SMS Pro Aviation Safety Software Blog 4 Airlines & Airports

Definition of Safety Culture in Aviation Risk Management

Safety culture in aviation safety management systems (SMS) is usually defined as being the safety attitudes, beliefs, behaviors, and values of employees in an organization. Unfortunately, such a high-level, conceptual definition of safety culture does not help safety manager address core personnel challenges in your organization's SMS.

In much of the SMS guidance material pushed out by regulatory agencies and standards setting bodies, such as ICAO's document 9859 Safety Management Manual, we see condensed definitions of "what is safety culture" with a very, easy-to-understand phrase: "employees actions regarding safety when nobody is watching." I find this definition enlightening, but still too generic. How do safety managers measure safety culture or affect the safety culture in their organization? We need more information in this definition in order to be useful to SMS practitioners.

Another way to approach the question, what is safety culture, is to break it into multiple definitions based on how it works in safety management systems.

Aviation SMS Success Dependent on Safety Culture

Whether safety professionals or upper management like it or not, a successful aviation safety management system (SMS) is dependent on safety culture. This fact hold true for every aviation industry segment, including:

• airlines;
• airports;
• maintenance organizations, etc.

Your company can have the best risk management processes and the most expensive aviation SMS database, but when your safety culture does not support the organization's SMS initiative, your company will never realize the full benefits of an aviation SMS. Furthermore, risk is not being managed properly.

Does this bear repeating? Unless you have a positive, trusting safety culture, you will be wasting a significant portion of your SMS investment. Money will be left laying on the table and management will miss out on the promised benefits of the aviation SMS.

With this in mind, how do you know whether your safety culture is either improving or in a slowly imperceptible decline?

What Are Mandatory and Voluntary Safety Reporting Policies

Mandatory and voluntary safety reporting policies are an extremely important part of providing guidance for safety reporting in aviation safety management systems (SMS). Yet, we rarely see these policies published and communicated in aviation SMS implementations.

What Is Confidentiality in Aviation SMS

Confidentiality in aviation SMS is how much personal information is included in available safety reports and concerns. When safety issues are reported, employees may or may not have access to details about the reported issue. When employees do have access, or when you release information about a reported issue, you will need to decide if employees can see information like:

Quality Leadership Stimulates Teamwork

A mature, effective aviation safety management system (SMS) will always incorporate imaginative ways to stimulate teamwork and good communication between employees.

It’s a tricky area though because teamwork and communication are beset by:

• Poor interpersonal relationships;
• Different teamwork needs;
• Cultural differences; and
• Separate problem-solving strategies

What Aviation SMS Needs for Successful Hazard Reporting

Aviation safety management systems (SMS) needs input from three levels of your organization to be successful. Without total involvement of your company, hazard reporting will fail.

The three levels of your company and their corresponding responsibility for setting up a successful hazard reporting program are:

What Is Participation in Your SMS

Employee participation in your aviation SMS is critical to its maintainability. We this over and over, where the SMS is being pushed by one person and when that person leaves the program falls apart.

One of the primary goals of generating good involvement is creating a sustainable SMS.

How to Quantify Resistance to Your SMS Using This Article

Grab a spare pen and paper so you can write down some notes. What we are looking for is a total score. It works like this:

Transparency, a Hot Topic:

In recent years, managerial concerns surrounding organizational transparency have become extremely important at all levels of industry and government. So important in fact, that most sensational news stories in recent years - namely Edward Snowden, Wikileaks, the Sony Hack, Bradley Manning - are issues of organizational transparency.

For individuals who defend transparency, we even have a name that has acquired the show-stopping power of words like "terrorist" and "hero," or "whistleblower."

What Is Confidentiality in Aviation SMS

Confidentiality in aviation SMS refers to how much personal information should be made available to your organization. By personal information, we are mainly talking about personal information in safety reports, such as people involved or the name of the reporter.