By Dr Lisa Dorn, Founder, PsyDrive
Organizations are increasingly concerned that ‘safety culture’ impacts on the way people drive at work. Safety culture can be described as our values, behaviours and beliefs about safety within an organization. It can be observed and investigated across multiple elements including leadership and management commitment, resourcing, reporting and learning from crashes, risk awareness and management of risk, teamwork, communication, responsibility for safety and the extent to which employees are involved in improving safety. An organization with a positive safety culture is keen to identify any gaps in these elements so that defences can be strengthened to improve fleet safety.
History of Safety Culture
The concept of safety culture can be traced back to the investigation into the 1986 Chernobyl disaster in which all managerial and operational levels were found to be major underlying factors contributing to the nuclear accident. Poor safety culture had permeated not only operations but also system design, engineering, construction, manufacture and regulation. The Chernobyl investigation findings, and that of other major disasters, has led to increased attention to the role of the broader organization. It is well known that developing a safety culture requires senior management commitment and strong safety leadership, but the entire workforce must develop a shared belief that safety is important. The formal safety rules within management and supervisory systems, reward systems, a willingness to learn from errors and collisions are strong indications of how important safety is to an organization.
Investigating Safety Culture and Fleet Safety
We investigated safety culture within a major UK fleet-based company (Dorn et al, 2012). We reported evidence of how latent errors like poor scheduling and high workload increase fatigue and stress and remain hidden, like pathogens in the human body.
Drivers reported: -
”You get tense situations between drivers and their supervisors over shift patterns. For certain shifts, you’re tired when you come to work, and it slows you down. An hour running late, creates four hours of pressure to get back on time and you’re wrecked, and you are pushing and pushing and pushing, and everything is happening too quick. You immediately feel tired because the concentration level is heightened because of the pressure you’re under. You can’t relax when you come off for your break, you tend to snap. It is very stressful”
In contrast, active errors committed by drivers at the sharp end becomes the focus for managers, enabling the weak defences in the organisational systems to remain obscured. A negative safety culture is often characterised by low trust between managers and employees and challenging operational pressures. Typically, there are fewer resources for managing safety, and a high level of non-compliance to safety rules and procedures. Management may encourage drivers not to speed but workloads are high and there may be negative consequences for both drivers and the company for running late.
“The company thinks that you are responsible on the road if you have an accident, and everything is put into your corner. You haven’t got the support of the company. The company will make you wrong regardless”
“I don’t think they actually listen to what we say but even if they do they’re not prepared to do anything because higher up in the company that’s the way it is and that’s the way it’s going to be”
“I think it is very unfair, because they preach health and safety, but they don’t follow it through. It’s health and safety as long as the rules apply to them. It’s your fault period, not their fault, their schedules”
Developing a Positive Safety Culture
For a positive safety culture employees perceive safety procedures and policies to be meaningful. Safety is communicated to everyone ensuring consistency and visibility across the workplace. Organisations with a positive safety culture encourage fleet drivers to talk about safety and managers act on the information. Above all, employees feel empowered to contribute to safety and there is good safety training and advisory support in which responsibilities are allocated to everyone in the workplace. Management focus on monitoring driving behaviour carefully and use crash and telematics events data to identify patterns. This information is used to design intervention to improve fleet safety. Cooperation between individuals and groups is the norm in a positive safety culture in which everyone has a shared responsibility towards safe operations.
Register for our free 30-minute expert webinar followed by a 15-minute Q&A with Dr Lisa Dorn on 28th November at 1pm. We will consider the evidence for how to develop a positive safety culture for improved fleet safety.
Click on the link below to register.
Reference
Dorn, L. (2012). Investigating safety culture: A qualitative analysis of bus driver behaviour at work. In Contemporary Ergonomics and Human Factors 2012: Proceedings of the international conference on Ergonomics and Human Factors 2012, Blackpool, UK (p. 313).
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