Building resilient safety cultures takes more than a campaign!

Resilient safety cultures are detected within organisations that are coping well with changes or the unexpected and can prevent unpleasant surprises. But they also understand that resilience requires both an organisational and employee approach. Notwithstanding the fact that many organisations have clever people an organisation can, due to various reasons, still be dysfunctional.

A company’s safety performance is not something you can park on someone’s desk. Despite the fact that shipping companies have safety departments it doesn’t change the fact that all employees should be accountable towards safety. The goal of having safe operations is better achieved when job description boundaries are exceeded and employees look up from their workplace and realise how their decisions and work can impact other areas of the business. Every employee and department has a role to play and is therefore also accountable. This principle should at all times serve as an overriding principle and is also a prerequisite for the living of ‘Principle 2’.

It is easy to understand why crew on board vessels have to carry out risk management but among many shipping companies is it is still difficult to understand how office staff can contribute. The short answer to this question is that all employees – regardless of position and rank – make decisions that can have an impact on safety.

All departments have work processes and play an active part of the organisation’s value chain. To varying degrees they all influence the ‘end product’ – the final safety performance – but not all departments fully understand or are aware of how, when, where and what they influence.

When the talk falls on safety performance we often turn our attention to ‘the sharp end’ – the safety on board the vessel. For many good reasons we focus on the seafarers and their ability to work safely. But in many cases the resilience thinking begins long before the involvement of the seafarers. The principle is called ‘As early as possible’ and can best be described through specific examples integrating Risk Management into the equation, hence every department should ask themselves a number of questions during their tasks that represent their safety role.

The matrix *) at the end of the article gives you a number of example questions relevant for various departments in the company.

Having accurate knowledge and understanding (of i.e. the safety conditions and performance on board) is by many philosophers described as a function of a person’s belief and justification of this belief. The downside of this function is, though, that many people have strong beliefs but with a poor justification of facts. They claim to have a clear understanding/knowledge of what is true but when you start digging their belief (and therefore also their knowledge and understanding) turns out to be questionable. The fact that a person is not experiencing incidents or accidents doesn’t automatically mean that work is being performed in a safe manner; ‘I have never been hurt I therefore conclude that the way I go about my work is safe’.

However, the lack of incidents and accidents is known to trigger the reinforcement of the actual performance/behaviour (safe or unsafe) shown during this period of work. Potential poor safety performance doesn’t automatically result in incidents or accidents but will – if not understood – unfortunately result in a repetition or reinforcement of this behaviour. This could potentially lead to an increased likelihood of an incident or accident to happen.

A continuous questioning, evaluation and reflection of own and others’ safety performance is therefore a prerequisite to ensure a resilient safety culture. The keyword is performance debriefs and evaluations stimulating a process that will make people continuously discuss their safety performance and making corrections/improvements if assessed necessary. Performance debriefs and evaluations should be embedded in the company evaluation processes, and can take place during the following activities:

Individual evaluation

Crew/team evaluation

Company evaluation

The Danish researcher Erik Hollnagel is a great believer and advocate of focusing, discussing and highlighting what goes well rather than solely waiting to discuss the things that go wrong.

His main argument is that people at work most of the time don’t get hurt so why don’t we discuss how and why we manage to be safe? In short, his point is to reinforce the good but manage the bad. Find the positives and reinforce these during work.

*) This Principle 2 matrix exemplifies the questions that each department should ask themselves in order to become part of a safety resilient organisation: