Safety Culture

Safety culture has been widely definded as: “The product of individual and group values, attitudes, perceptions, competencies, and patterns of behaviour that determine the commitment to, and the style and proficiency of, an organisation’s health and safety management” (UK Health and Safety Commission).

Another commonly accepted definition states: “The safety culture of an organisation is the product of individual and group values, attitudes, perceptions, competencies and patterns of behavior that determine the commitment to, and the style and proficiency of, an organization’s health and safety management.” (Advisory Committee on the Safety of Nuclear Installations).

When incidents occur in the workplace, it is important to understand what factors (human, technical, organisational) may have contributed to the outcome in order to avoid similar incidents in the future. Through developing an understanding of why and how incidents occur, appropriate methods for incident prevention can be developed.

An ideal safety culture can be considered “the ‘engine’ that drives the system towards the goal of sustaining the maximum resistance towards its operational hazards” What drives the system is a constant level of respect for anything that may bypass organisational safety systems. In other words, it is important to remember what can go wrong. It is very dangerous to think that an organisation is safe because no information is saying otherwise.



Matrix Safety Systems promotes good safety performance, as well as appreciation that the best way to stay cautious is to gather the ‘right kind’ of information: which means creating an informed culture. An informed culture requires safety management to be aware of the numerous factors that have an impact on the safety systems (i.e. human, technical, organisational, and environmental).

An informed culture is a safety culture. And a safe workplace tends to benefit from:
· Higher retention of quality staff;
· Increased productivity; and
· Greater prosperity.