Achieving a world-class safety culture means transforming fundamental assumptions behind the way safety is perceived and practiced by employees at all levels of an organization. It is a revolutionary enterprise.
That doesn't make it sudden or chaotic or otherwise disruptive, because the process of implementing the kind of change that sticks is evolutionary -- gradual, systematic, alert to the intense, built-in resistance, and above all geared for the long-term rather than the quick fix. Genuine culture change is by definition a process, not a shotgun event.
What follows are the four phases of an evolutionary intervention for achieving the revolutionary change in safety culture that results in world-class safety performance.
Enlisting and Educating the Leaders
Assessing the Baseline Culture
Driving Change From the Grassroots
Generating Culture-Based Projects
The first phase is obtaining buy-in from all leaders who are needed to play key roles in creating the new safety culture --and that's leaders at every level of the organization. One of the most common mistakes is to identify only leaders from the ranks of management, only from the union, or only the safety department. Buy-in has to come from leaders of all constituencies because successful culture change is organic -- a "tribal" product, not a stick-on "program."
Education is the initial instrument for enlisting commitment to a change initiative. Typically, a one-day seminar -- best when comprised of a cross-section of plant personnel (management, union leaders, supervisors, line employees) -- can introduce the fundamental concepts and the principles of culture-based safety:
How culture impacts safety performance
How cultures evolve and grow
The role of leadership in driving change.
Aligning leadership around achieving a world class safety goes well beyond modifying a few behaviors, procedures or regulations. It mandates rallying around the goal of modifying people's fundamental perceptions about how safety and productivity go together in the work process.
Without advance inquiry into the root beliefs, norms and assumptions that drive people's behavior, even the best programmatic efforts may misfire. So it is axiomatic that an organization should carefully assess its culture - communication, trust, leadership, commitment, peer group norms, institutionalized influences - before initiating change. The emerging culture assessment is a dual resource: it throws open a window onto the current safety process, and it becomes the foundation for an ongoing cultural data base.
Better still, the culture assessment can itself actually catalyze transformational change. Holding up a mirror for an organization's leaders of the strengths and deficiencies braided into the culture often has the power to trigger a change impulse in companies where previous attempts to overcome inertia have failed. When it reveals wide gaps in perception among different groups about institutionalized 'givens,' it makes an unmistakable case for the urgency of intervention.
