Inside-out of Safety Culture.

In the present article, attempted to put a perspective out of what has been earned over the long years of working in Safety.

Culture is a very commonly spoken word and has been in usage in different perspective since long.

In safety world, this is most differently interpreted and is being shown as something like a tool to improve safety in an organisation overnight.

As I have opined many times that a certain behavior followed and demonstrated by majority in a group is called a Culture. E.g. dining (an observable behavior) generally before sunset is a culture in Jainism. So it never mean that this single customary behavior as a culture is alone enough to describe this religion. Most important here is to understand that this is neither good nor bad to be followed by others unless you choose it for the sake of increasing or decreasing based on your objective.

Now, let’s take an example in the context of safety. We heard many saying “safety culture is not here at and I want to run this program for creating it”. Well, but culture representing which particular behaviour you are referring to? In other words, has anyone been identified as critical, you are interested in to change? I mean whether it was culture of not reporting unsafe condition/act, poor participation in safety program, hiding injury, not sharing ideas to improve safety or not wearing PPEs etc etc. Will you identify one from within your organisation or will pick one randomly from somewhere else? The answer is no. So, when you speak of safety culture, be very specific of the context you are referring to for it.

So when you are planning for a culture change, you need to first identify one existing culture (behavior) that is significant and non supportive to good safety. If there are many such, then you select preferential one which need attention first. When do you work step by step for each critical behavior by employing suitable intervention(s), you would reach to a situation wherein most of the employee would proactively work for safety and then this will be called a Total Safety Culture (TSC).

Welcome your comment, if any.