The Four Universal Indicators of Organizational Safety Culture

Getting Back to the Basics

Many opinions were shared regarding Boeing’s organizational safety culture following the most recent 787 Max crash. In fact, Forbes wrote a piece (which jumped out at me) focusing on the frequency of the words “safety” and “profit” used in their 2018 annual report and the ratio between them. While I believe the article makes an interesting point I do disagree with the inference. Yes. Safety culture starts with executive leadership. Sure. The annual report is their opportunity to share the companies core values and vision. But the frequency of the word “safety” in such a report does not carry enough clout to alter the safety construct of an entire company. That’s a bit of a stretch.

But I get it. Boeing has a problem. How about getting back to the basics? What are the key components of a safety culture? Heck before we get there how do we characterize workplace culture in general?

These questions have prompted me to think about the decomposition of organizational safety culture and its key universal indicators. Let’s check them out.

“A culture is a set of shared values and norms, a way of looking at and interpreting the world and events around us and of taking action in a social context. Safety culture is that subset of culture that reflects the general attitude and approaches to safety and risk management.” (Leveson, 2011) An organization will always align itself with a purpose. Therefore, organizational safety culture is safety and risk management with a purpose.

It should then be no surprise that safety is the expected outcome while risk management is the mechanism through which a certain level of safety is achieved. As such, the elements of safety and risk management are to be woven into an organizations safety culture. The System Safety Process as defined in MIL-STD-882E provides a road map for safety and management. The eight elements of this process are as follows:

1. Document the System Safety Approach

2. Identify and Document Hazards

3. Assess and document risk

4. Identify and document risk mitigation measures

5. Reduce risk

6. Verify, validate, and document risk reduction

7. Accept risk and document

8. Manage life-cycle risk (Defense, 2012)

In order for these elements to be exercised there are four key universal indicators that must be present. These indicators behave as catalysts and enable an organizational safety culture to maximize its output.

The successes of an organizations safety culture are rooted in planning. A safety plan provides the organization with a way forward through strict guidance. It defines the processes, methods, actions and coordination needed to achieve a definitive culture within an organization. Simply put it is the backbone upon which the culture thrives or dies.

The development of a safety plan should be based on the structure provided within an accepted standard such as but not limited to those detailed in MIL-STD-882E. A standard inherently provides the safety plan with the value of lessons learned which can result in risk avoidance and inherently benefit an organizations projected goals of cost and schedule.

This is what we call planning. A safety plan is dynamic such that depending upon the nature of the situation it can be tailored to adjust to unforeseen circumstances. If tailoring becomes a concern a simple risk assessment can be used to identify if the benefit from the change in approach is worth the potential loss.

The safety plan is an opportunity for the practitioner(s) to identify specific safety tasking and activities to be completed within the organization which allow for the identification, evaluation, elimination and control of hazards/risk. This is achieved through careful monitoring of the personnel, infrastructure and environment which is then complimented by safety precedence to ensure that the necessary mitigations are exercised.

The means by which an organization interfaces amongst itself hinges upon communication. Organizations lacking strong internal communication succumb to the crippling effects of all that is unknown. They are unable to leverage the strength of resiliency and fall prey to the menaces of accounting for only that which is expected.

Often times poor communication can lead to the development of unwanted characteristics amongst the employees at a given organization. An example of this is the concept of key personnel single points of failure.

Often times certain individuals can become information sinks which ultimately leads to large amounts of knowledge remaining within the minds of a select few. This is risky. What if these individuals were to leave the organization for some reason? Did they hold key pieces of information close to themselves and not share it with others? Did resource contentions exist and force greater levels of demand upon specific subject matter experts? These are the kind of questions that can come to fruition within an organization that suffers from a lack of communication.

A means for resolving this issue can be through the development of knowledge management plans. These plans allow employees to pair up into mentor and mentee type teams. The goal of this is too enable the mentor to transfer key work related information that is not easily learned without extensive on the job experience. Knowledge management plans encourage the creation of healthy lines of communication and work to eliminate the difficulties of gaining tribal knowledge quickly over short periods of time.

An organizational safety culture that exudes high levels of quality communication creates an environment rich with learning. Through this learning the quality of work place products improve. These improved workplace products (i.e. verification and validation of hazards) contribute to an enhanced organizational safety culture.

“Configuration management is a systems engineering process for establishing and maintaining consistency of a product’s performance, functional, and physical attributes with its requirements, design, and operational information throughout its life.” (Configuration Management, 2016)

One of the most powerful characteristics of configuration management is problem report tracking. Within an organization it’s possible for hundreds if not thousands of problems to be reported on a periodic basis. This could be days, weeks, months, years, etc. The point being that over time managing and keeping track of all this information can become an incredibly daunting task. Configuration management makes that task possible. The means by which this is accomplished varies based on the size and needs of a given organization.

Solutions can range from manual management to full scale software enterprise solutions that are used to support organizations like major financial institutions. An example of a major benefit to be gained from the configuration management of problem reporting is stream lined sorting. This technique allows for the ability to quickly identify duplicate reports. When working with larger scale organizations this capability ends up saving incredible amounts of time which later results in monetary savings.

Before an organizational culture can successfully execute a safety plan, demonstrate communication, and provide configuration management it must also apply a rigorous process management system. Without the binding glue of this fourth universal indicator of organizational safety culture the elements of the System Safety Process begin to unravel.

Rigorous process management carries with it strict monitoring and control over the four other universal indicators and instills a sense of discipline. By leveraging this discipline, an organization can implement rules that carry with them expectations. Thus, leading the charge towards achieving the highest standards in safety and risk management.

So why am I telling you all of this? Let’s face it, safety culture is complex. It’s a sociotechnical system with a bunch of contributing factors influencing its overall health. But like any system it’s strength is rooted in its architecture which I believe traces directly to my universal indicators.

Each contributes an integral piece of the greater sum that results in purposeful and mindful safety and risk management. These my friends are the four most important, universal indicators of an organizational safety culture.

Defense, D. o. D. (2012). Standard Practice Safety. Department of Defense.

Jenner, G. (2015, March 7). Animals On The Wall: Cave Art & Stone Age Pets. Retrieved from Greg Jenner: http://www.gregjenner.com/animals-wall-cave-art-stone-age-pets/

Leveson, N. G. (2011). Engineering a Safer World. Cambridge, Massachusetts, United States of America: The MIT Press.

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