It is your business to be safe!
Post by our new writer S. Fisher
The culture of a company can be defined as: who a company is; what it does and how it goes about doing things. So the safety culture is therefore the company’s way of dealing with safety. If we could tattoo ‘safety is how we do business around here’ on every member of a business, small or large, and this is what people lived by….business would be booming.
A cultural change is drastic and takes time to be implemented. And a change requires people in the culture to think the unthinkable. So a safety culture needs support from a reliable management system.
There are different types of organizations: pathological ones just don’t care; reactive organizations think there isn’t a way to perform better; and calculative organizations are hard to change because they are so comfortable.
The good news for smaller companies is less effort is required to keep a healthy, safe culture. Large organizations will be calculative unless active steps are taken. The bad news for both small and big companies is if they do not maintain a safe culture, unwanted costs will be incurred.
So all companies want to be proactive: this means staff and management have acquired beliefs that safety is worthwhile. And the final goal is to be generative: so safety behaviour is fully integrated into everything the company does. And the motto by all is: ‘safety is how we do business around here’.
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