While it is normal to say that safety culture is something you should pay attention to, it might be better to say that safety culture are things you should pay attention to.
Safety culture in aviation organizations is more than just one thing. There are multiple “types” of safety culture.
The five faces of safety culture you should consider are:
You cannot monitor aviation safety culture with one safety chart or one metric. You need a handful of dedicated charts to acquire a global picture of aviation safety culture in your aviation safety management system.
Commitment and attitude are really two sides of the same coin. When we talk about safety commitment, it is usually in the context of management’s commitment to the safety program:
It should be clear whether or not your management is committed to the safety program. However, the safety attitude of front-line employees is harder to qualify/quantify. Employee safety attitudes are things like:
These are important questions. Organizations with employees who have good safety attitudes are safer organizations, period. The best way to assess employees’ attitudes is with safety surveys. By taking surveys, you can chart the results onto a safety survey results graph. Over time, you will be able to assess the trend in safety attitudes. This is a good baseline for assessing the effectiveness of your safety promotion efforts.
What are the employees in your safety management system doing when the boss isn’t watching? Are they following prescribed safety procedures? Employees who take shortcuts with tasks or prescribed procedures are unsafe. Safety management’s safety efforts depend on the assumption that employees are following prescribed behavior.
There are three important parts of safety behavior:
A great chart to assess this is the policies and procures classification chart. This chart shows which policies and procedures are implicated in safety issues. If a policy should be working, but it keeps being classified, it means either:
A great chart to use in conjunction is the top Human Factors classification chart. If you find that employees not following directions is a significant contributor, then you know what your problem is.
Hazard reporting culture is your baseline safety culture performance. If employees aren’t reporting issues, your safety program is a farce. Even if your SMS is riddled with other problems, so long as employees are submitting safety issues you can practice continuous improvement.
There are two charts you can use to monitor safety reporting culture:
These two charts give you an opportunity to assess the global hazard reporting culture and hazard reporting of each employee. Poor hazard reporting cultures can be in part a "human" problem, as well as a hazard reporting process problem. Other charts that are useful for assessing hazard reporting culture are:
Instilling high-quality safety awareness may be the highest goal of a safety culture. Awareness is as critical important for identifying threats, root causes, and other types of exposure before safety is compromised.
Organizations whose employees have good safety awareness will feature a high percentage of low-risk issues. This is because issues are often reported early in the hazard-risk lifecycle (i.e., low risk!). Furthermore, as management continues to identify and implement risk controls, they will become more aware of the best methods for controlling risk – this also leads to a reduced number of high/medium risk situations.
Hence, a great chart for monitoring the trend of safety awareness in your organization is the number of hazard reports by risk level safety chart. This chart shows:
You can also compare data to the previous time period for an even more thorough understanding of the context of current trends in safety awareness.
Your organization’s ability to adapt to change is a significant marker of overall safety culture. By adopting, we are talking about responding to changes in the operational environment. Two great charts to monitor adaptability are:
Both charts show how quickly your SMS can do the “Four I’s”:
Once the problem has been fixed, the issue can be closed/reviewed, hence the average days to close the issue chart. Programs that are highly adaptable feature:
Adaptable aviation safety cultures should have low average days of close issues and a very high percentage of on-time CPA closures.
Once again, here are the best charts to monitor aviation safety culture in SMS:
Wondering what the safety culture score is in your SMS? Take this free quiz to find out how your SMS safety culture compares to the industry.
Last updated in March 2024.