07 Apr Develop your Organisational Safety Culture

Recently Talegent hosted Christopher Burt from the University of Canterbury for a webinar where he shared his expertise and tips for crafting an organisational safety culture. If you missed it, you can watch it here: Developing an Excellent Safety Culture. But first, a quick summary of Chris’ top tips.

Classify your Safety Culture

The first step of developing a safety-based culture is understanding your current position on the safety culture continuum. Every organisation will be somewhere between Pathological [with a lower safety culture] to Generative [where a safety culture is fully integrated].

Once you understand where you are at, you can begin to develop your health and safety processes. To move towards safety culture excellence – safety components need to be integrated into all organisation systems and processes.

Capability Development is Essential

Capability development can have considerable economic benefits and positive safety behaviour outcomes.

Integration of Health and Safety components creates felt obligation and reciprocity within employees. Developed capabilities with safety features improve economic outcomes for your organisation and have an intrinsic motivating component. This leads to employees being motivated to change their Health and Safety behaviours.

Hire with Safety Assessments

One way to improve the safety culture at your organisation is to hire for it once you have your health and safety processes incorporated. You can’t hire candidates based on their safety awareness and capability without having a supportive and safety-focused organisational culture first.

Job Analysis:

• Identify all H&S aspects of the job, work environment, team, organisation
• This requires Organisational Understanding of the safety culture

Recruitment Process:

• H&S mentioned in Ad and Job Description
• H&S competencies listed in Person Specification
• This acts to keep your applicant informed and aware

Selection Process Measures:

• Safety relevant and specific competencies
• Safety Expectations Measured and Feedback
• Using selection measures, you can identify applicants with the relevant level of safety awareness

Outcomes:

• Contributes to safety culture excellence
• Employee reciprocity: Safety compliance & participation

When you’re ready to hire with safety in mind, there are a few ways that you can assess candidates depending on the industry and the role.

If you want more detail on building a safety culture at your organisation watch the webinar here or read some of Talegent’s Safety Whitepapers.