Workplace Safety Culture

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I am the managing director of Australia's largest safety solutions organisation, the Industrial Foundation for Accident Prevention (IFAP).  We are a wholly self-funded, not for profit organisation which provides services across the broad spectrum of safety-related matters ranging from low level induction style training courses to whole-of-organisation safety culture change programmes.

When you think about the title of this piece, the first thing that comes to most people’s minds is an accident that produced property damage but no injuries.  While that is a common example of this principle, it is not the only one.

Resolution #1: Less Focus On Preaching More On Teaching. Awareness campaigns are important for the unaware. But most workers who ultimately get hurt do so knowing something they know is dangerous, or at very least that they suspected COULD be dangerous. 

Before an organization begins to curse safety, it is probable that one or more of the following have occurred: regulators with a limited knowledge base of safety have caused grief, a condition of supposed danger has led to an operations shutdown, a series of injuries or a severe injury has caused notable concern.

A number of companies have made significant improvements to their safety cultures. Their progress is so dramatic, they often come to the realization that it is highly probable that their next fatality will come from a contractor they hire. To safety leaders, this is not an acceptable risk.

One of your readers recently emailed: “I have always found it interesting that the ES&H function in a significant number of corporations is managed, note I did not say led, by executives who have failed somewhere else in their corporation and are clueless when it comes to ES&H activities.”

I preferred to give you my input privately. When in private industry, my supervisor, the HR manager, kept telling me that if I found safety hazards I could not put it in writing, that way "if management does nothing and someone is injured or killed there will be no liability."