Workplace culture is often described as "the way we do things around here."
When combined with safety, however, culture is much more involved.
Safety culture is easy to talk about, but hard to describe. You often know when you have a good one, but it is difficult to describe why it is good. I have said that we need "to put handles" on safety culture, so that we can grab it, examine it and figure out how it works. At SAFE Work Manitoba, we have been working hard "to put handles" on safety culture to give workplaces some practical tools to understand and improve theirs.
Our current advertising campaign talks about safety culture, but let's take a closer look.
Values and beliefs guide safety culture
Working with our partners, we have developed this definition, which we think will help guide our efforts to ensure a strong and sustained safety culture – across the province – for generations to come:
A positive safety culture exists when a set of shared values and beliefs about workplace safety and health influences and drives practices for preventing workplace injuries and illnesses.
First of all, there are values and beliefs that underpin a strong safety culture.
In a strong safety culture, people value and expect a safe and healthy workplace, people in the workplace are considered to be the most valuable resource, and safety and health is valued along with productivity, quality and pay.
In a strong safety culture, people believe workplace injuries and illnesses can be prevented, leaders drive improvement, and everyone plays a part in building safe and healthy workplaces.
Examples of safety culture
Values and beliefs are only part of the picture. These values and beliefs must influence our actions and practices in order to become part of our culture.
An example of safety culture in our province is seatbelt use. Try to think of the last time you consciously thought about buckling up your seatbelt. It's been some time for me. Now, most of us automatically reach for it every time we get in the car. I lived in a generation when we changed our practices and started using seatbelts regularly. My children have only ever known a strong seatbelt culture. They have difficulty imagining that anyone would ever consider driving without a seatbelt.
This automatic action wasn't always the case. There was a time when cars didn't even have seatbelts. There was a time that seatbelt use wasn't required by law, but through a long effort of legislative changes, awareness promotion, enforcement and peer pressure, we have a positive and sustained change; a shift in our safety culture where people value and believe in seatbelt safety.
I see evidence of a strong safety culture in workplaces and I'm sure you do, too. It's the worker who automatically puts on a hard hat, clips in a lanyard, tests for voltage or locks out a machine. It's the desk worker who takes time throughout the day to get up, stretch and walk to offset the effects of sitting. It's the supervisor who praises a worker for raising a safety concern, initiates a discussion about the hazards of a work task, or embraces the results of a safety audit or inspection as a means to continuously improve the safety and health of their workers. It's those willing to do things the safe way instead of taking a short cut. Constant actions like these inspire others to adopt these same practices and fortify the workplace's safety culture.
Adopting workplace safety culture
At SAFE Work Manitoba, we believe establishing and maintaining a strong safety culture should be an important goal for all Manitobans and Manitoba workplaces – it shouldn't be a complicated process.
More and more we are seeing safety and health embedded in educational institutions and provincial leaders supporting and investing in safety and health. We are also seeing our laws and standards become more practical and innovative, and enforcement used more effectively in maintaining a minimum standard of practice. I believe, in many ways, we will see the public expecting safety and health in the workplace as a community norm.
The good news is that we have some great examples in our province of organizations that foster a strong culture of safety. We recently recognized some of them at our SAFE Work Awards. The winner of the 2017 SAFEty Culture Award was Diagnostic Services Manitoba (DSM). The leaders and employees of DSM speak with pride of the elements of their safety and health program: all employees are trained in job hazard analysis and in writing safe work procedures; workplace safety and health committee members regularly involve other workers in inspecting laboratories, diagnostic imaging areas and other sites; and all staff are trained in the Provincial Healthcare Violence Prevention Program to protect staff, visitors and patients from aggression or violence. Certainly, these are all important parts of an effective safety and health program, but what sets DSM apart as having a strong safety culture is the pride, ownership and commitment that the leaders and employees demonstrate. This is a great example of a workplace that has built a positive safety culture.
To build a strong safety culture we must emphasize underlying values and beliefs surrounding safety and health in workplaces and in Manitoba society. Then, we must use this as a foundation to guide our actions and practices. In this way, we can reduce injuries today and prevent them for generations to come.
I encourage you to visit safemanitoba.com/safetyculture to learn more about safety culture in Manitoba, assess your workplace's safety culture and discover ways to improve the safety culture in your workplace.
Jamie Hall
Vice President, SAFE Work Manitoba
Learn more about our safety culture campaign.
Follow Jamie Hall on Twitter at @SAFEWorkJamie
