Safety culture

Safety culture is a behavioral characteristic of a group or organization in how safety issues are dealt with. It is subject to a complex learning process in which common goals, interests, norms, values ​​and behavioral patterns develop.

Based on:

• Edgar Schein , 1997: "Culture is the result of a complex learning process of a group, organization or society in which common goals, interests, norms, values, behavioral patterns, rituals, traditions, continuity, security and other characteristics develop."
• Cox and Cox, 1991: "Safety culture describes the way in which safety is organized in the workplace, and thus reflects the attitudes, beliefs, perceptions and values ​​of employees with regard to safety."

Origin and meaning of the term safety culture

The term “safety culture” was first used in 1986 in connection with the Chernobyl disaster , to which organizational deficiencies as the cause of the accident had contributed to a considerable extent. The INSAG commission (International Nuclear Safety Group) set up by the IAEA used this term to summarize the “so-called human element” in the operation of the reactor.

The OECD stated in:

“The Chernobyl reactor accident showed that the basic safety values, norms and attitudes of an entire organization were weak or missing. In such a case it does not matter how well existing safety devices and procedures have been developed and created. They are of no use if the staff exceeds the operating limits and security systems are circumvented. Safety culture must therefore permeate all levels of a company organization.
At the top of a corporation, management has a profound influence on the safety culture of the entire company by making clear the values ​​of safety and quality in the company so that employees do not come into conflict between safety and production goals in their daily tasks. The employees will observe very closely whether the values ​​issued by the company are in line with the actual actions of management. "

As a result of the Chernobyl accident, the IAEA first coined the term "safety culture" in industry in 1991 to draw attention to the importance of human and organizational concerns for the safe operation of nuclear power plants:

"Safety culture is the sum of all characteristics and attitudes in organizations and of individuals, which ensures that nuclear safety issues are given the top priority they deserve due to their significance."

The importance of the safety culture for the safety of technically complex systems is recognized today in all areas of industry. It manifests itself in practically all major industrial accidents, such as chemistry - Sevesounglück (1976), nuclear technology - Chernobyl disaster (1986), space travel - Challenger (1986), petrochemicals - Piper Alpha (1988), rail - ICE accident at Eschede ( 1998).

The oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico in 2010 and the nuclear disaster in Fukushima in 2011 underline the importance of this influencing factor even today.

The fact that it was only a large number of serious industrial accidents that revealed the great importance of the influencing factor “safety culture” is explained by the fact that safety culture is not visible and therefore cannot be measured directly. In aviation, this knowledge process is referred to as “the evolution of safety thinking”, according to which knowledge about the main types of accident causes has developed over time as follows: Technical factors (1950), human factors (1970), organizational factors (1980).

In his three-level model, Edgard Schein describes the characteristics and effectiveness of an organizational culture , which also apply to safety culture as follows:

• Artifacts of the organization: The visible characteristics of the organization, such as the appearance of the company, the type and condition of the buildings, the equipment of the employees. However, their origins and backgrounds remain hidden.
• Emphasized values: such as strategy, goals and philosophy of the company (company guidelines), but which do not yet represent a common level of experience. The transition from highlighted values ​​to common basic values ​​(transformation process) takes place through shared experience.
• Basic assumptions and values: They are unconscious, cannot be measured and essentially determine the culture of the company. They are the characteristics of how we think about things and how we behave. They are not the subject of discussion. They establish trust in others who have the same thought patterns and enable a common sense of departure to achieve common goals.

Methods for recognizing, evaluating and managing a safety culture

The Swiss supervisory authority HSK highlights the close interrelationship between safety culture and safety management :

“Safety culture and safety management are very closely related. Despite this relationship, there is an essential difference between the two terms. While safety culture itself cannot be directly observed and can only be recognized by its effects, safety management can be observed directly and - on paper - described. The existence of a safety management system, its explicit description and the determination of its effectiveness can therefore be used to infer the safety culture of the plant indirectly. "

Due to the great importance of the influencing “safety culture”, safety management systems are used today in practically all risk-relevant industrial areas.

Methods for determining and evaluating safety culture in companies are largely carried out in qualitative form, such as by observing the staff (with a focus on group discussions), evaluating company reports and case studies as well as through questionnaires with standardized question lists about organizational and operational processes, management and Personnel behavior. The influencing factor safety culture is to be quantified in a numerical ranking of the results of the surveys.

Another form of recording the influencing variables of organization and management is the in-depth analysis of the causes of incidents and accidents. This evaluation is supplemented by the derivation of safety indicators with regard to the determined frequencies of malfunctions and incorrect actions by the staff ( human factors ).

The American aviation authority is pursuing an approach of analyzing the organizational and management influences of accident events in detail using the Reason accident generation model. This model forms the essential core of the root cause analysis of incidents and accidents. The reason for this investigation was the increase in "organizational accidents" in aviation, which is attributed to the increasing complexity of the entire socio-technological environment of aviation.

The elements of the causes of incidents and accidents (based on the Reason model) according to which accident incidents are investigated are:

• organizational factors (incorrect decision-making processes, economic and political influencing factors, organizational culture)
• Tasks, working and environmental conditions (insufficient funds for new equipment, low work ethic)
• individual influencing factors (ineffective training)
• Inadequate countermeasures against the disruption and accident sequence, even under previously unrecognized conditions.

Safety culture in society

Safety culture as a conceptual construct is used to analyze society in dealing with (in) safety, whereby different levels of aggregation (individual, group, organizations, social system, etc.) can be used as a basis.

Cultural and social conditions and behavioral patterns influence the development of technology, just as vice versa these are influenced by technology.

Security has a strong subjective component and is therefore also - or primarily - cultural and dynamic in nature. Security arises not only from knowledge and insights, from rational or rational decisions and transparent actions. Security also arises from an intuitive understanding, from experiences and expectations, from hopes and fears, from experienced opportunities to participate in technical problem-solving processes or at least perceived opportunities to intervene in technical processes or from feelings of powerlessness in view of the apparent momentum of the technical. The process of understanding about ensuring safety (of a technical system) between the builders and operators of a system on the one hand and the people living in the vicinity of the system on the other hand is also influenced by language and culture.

The “Cultural Theory of Risk” tries to explain social conflicts caused by technical and environmental risks on the basis of empirical studies. It assumes that different perceptions and discrepancies about risk / danger and security exist as indicators of competing values. In “Grid and Group Cultural Theory”, a distinction is made between two main influencing factors, the bond in the group and the prevailing rules and structures. Risk perception grows with the strength of the respective influencing variable .

Security and approaches to solving security problems vary primarily due to political and social institutional relationships. Insecurity strengthens long-established interpretations and relationships within a culture.

In the European countries different symbols and values ​​prevail in relation to goods and protective measures worthy of protection. They are reflected in national laws and technical standards and provide information about the national safety culture of a country.

In the populations of modern industrial societies, the need for security is growing regardless of the actual risk and security situation. The risk acceptance decreases dramatically as the security demand increases to the same extent.

literature

• ET Hall: Beyond Culture . Anchor Books, New York 1989
• J. Reason: Managing the Risks of Organizational Accidents: Living with high-risk technologies . Ashgate, Hampshire, 1997
• C. Perrow: Normal Accidents . Basic Books, New York 1984 ( books.google.de )
• N. Pidgeon, M. O'Leary: Man-made disasters: why technology and organizations (sometimes) fail . In: Safety Science 34, 2000, itn.liu.se (PDF; 128 kB)
• Edgar H. Schein: Organizational Culture & Leadership . 2nd Edition. Jossey-Bass Publishers, San Francisco 1997
• Edgar H. Schein: The Difficult Cultural Issues in Promoting Safety . IAEA - International Conference on Safety Culture in Nuclear Installations, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, December 2002
• Collins Gladd: Safety Culture: A Review of the Literature . Health & Safety Laboratory (HSL), 2002, hse.gov.uk (PDF; 257 kB)
• Valentin Rauer: From guilt culture to safety culture. A conceptual historical analysis 1986-2010 . In: S + F - Sicherheit und Frieden 2/2011, pp. 67–72 ( PDF; 225 kB )
• Torsten Büttner / Babette Fahlbruch / Bernhard Wilpert: Safety culture . Concepts and analysis methods . 2nd edition Heidelberg 2007
• Hans-Joachim Reeb : Safety culture as a communicative and educational challenge. Dealing with politics, media and society . Hartmann, Miles-Verlag, Berlin 2011, ISBN 978-3-937885-43-8 .
• German Social Accident Insurance (DGUV), culture check of the "kommmitmensch" campaign: https://www.kommmitmensch.de/toolbox/kulturcheck/

aviation

• Safety is Everybody's Business , FSF 58th annual International Air Safety Seminar, Moscow, 2005 ( Online ; PDF; 11.6 MB)

