Keywords

The concept of “safety culture” has both an external and an internal use. When addressed to the outer world—be it the regulatory body, the media or the general public—its main value is to be as visible and brilliant as possible (a justification stake). When used internally, it is deemed to support the efforts made to improve safety. HSE departments are often caught between top management’s expectations of homogeneous, company-wide, messages and approaches, and local management’s needs for tailored and efficient support.

The first result of the strategic analysis presented is: “If your main target is external, keep it simple, and use the models and formalisms that are the most popular for, or imposed by your interlocutors.”

If your strategic goal is to mobilize internal stakeholders in the long term to improve safety, the question becomes: “Under which conditions may the concept of safety culture help?”. Returning to the initial diagram in Chap. 2 (Fig. 1), it appears that the work of the strategic analysis leads to reconsider it in a rejuvenated way. Five dimensions are in tension with each other: a will or a need to act; an “already there”, which is the influence of organizational culture on the ways of doing and the ways of thinking that affect safety; an offer (an academic and consultancy market) of safety models; a set of stakeholders, for whom safety has to do with power; and the external environment of the group, the branch or the plant.

The dimension on which this book places the most emphasis is the need to properly understand and build on the “already there”. The organization has other stakes to manage than safety, and its culture gives a certain weight to safety in the arbitrations made daily at all levels—which is reflected in the infrastructure: the technology and the organizational structure. But the present efforts towards safety are also borne by the collective practices of many professional groups, each of which has its own culture. A number of boundaries and interactions shape the landscape of safety culture.

The suggestion is to take this “already there” more as an asset than as a liability. It requires a careful understanding of the existing safety cultures, the identification of crucial trades and groups, and a deep understanding of “work as done” among them. It also entails the analysis of a possible “organizational silence” and of the reasons why information available in the field is not shared upwards.

Starting from this deep understanding of the “already there”, conditions of success may be outlined. Suggestions for encouraging safety culture to evolve would be:

  • Focusing on the prevention of SIF (severe injuries and fatalities) and major accidents, not on frequency rates.

  • Involving all stakeholders at all steps of the process from the outset (the diagnosis and discussion of the existing situation).

  • Examining what present safety cultures can absorb.

  • Aiming to change their practices rather than their values—values will follow—while ensuring compatibility with the organization’s overarching values and strategic orientations. Make visible efforts to reduce the everyday risks and optimize the working situations.

  • Basing the change targets on the reality of activities, and on safety models that are relevant according to the endogenous and exogenous degree of uncertainty (one size does not fit all), and to the possible need for switching from one mode to another under certain circumstances.

  • Regarding the change process, fostering meaningful dialogue and discussion, not only vertically along the managerial line but also, and maybe above all, horizontally at the boundaries between departments, groups, trades.

  • Respecting the differences in perspectives, and endeavouring to reconcile the trades by providing a common vocabulary and representations favouring boundary crossing. Accepting a degree of ambiguity and friction.

  • Holding together differentiation (according to the activities) and a common core of principles and indicators providing a clear framework.

A number of organizations are engaged in change processes aiming at improving their safety culture. A valuable contribution to knowledge about these processes would now be an in-depth analysis of the activities of the practitioners who bear the charge of carrying out the change. Behind the explicit announcements, which are the strategies, the trials and errors, the victories, defeats or rebounds? Understanding “work as done” should also be applied to change agents.