What Is Safety Culture? Your Guide To Positive Safety Culture

Great safety culture is a valuable business asset that few fully appreciate. It has the ability to cut your costs, increase employee happiness and grow your company. Poor safety culture, by contrast, can hack away at your reputation, leave you with expensive legal cases and prevent you from achieving your true potential. 

Today our health and safety experts dig deep into what safety culture is to explain why it’s so important and what you can do to make sure you see those valuable, positive impacts. 

What Does Safety Culture Mean?

Safety culture demonstrates the ownership of safety throughout the business and at all levels, it defines the representation of health and safety within a business and the attitude of the workplace towards it. Safety culture is about the mindset of the company and its People, looking at how their values and beliefs influence the way health and safety procedures are implemented and used on a day-to-day basis, and allows people at all levels to take ownership of their own, and others safety. 

Safety culture isn’t just about simple compliance to health and safety policy but also about employees’ approach to said policy. Are they not only happy with it but also interested in workplace safety, or are they ambivalent or even against health and safety policy?

Importance Of Safety Culture

Safety culture will have a very noticeable effect on how your health and safety strategy is received and executed. A culture that is open to health and safety policy accepts risk and is encouraged to take steps to avoid it. If you’re working within a safety culture that does not take health and safety seriously, safety initiatives and policies can suffer, resulting in increased risk. 

Building a beneficial safety culture then has immeasurable value to a business. Good safety culture and, as a result, safety performance prevents injury, reduces costs and improves industry reputation. 

What Is Safety Culture In Construction?

Safety culture serves a certain significance within the construction industry. As a sector that involves a high volume of personnel often working in environments with serious dangers, such as working around heavy machinery or with construction equipment and hazardous chemicals, proper safety management can be the difference between life and death. 

Death and injury rates are higher in construction than any other workforce in the UK, which is simply due to the risks of construction occupations. These deaths and injuries result in a high number of legal challenges resulting in fines worth over £8 million per year, as well as over 2 million workdays lost to injury-based leave. 

Developing a strong and robust safety culture in construction is vital then for the health of employees and the businesses they work for. 

Types Of Safety Culture

Three different types of safety culture can be experienced in the workplace. Being able to identify which type of safety culture your workplace fits into can be incredibly valuable. Knowledge is power, and by creating awareness around your safety culture, you can start to make changes that benefit your business. 

The types of safety culture are:

• Negative/Inactive — In a negative safety culture, health and safety is often seen as bureaucratic, existing to check boxes and conform to regulations rather than actually help people. Health and safety processes are looked at unfavourably by staff and management, and teams rarely take steps to improve things. Negative safety cultures tend to ignore safety warnings and willfully go against policy, thus increasing risk. In these workplaces, health and safety is used to appease regulators but is rarely followed. 
• Neutral/Reactive — A neutral or reactive safety culture does not stand against the health and safety concerns but does not encourage or challenge safety considerations either. If something goes wrong, the business will likely implement precautions to stop it from happening again, but there is little concern for potential risk in this kind of environment. Policy is normally followed by staff as a point of professionalism and not out of a genuine desire to increase safety. 
• Positive/Protective — Positive safety culture ensures a proactive take on health and safety. Your team is personally invested in their safety and the safety of others. Not only do they follow policy, but they do so willingly with the mindset of looking out for ways to increase site safety, reducing risk and the number of safety incidents that occur. If this is your organisation’s safety culture, people who flout health and safety rules are admonished and reported for breaking the rules.

Positive safety cultures are ideal. 

Not only does having a positive culture result in happier employees, but such proactive practice also reduces risk and keeps staff safe. While positive safety culture can often still be improved, the issues you have will be far less pressing than if you’re experiencing a negative or neutral environment. 

Both of these types of safety culture can increase business risk, which as a result can:

• Damage your reputation as a supplier and prevent your acquisition of clients
• Cause delays to the delivery of contracts due to poor safety performance
• Mean you fail to achieve the accreditations needed to win jobs
• Mean your staff end up injured on the job, leading to compensation costs and legal claims, as well as potentially poor retention rates.

The solution to poor safety culture practice is to make improvements, which leads us to our next question.

How Can We Improve Safety Culture?

Improving safety behaviours is not always about enhancing health and safety policy, although optimising your processes can be helpful, which we’ll highlight below. Instead, it’s often about changing views and opinions and getting people happy and comfortable with the idea of safety activities being a valuable part of their working life. 