Nuclear technology

• IAEA Safety Reports Series No. 1; Examples of Safety Culture Practices . Vienna 1997 ( books.google.de )
• IAEA Safety Reports Series No. 11; Developing Safety Culture in Nuclear Activities . Vienna 1998, iaea.org (PDF; 233 kB)
• IAEA INSAG-13; Management of Operational Safety in Nuclear Power Plants . Vienna 1999, iaea.org (PDF; 146 kB)
• IAEA INSAG-15; Key Practical Issues in Strengthening Safety Culture . Vienna 2002, iaea.org (PDF; 165 kB)
• IAEA TECDOC-1329; Safety culture in nuclear installations . Vienna 2002, iaea.org (PDF; 687 kB)
• IAEA Safety Report Series No. 42: Safety Culture in the Maintenance of Nuclear Power Plants . Vienna 2005, iaea.org (PDF; 523 kB)
• Regulatory Response Strategies for Safety Culture Problems . OECD / NEA, 2000, oecd-nea.org (PDF; 240 kB)
• Safety culture in a nuclear installation, recording, evaluation, promotion . Federal Commission for the Safety of Nuclear Installations (KSA), KSA Report No. 04-01, 2004, page no longer available , search in web archives: bfe.admin.ch

Individual evidence

1. ^ S. Cox, T. Cox: The structure of employee attitudes to safety - a European example Work and Stress , 1991, see Safety culture in the English language Wikipedia
2. ↑ Valentin Rauer: From the culture of guilt to the culture of safety. A conceptual historical analysis 1986-2010. 2011 (PDF; 225 kB)
3. ^ OECD / NEA The Role of the Nuclear Regulator in Promoting and Evaluating Safety Culture . (PDF; 79 kB) 1999
4. ↑ IAEA Safety Standards and Guides , INSAG-3: Basic Safety Principles for NPP . 1988 (PDF; 318 kB)
5. ↑ IAEA Safety Series No. 75-INSAG-4: Safety Culture . 1991 (PDF; 2.3 MB)
6. ↑ In- depth analysis of the accident in Fukushima on March 11, 2011 with special consideration of human and organizational factors . ensi.ch (PDF; 1.1 MB) Federal Nuclear Safety Inspectorate (ENSI)
7. ↑ Safety Management Manual (SMM) ( Memento of March 24, 2012 in the Internet Archive ) (PDF), ICAO Doc 9859, 2009, ISBN 978-92-9231-295-4
8. ^ Edgar Schein in the English language Wikipedia
9. ^ Edgar H. Schein: Organizational Learning as Cognitive Re-definition: Coercive Persuasion Revisited. ( Memento of the original from February 5, 2012 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. In: solonline.org 
10. ↑ A. Frischknecht, J. Nöggerath, Deutschmann: Supervision of the operational safety of nuclear power plants . Lecture at SVA advanced course "Review of the operational safety of NPPs", Winterthur, 10.2000
11. ^ Wiegmann, Zhang, Thaden, Sharma, Mitchell; A Synthesis of Safety Culture and Safety Climate Research . ( Memento of the original from August 13, 2011 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. Aviation Research Lab Institute of Aviation, USA, June 2002 
12. ↑ SJ Cox, AJT Cheyne; Assessing safety culture in offshore environments .  ( Page no longer available , search in web archives )  Info: The link was automatically marked as defective. Please check the link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. Loughborough University UK, Safety Science 34, 2000 (PDF)  
13. ↑ JT Luxhoj, A. Choopavang, DN Arendt: Risk Assessment of Organizational Factors in Aviation Systems. In: Air Traffic Control Quarterly. Vol. 9 (3) 135 174, 2001
14. ↑ Seeking and finding organizational accident causes: Comments on the Swiss cheese model. University of New South Wales, Aviation
15. ↑ Petra Badke-Schaub, Gesine Hofinger, Kristina Lauche (ed.): Human Factors. Psychology of safe action in high-risk industries . Springer, Heidelberg, pp. 29-33.
16. ^ ^{A b} Gerhard Banse, Robert Hauser: Technology and Culture. The example of safety and safety culture (s) . In: Olga Rösch (Ed.): Technology and Culture (Wildauer Schriftenreihe Interkulturelle Kommunikation, Vol. 6). 2008, pp. 61–83, zak.kit.edu (PDF; 184 kB).
17. ↑ see Cultural Theory of Risk in the English language Wikipedia.
18. ^ Mary Douglas, Aaron Wildavsky: Risk and Culture . University of California Press, Berkeley CA et al. a. 1982.
19. ^ Mary Douglas: A History of Grid and Group Cultural Theory. ( PDF; 198 kB ).
20. ↑ Lübbe, H .: Security - Risk Perception in the Civilization Process. In: Bayerische Rück (ed.): Risk is a construct. Perceptions related to risk perception. Munich, 1993, pp. 23-41