "lack of safety culture" was a contributing factor in the 2005  explosion that killed 14 employees at BP's Texas City refinery.

Researchers have recommended numerous ways to assess safety culture in organizations.  However, none of these have found widespread acceptance in industry. 

This researcher, in fact, was among the folks investigating this topic but was not able to develop an instrument that could measure, in isolation, safety culture. After two years of work, I concluded that the isolation and measurement of safety culture was a futile effort.

Safety culture is a part of organizational culture. Organizations must work to develop a culture that is consistent in all aspects, not just safety. Workplace values, goals, policies and practices should be designed holistically. Adherence to these should be consistent. Managers must demonstrate these by their actions. 

In sum, companies should say what they are going to do and then do it...consistently.

This will be a presentation where the concept of safety culture is defined and several examples of failed safety culture will be reviewed. The presenters will review the recommendations of scholars for assessing safety culture and discuss why these assessment tools do not work.

Finally, the authors will present steps for establishing strong organizational culture with some recommendations to qualitatively assess the strength of that culture.