Safety culture is a word you see all over the place in aviation reference resources.
"Safety Culture" is used in different contexts and seemingly in very different ways.
Sometimes we say safety culture, and what we mean is hazard reporting culture. Sometimes we mean safety communication transparency. Sometimes we mean a lack of safety culture.
Safety culture can mean many different things, so when we talk about how to build safety culture, what we are really talking about is:
It’s important to always recognize the context of safety culture when you are making strategies for improving and building a safety culture.
So instead of worrying about how to build a safety culture in general, focus on building a particular piece (hazard reporting, awareness, etc.) of safety culture as a part of improving overall safety culture.
Before going further, we should establish why building a safety culture is even worth your time.
Consider the fact that in aviation oversight guidance all around the globe, Safety Promotion gets significantly less attention than other aspects of SMS. For example, the FAA’s Advisory Circular 120-92B guidance on regulation only designates 10% of its guidance for Safety Promotion (the other 90% goes towards Safety Assurance, Safety Risk Management, and Safety Policy).
Should you really only spend 10% of your time promoting SMS and safety in your company? Absolutely not.
The reason is that safety culture translates directly to actual safety performance. Whereas having strong SA, policy, and SRM processes in place is good for compliance and is necessary for having an actual SMS, those aspects of SMS don’t correspond directly to safety performance. They correspond directly to compliance performance.
Building safety culture is a means of ensuring that employees are safety-minded enough to:
Knowing how to build safety culture involves knowing what you build towards. Signs of effective safety culture are:
Keep these bullet points in mind in the future and as we move forward in this article.
Building hazard reporting culture involves improving:
Reaching this goal involves three important points:
Given these three points, the way to build a hazard reporting culture is:
Using safety surveys to gather feedback about how employees feel about hazard reporting is a good place to start.
Safety awareness is one of the most crucial aspects of safety culture. It involves:
Conveniently, improving these aspects of your SMS is actually not terribly difficult:
Just Culture is by far the hardest safety culture attribute to build. For one, there is a lot about Just Culture that is out of safety management’s control:
Especially in cases where there has been cronyism, management abuse of power, high turnover, and poor working relationships, establishing Just Culture can be downright impossible. But here are some tips:
Initially, be conservative and don’t allow much transparency in terms of employees’ being allowed to see what other employees are submitting. Over time, loosen up and let employees see desensitized information.
Then, you may or may not continue to loosen up and give employees full access to most reported issues’ data as the quality of aviation safety culture builds.
Acceptance of the SMS program has important implications in how willing people are to:
Feedback mechanisms are extremely important to this end. You need to communicate with employees and understand how they feel about the SMS. Gathering such data allows you to target your safety promotional efforts and make sure they are addressing undervalued aspects of your safety program.
Beyond this, some good tips to generate acceptance of your SMS program are:
See what the quality of your safety culture is with this free, 15 questions safety culture quiz:
Last updated June 2024.