Aviation Safety Culture

Proactive cultures

A proactive safety culture fosters an environment where staff feel responsible for safety. This can be seen when they actively seek improvements, vigilantly remain aware of hazards and utilise systems and tools for continuous monitoring, analysis, and investigation.

Foundations of a proactive safety culture include shared commitment by staff and management across all levels, to personal safety responsibilities, confidence in the safety system and a documented set of policies and rules which are followed. Responsibility for creating a proactive safety culture rests with senior management and relies on having a high degree of trust and respect between them and the workforce.

Proactive subcultures

A proactive safety culture comprises a blend of performance sub-cultures:

• Just Culture
• Reporting Culture
• Flexible Culture
• Questioning Culture
• Learning Culture

Safety culture is a natural bi-product of your organisation’s overall corporate culture and is directly shaped and influenced by the behaviours, attitudes and beliefs of the senior management team. Safety culture encompasses an organisation’s commonly held perceptions and beliefs regarding safety and ‘the way we do things around here’ and therefore has the potential to significantly influence people’s behaviour. Focussing on making positive changes to your safety climate, will in time affect your safety culture.

Challenges you may be facing 

• Your safety leadership team don’t have a shared view of the current safety culture
• You don’t have a credible safety culture continuous improvement plan
• You see events that concern you and need to understand why they happened
• You have quality failure outputs and need to understand their causes
• You have misgivings about current work processes and are concerned that not everyone follows the correct procedures
• Your people are cautious about reporting errors, they don’t feel a Just Culture prevails
• Your error management system identifies reasonable levels of error reporting, but you don’t see any evidence of corrective actions being implemented
• Your organisation operates in silos, with different management styles, attitudes and behaviours in each area – preventing a cohesive approach to safety management

How we can help 

• Safety Culture Diagnostic – by identifying and measuring behaviours and attitudes, we can offer you valuable insight into the maturity of your safety culture and its impact on your day-to-day operation and organisational safety performance. Our diagnostic surveys provide an in-depth, objective review of your current safety culture and it will help you to gain a valuable perspective of how and to what extent your people, processes, procedures, structure and resources support a safety culture
• Safety Strategy Development – our experienced safety strategy consultants work alongside you to help develop a robust safety vision, strategies and objectives for your organisation, formulating road-maps of action that will help you achieve desired business and organisational safety performance objectives
• Safety Leadership support – working on a one-to-one basis, we can help your safety leadership set and deliver safety goals in the most efficient way
• Safety Culture and behaviours coaching – Assisting managers to establish and communicate desired safety behaviours is a first step on the road to improving the development of a safety culture in an organisation
• Just Culture Development – an open and honest reporting system is essential to understanding and managing risk in an organisation. It relies on trust in a Just Culture; trust that the leadership team is committed to the principles of a Just Culture and trust that the processes will be consistently applied. Through a programme of guidance and facilitation, we can help you to understand, build and sustain a Just Culture and help unlock the sharing of safety event information
• Investigation and review skills – we can you build the competence to investigate events and operate effective review groups that will support your Just culture
• Human Factors Training – Although a mandatory requirement for all EASA Part 145 organisations, Human Factors and Error Management training is essential for engaging your people in the effective management of error. Everyone needs to understand their personal responsibilities for safety in order to prevent rule-breaking and violations from occurring and a successful HF training programme – including recurrent/refresher training is a must for all proactive, safety-conscious organisations.

What dos a proactive safety culture look like?

Having a proactive safety culture is one of the core enablers of organisational safety performance and is fundamental to achieving your stated safety vision and goals. A proactive safety culture is evident when there are highly motivated, competent people who are aligned with your strategic and daily operational safety objectives and priorities.

At a strategic level, the safety culture of your organisation has a huge influence on your ability to protect your reputation, business profitability and assets; at an operational level, your safety culture plays a significant role in helping to reduce human error, inefficiency, incidents, injuries and rework.

A strong, proactive safety culture provides: 

• High degrees of trust and respect between your workforce and senior management
• Enthusiasm and commitment to participate in reporting with strong feedback
• A willingness to positively challenge and change ‘the way business is done around here’
• An ability to continually adapt and change, without dilution to the safety climate
• An environment in which learning actively drives improvements and questioning is actively and openly encouraged