Healthy aviation safety culture results in safety performance.
Other than the bureaucratic elements of SMS, you could even make an argument that safety culture is safety performance. In aviation safety management systems (SMS), safety performance monitoring and measurement are required.
How do you measure safety culture performance?
How do you determine safety culture performance is improving?
Aviation safety culture is notoriously difficult to monitor and influence. Changes within the SMS may take considerable time to determine the effect on safety culture. The consequence of this difficulty is that it is also challenging to monitor safety culture performance.
To monitor safety culture performance in aviation SMS, you need to understand what safety culture is. There are countless different definitions. However, it is less effective to try and define safety culture than it does to establish:
What the above articles all point out is that safety culture will express itself differently in each company. Monitoring safety performance isn’t just about understanding what safety culture looks like, but what it looks like in your company. Then you can:
Monitoring aviation safety culture is an essential part of continuous improvement and overcoming plateaus.
More than the safety team needs to be aware of how safety culture affects the SMS. The accountable executive is ultimately responsible for ensuring the SMS is properly implemented and effectively performed in all operational areas. In order to ensure the SMS is working, the accountable executive needs to monitor SMS performance.
Since SMS performance is reliant upon safety culture, it stands to reason that safety teams are monitoring safety culture performance for account executives to fulfill their responsibilities to comply with SMS regulatory requirements.
To determine whether the SMS complies, there needs to be a process in place for account executives to regularly review organizational safety performance. Whenever substandard safety performance is identified, the accountable executive is again responsible for directing actions necessary to rectify the situation.
These questions should either trigger some inspiration or a mild fear that you don't have to tools or the capabilities to measure, much less monitor safety performance. If you have these abilities to monitor safety performance, you are well on your way to extrapolating the data and monitoring the performance of your safety culture.
Without question, aviation leading indicators are the most effective way to monitor safety culture. Leading indicators are designed to assess underlying causes and "inputs" of aviation SMS. Many of these inputs-metrics are:
Examples of leading indicator metrics that are extremely effective for monitoring aviation safety culture are:
Metrics like the above show the kind of safety behavior that involves:
Above all else, employee performance monitoring is the best use of leading indicators.
Feedback from certain safety promotional activities is also an effective way of monitoring safety culture.
The first safety promotion activity to review is "safety surveys." Safety surveys are extremely effective promotional materials. Best practices for using safety surveys to monitor aviation safety culture are:
Safety surveys provide safety management with a golden opportunity for quantifying safety attitudes and safety behaviors. As safety teams conduct surveys consistently over time, there is an excellent opportunity to collate survey data and look for trends.
A second safety promotional tool suitable for monitoring aviation safety culture is safety meetings. This type of safety promotion activity isn’t as easily quantifiable as safety surveys. If you have access to SMS database software that tracks safety meeting activity, you will collect some very valuable data that can also generate interesting trends, including
Most aviation service providers can't effectively track safety meeting activity, especially when they are using spreadsheets to manage their aviation SMS. If you are using spreadsheets, don't fret, as observing employee participation in safety meetings is still valuable. Creating trending charts in spreadsheets is also relatively easy for most computer users as spreadsheets are a common business tool used by most aviation safety managers.
The third common safety promotion tool that can be used to monitor safety culture performance is safety newsletters. Safety newsletters are very common in aviation SMS. You may appear skeptical that safety newsletters can be used to monitor activity, but consider these data points that can be trended over time:
You will notice again that spreadsheets are the wrong technology to acquire data for future trend analysis. An SMS database is required, plus your safety newsletter publishing tools must be integrated within the SMS database.
How do you create and distribute safety newsletters? Many companies have SMS database software that helps safety teams draft and publish safety newsletters. Newsletters are sent either by email or are made available on an employee safety bulletin board, such as a dashboard that lists an employee's recent newsletters.
The SMS database needs to track the number of employees who were sent the newsletters and also track whenever an employee reads the newsletter. With the stored data, safety teams can analyze trends to monitor whether safety promotion activities affect SMS performance.
Ideally, aviation safety training should correlate directly to performance. When aviation safety training has no noticeable effect on safety performance, it indicates that:
Other safety culture monitoring activities should inform what types of safety training are most relevant for improving safety performance. When done, end-of-course assessments should be given and monitored. These assessments
Not all aviation safety management systems are built equally. Some SMS data management strategies are better built to monitor safety culture activities. Some key indicators of aviation SMS that are built for monitoring safety culture are:
Restructuring your SMS can be extremely beneficial for your SMS' ability to monitor and encourage safety culture development. For companies with immature or underperforming SMS, one of the most important tools you can implement is an SMS database. An SMS database affords you the ability to not only collect hazard reports but easily identify trends using the same database. An SMS database is scalable to track all SMS documentation requirements.
Spreadsheets are very difficult for scattered safety teams to conduct safety performance monitoring and measurement activities. Furthermore, if you have more than 50 employees in your company, managing an SMS using spreadsheets and paper is too risky.
A good argument for adopting SMS database software to monitor safety culture performance can be seen from the accountable executive's position. Your accountable executive is responsible for ensuring the SMS is performing in all operational areas. The SMS database is for the accountable executive's peace of mind when he is called before SMS regulatory auditors to demonstrate SMS performance monitoring capabilities.
As safety managers come and go from the company, the accountable executive needs some assurance that SMS data is safe and that operations can progress smoothly despite disruptions in the safety team. An SMS database can give the accountable executive assurance that the SMS is alive and well. If not, the SMS database will more quickly advise the accountable executives that there are potential problems with the SMS.
Good luck with your SMS.
If you need help monitoring safety performance, we can help. We manage one of the well-known SMS databases that has been used across the world for the past dozen years. Here are some demo videos to review and consider the possibilities.
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Last updated August 2024.