With that in mind, what can we do to curb poor safety culture habits to improve an organisation’s safety culture?

Get Management Onboard — Developing a positive safety culture should be a top-down initiative. If your management team doesn’t take safety culture seriously, you’ll run into a myriad of problems, from the rest of your team not taking it seriously to ineffective policies being implemented because those at the top aren’t paying close enough attention. To get your employees fired up about safety culture, you must lead by example. 

Make Safety Policy Universal — Rules that apply to some and not to others can lead to resentment, especially if they make a job more difficult, tedious or longer. There should be no member of your workforce that gets special treatment and can ignore safety culture. In a strong safety culture, everyone is responsible for safe working practices to the same standards, from the CEO to the latest apprentice. 

Be Clear On Consequences — Failure to comply with health and safety measures has consequences, and we aren’t talking about being disciplined by line managers. Inappropriate site conduct can lead to injury and death. To encourage positive workplace safety culture, it’s essential that your team understand the risks to themselves and their colleagues. If you provide them with clarity and show them what their actions could mean, then you’re more likely to get individuals committed to preventing workplace accidents.  

Train Employees In Workplace Safety — Ignorance isn’t always bliss. If your team doesn’t understand how to follow safety practices, then safety culture is just going to be confused and misrepresented. Training is crucial, and not just during the initial introductory stages. It should also be ongoing to educate on health and safety policy changes and serve as a reminder of the importance of great safety culture. 

Get Feedback On Your Safety Culture — Your employees are at the heart of your safety culture, which means they should get a say in how safety culture is developed and addressed. Ask questions and engage with your team. What are their problems with safety culture right now? How would they improve things? What would encourage them to be more positive and involved in safety culture? This will help you identify directions of development and core problems with your current safety culture that you may not even know about.

Work On Continuous Improvement Plans — Fresh and exciting initiatives can get a lot of buy-ins when they’re first introduced, but as time goes by, they can easily fade into obscurity. If you’re not constantly improving your health and safety process and keeping awareness fixed upon safe practice, safety culture can become background noise that employees easily ignore. 

Make Health And Safety Easy To Follow — Difficult and overly complex health and safety policies end up being begrudgingly followed, and that’s not encouraging a great safety culture. The goal is to get your staff to want to participate, engage in safety activities and help others do the same. Optimising your health and safety procedures to make them as easy as possible to follow is a powerful technique to get your staff involved and on board with a positive safety culture.

Reward Good Safety Culture Practice — It’s common practice to discipline those who don’t follow health and safety policy. This is an important part of maintaining procedures, but it’s not the only step you can take. Just as valuable as disciplining rule breaks is rewarding those who follow policy. Establishing health and safety goals and targets, then rewarding teams that meet those targets, develops a positive mindset towards safety culture.

Encourage Workers To Do The Right Thing — Let’s say, as an example, a worker notices a problem with safety policy implementation, but by bringing awareness to it, they end up shutting down activity and causing delays/accruing extra costs, which might impact their working hours, their pay or their targets. If employees don’t feel they can come forward with problems for risk of inciting anger or creating difficult situations, they won’t. If work has to stop to make it safer, then that should always be seen as a good thing, and workers should be reassured they will not suffer as a result of coming forward. This sort of behaviour should be encouraged and rewarded, even if it does come with a negative short-term impact on operations.

Make Safety Number One — The key to a truly positive and effective safety culture is to ensure that everyone understands a single golden rule: That safety comes above all else. Safety is above profits, above deadlines, above management decisions, above anything. If safety is your number one priority and part of your set core values, and your staff know that, your safety-first attitude will bleed through into a successfully developed safety culture. 

Can Health And Safety Accreditation Help Improve A Poor Safety Culture?

Health and safety accreditation can be important for building a good safety culture. 

It can do this by helping you identify where you may need to improve on the process and by understanding through health and safety auditing if your employees are following your safety policy and measures. 

The ultimate goal of health and safety assessments, such as the Safety Schemes in Procurement (SSIP), is to demonstrate that your business follows the health and safety practices required by high-value client businesses. 

If you don’t have a strong safety culture, accreditation assessments can help to identify your flaws. If you already have a good safety culture, then accreditation can be a badge your business wears proudly to show others of your accomplished strategy and approach towards safety standards. 

CHAS are industry-leading providers of health and safety certifications and a founding member of the SSIP accreditation scheme. Work with us today to assess your health and safety and develop an essential safety culture.