By definition, aviation safety culture is an organization’s commitment to safety. I tend to find this definition limiting.
Perhaps a better way to understand safety culture is the means of realizing safety success, in which commitment is just one part.
Of course, safety culture in the aviation industry needs to be coupled with an organized, compliant aviation safety management system (SMS) in order to increase an organization's ability for safety success. By safety success, I mean that your SMS implementation demonstrates:
Safety culture is the “means” to success because it:
Attitude, awareness, behavior, and commitment – these are the primary tenants of safety culture. Here are 3 ways aviation safety culture leads directly to safety performance.
Safety culture is something that happens on an organizational level and individual level. When aviation safety culture is successful, it always entails considerate safety behavior. Another way of saying this is that behavior demonstrates a commitment to the aviation SMS.
What is difficult about behavior is how to measure it. In other words, while it would be great for any safety manager to be able to say, “Employees in my organization behave extremely well,” what we really want is some proof.
Consider the following as quantifiable and trackable ways of measuring safety behavior:
The above list demonstrates the kind of data that quantifies safety behavior. Each point requires specific action on the part of general employees and management in order to achieve safety success.
It’s no secret that new employees by far pose the greatest risk to safety in the aviation industry and beyond. For example, nearly 1/3 of all nonfatal occupational injuries that involved time away from work were suffered by workers with less than one year of service (Bureau of Labor Statistics).
New employees generally pose a risk because they are:
A strong aviation safety culture successfully mitigates a considerable amount of risk involved with new employees because of strong safety culture:
Before organizations begin expanding, it greatly benefits them to pour resources into building a safety culture in order to mitigate exposure when hiring an influx of new employees.
What are you doing when your boss isn’t watching? Or, if you are the boss, what are your employees doing when you aren’t watching? In most organizations (we know from experience), employees only loosely follow policies and procedures when management isn’t around.
This is especially true when management doesn’t take an active role in its relationship with front-line employees.
One of the financial incentives in building a safety culture, besides saving money due to workplace injuries, is that workers are more productive because their work is consistent. This productivity does not come at the cost of safety. Rather, employees:
On the management side, managers can devote more time to important safety tasks, and less time to micromanaging employees and other managers. Good safety culture removes the burden of “authority” inherent in the top-down structure of aviation SMS implementations. Employees better manage themselves, and the top-down structure remains important for guidance rather than discipline.
Developing a mature safety culture is one of the hardest things to do in any safety program. It takes a lot of time, effort, resources, and overcoming of never-ending hurdles. A few simple ways to stimulate safety culture are:
If you are interested in monitoring your safety culture, learn how to do it in this step-by-step guide for how to monitor safety performance.
Last updated in May 2024.