Culture or Compliance?

I am fortunate to have worked with businesses in a variety of industries, of various sizes and various stages in their safety journey.  What continues to intrigue me though is that there are businesses of all kinds that still take a ‘pure compliance’ focus toward workplace health and safety.  Such rigid focus generally places the emphasis on the ‘paper’ side of the management system (policies, procedures, work method statements and training of these policies and procedures). What is lacking in organisations that take this pure compliance focus is the recognition and or understanding that for these policies and procedures to be truly effective the organisation must be making an equal investment in fostering a proactive safety culture.

Many businesses dismiss safety culture as too hard, preferring instead to ‘keep the regulators off our back,’ which in many cases consists of setting injury reduction targets, generating an overwhelming mountain of paperwork and little else. Such efforts are generally unsuccessful in achieving any actual results in improving workplace health and safety as the ‘magic’ ingredient of culture is missing.

Without a genuine safety culture, targets and statistics just make people creative and sneaky, and the all-important paperwork will have been completed in an arbitrary fashion adding very little value.  It is impossible to achieve any lasting success in creating a safer workplace without the starting point of genuine senior management commitment to safety that is integrated into the business.  Fostering a safety culture is in fact the key component of any successful safety management system, including one based on the Australian/New Zealand Standard 4801.  Importantly, a safety management system without an active safety culture focus, will not be considered compliant by any thorough auditor or regulator and will not mitigate the legal and financial risks posed by workplace accidents.

So why is there reluctance in so many businesses to focus on the development of a strong safety culture? Possibly this is a result of fear of ‘soft skills’ as well as a segregated approach taken toward safety.  Often lumped together with other issues requiring compliance (environment, quality) or in separate business units from other support services such as HR, workplace health and safety can take on a systems approach which ignores the softer skills required for its success such as communication, consultation, coaching, engagement and effective human resource planning.

For businesses to succeed in workplace health and safety compliance, implementation of a workplace health and safety management system and in reducing/eliminating workplace injuries the priority must be to invest in strategies aimed at developing a safety first culture.  As with all organisational change this is generally not achieved over a short timeframe, however the eventual result of such investment will be a truly safer workplace and overall a higher level of legislative compliance as a result.

 

Christina Willcox MHSc; PostGradDip OHS; BBus(HRM)

Workplace Health & Safety Specialist