Safety culture

Your safety culture should be promoted throughout your organisation and led from the top, so that it is felt and observed throughout your organisation. You should try to promote a culture with the following elements:

• ‘compliance’ with applicable standards and procedures;

• ‘right first time’;

• ‘not accepting poor standards of work’;

• ‘understanding’: – the overall risks that are being managed, – that risk is not constant and that new hazards need to be captured and managed as they arise, – what the organisation is supposed to achieve,

• ‘learning’ from incidents and near misses to improve the safety of work and overall safety of the railway;

• ‘sharing information’ so that your maintenance staff become the eyes and ears necessary to detect things that are wrong; and

• ‘action’ where something is found to be wrong. You should recognise that that there can be a tendency for safety culture to deteriorate, particularly where repetitive tasks can result in perceived familiarity and a false sense of security.

It is essential to put measures in place that minimise the potential for complacency, such as varying people’s tasks and encouraging ownership.

The benefits of a safety culture

In an organisation with a good safety culture, everyone:

• is aware of the importance of safety;

• makes safety the highest priority in all that they do;

• continually strives to improve safety; and

• understands the parts of the law and other regulations that are relevant to them. The benefits of nurturing a good safety culture are that:

• safety is built into the organisation’s products and services;

• potential hazards and failures are detected and eliminated or controlled early;

• the organisation’s products are safe and visibly so;

• the organisation realises efficiencies and cost savings; and

• the risk of not conforming to legal obligations is reduced.

A good safety culture will enhance an organisation’s reputation, whereas a single major incident can ruin it. Indeed, a major incident can mar the reputation of the industry as a whole, and cause harm to many of the interdependent organisations that contribute to and rely on the industry’s success. James Reason, in his book ‘Managing the Risks of Organizational Accidents’ [F.7] provides a clear account of how safety culture contributes to risk and the elements of a good safety culture. This book is recommended for further reading on ESM.