Culture and Construction
The Nature of safety culture: A survey of the state of the art. [3]
- Organizational culture is measured through qualititive methods such as observations and management systems.
- Cultural aspects of a company can be seen in the structure, policies, working procedures and management systems employed by that company.
“Workers risk-taking behaviour is a significant contributor to accidents.”
- Economic incentives for companies, as accidents increase, insurance, lost productivity and entire site disruptions make training, and staff involvement financially viable.
- Is safety culture an entity or an aspect?
Entity - Has a real existence.
Aspect - How something is viewed or regarded.
Safety Climate - Safety culture can't be viewed as an alternative to safety climate but instead safety climate should be viewed as a product of the culture.
Focus is placed too heavily on the way people think (perceptions) and safety environment, safety management systems and people's safety behaviour is forgotten/disregarded.
Explicit and Implicit trust within safety culture. [4]
Effect safety culture comes from or is engineered by:
- Reporting Culture,
- Just Culture,
- Learning Culture.
Reporting Culture:
· Effectiveness of a Safety Information System depends on the willing participation of the workforce.
· Employees have to be willing to report near misses or errors, in the knowledge that they won’t get blamed or punished.
Just Culture:
· Agreed principles to draw line between acceptable and unacceptable actions, (Substance abuse is totally unacceptable and would warrant severe actions with no blame)
Learning Culture:
· Willingness and competence to draw adequate conclusions from an incident and to implement major reforms when required.
All three of these together make a safety culture but all have to be implemented and adhered too as without one the rest are useless.
Comparison of Cultures in Construction and Manufacturing Industries [5]
Can the construction industry learn from industrial/manufacturing companies and learn from the culture within manufacturing to help reduce accidents and injuries?
Increased use of sub-contractors makes it very hard for the industry to improve its H&S record.
- Construction industry is less innovative than the manufacturing industry but due to innovation being used all the time by the construction industry to over come problems it is perhaps a bit unclear as to the accuracy of this.
- Sub-contractors in the construction industry are a huge problem!
Relationship of safety culture and process safety [6]
Humans gather in groups throughout history, social, religious or industrial purposes. As people interact, values, beliefs and principles develop and guide how the group behaves. Commonly referred to as group culture.
Organizations have there own culture developed by employees due to there interests and background.
Safety culture has prevailed over recent years.
Major disasters within certain industries have caused change in safety culture such as Pipa Alpha in the Oil industry or major chemical accidents that occurred in the 70’s and 80’s.
Safety Culture (Background) – Policies and goals set by organisations relating to overall safety.
Safety Climate (Foreground) – Attitude people in a business have towards safety,
- Climate changes more rapidly then culture,
- After a major accident or incident climate undergoes immediate change NOT culture,
- HOWEVER culture has to be changed over time to support climate or more incidents are inevitable.
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