“Safety culture” is an ambiguous phrase that gets thrown around a lot.
Sometimes we use it when we talk about poor safety awareness when employees behave ignorantly on the ramp or around dangerous situations.
Sometimes we use it when we talk about corporate culture or lack of upper management support whenever we see competing business priorities and demands taking precedence over safety concerns.
Sometimes we use it to refer to resistance to the safety program as employees stubbornly resist participating in the SMS, such as reporting safety concerns or attending safety meetings.
Safety culture can generally be broken down into the following 5 components:
There's a big difference between understanding what unhealthy safety culture looks like and actually improving safety culture. Managing a safety program with a poor safety culture will constantly make you feel like your hands are tied.
Safety culture correlates directly to safety performance. You might look at the role of safety culture in overall aviation safety as:
Understanding how to improve safety culture first involves understanding the components of safety culture and the role safety culture plays in aviation safety.
After understanding what safety culture is, the second step in improving safety culture is to be able to identify symptoms of poor safety culture in your aviation SMS. Here are some common signs of poor safety culture:
This list goes on, but this should provide a solid foundation of some of the most common signs of an unhealthy safety culture. Do any of these points look familiar?
The last thing you need to firmly understand before starting to improve safety culture is what effective safety culture actually looks like. If you don't know this, you don't know what you are improving towards.
Here are some signs of an effective safety culture:
Once again, the list of signs of an effective safety culture goes on, but the above points provide a solid basis.
Hazard reporting culture is the first component of safety culture you should try and improve. Hazard reporting forms the basis of your data acquisition process and all subsequent risk management activities that are vital to aviation SMS. Moreover, of all components of safety culture, safety management has the most direct influence over hazard reporting.
Here are some inspiring examples to improve hazard reporting culture:
For safety management wondering how to improve safety culture, improving hazard reporting culture provides a major boost in overall safety culture.
Improving safety awareness is critical for developing a mature safety culture. Safety awareness is simply the ability to:
As you can see, safety awareness is practically the same as situational awareness, which is a fancy term for employees being mindful of their surroundings. Since we are discussing aviation SMS, there will be a safety focus in this case that stresses awareness of:
Fortunately, there are several easy ways to influence safety awareness in SMS programs:
Improving awareness is largely about helping employees understand the safety implications of their actions. When employees can see the personal connection between their attitude/behavior and their own personal safety, they are universally much more willing to comply and be involved with the SMS.
If you have been paying attention, you will notice that safety teams have many tools at their disposal to increase safety awareness. These are the same safety promotion tools used by safety managers to educate employees on the purpose and importance of SMS. Safety promotion can take many forms and target multiple objectives.
The most common "visible" safety promotion tool in the aviation industry is "safety newsletters." Unfortunately, we observe that MOST aviation service providers don't publish safety newsletters frequently enough to consistently remind employees of the need to be "aware of their surroundings." This lack of newsletter publishing frequency can be overcome using supplemental safety promotion techniques, such as
Poor safety communication can and will ruin safety culture. To improve safety culture, you must have solid communication lines between:
In other words, communication works across all levels of an organization. Safety communication is about:
Some good ways to quickly improve safety culture are:
These are all easy, documentable ways to improve safety communication. They only require a bit of front-end work and dedicated follow-up. Return on investment for improving safety communications is hard to determine, but one can easily envision an organization that has poor safety communication practices.
Breaking down silos and corporate culture is a tricky beast to tackle. Unfortunately, there are no quick tips or easy answers here. The reality is that in some situations, you may be entirely powerless to effect change.
That being said, here are some ways to try and break down silos and change corporate culture:
There are no quick fixes for toxic safety cultures. Changing the course of your safety culture is more difficult than changing the course of a drifting oil tanker in a storm. Many months or years may be required to change attitudes and behaviors in your SMS.
At the opposite end of the spectrum, damaging a safety culture is easy and can be done very quickly if managers are not quick to spot and mitigate bad behaviors and substandard conditions.
As stated before, accountable executives are responsible for monitoring the performance of the SMS and rectifying any shortcomings. Safety culture is an important element for the success of EVERY SMS. Therefore, when there are problems with your safety culture, make sure your account executive is informed and aware of the long-term risk of "doing nothing."
Here are some resources that should help you improve the safety culture in your aviation SMS program:
Accountable executives are responsible for monitoring the performance of their SMS. Here is another very useful and free resource to download.
Last updated April 2024.