Safety Culture Improvement Process

The strength of a company's safety performance lies within the strength of its safety culture. There is no silver bullet to improve safety culture and enable world class safety performance. Understanding strengths and weaknesses helps to target the necessary improvements to achieve safety goals.

Through DuPont experience, it has found that there are three dimensions of safety excellence that must be satisfied to create a safety culture that leads to excellent performance. The first is committed leadership. Leaders must show employees they are staunchly committed to safety. Proper structure is the second required dimension of safety culture and is vital for effective safety management. The third requirement involves processes and actions, and includes activities such as communication among all levels of the organization, training and development and employee participation in audits and observations.

Each dimension is critical to the lifeblood of a safety culture. Only when companies choose to assess their organization against these three required dimensions, they can identify improvements that will help strengthen their safety culture. DuPont has developed the Safety Perception Survey as a benchmarked process for the evaluation and improvement of corporate safety culture. It involves every level of the organization and provides leaders with an objective, data-driven process for understanding safety culture and benchmarking it. Responses are compared within the organization and to external benchmark companies.

Benchmarking safety culture can positively influence an organization's. The DuPont benchmarking data spans the globe, with more than 200,000 responses covering 51 industries, 41 countries and more than 1,100 plant sites. Measuring the company's safety culture and comparing it against competitive benchmarking data helps create a culture that values continuous improvement to achieve excellence. It also provides a tangible system to measure improvement and can help identify perceptions and beliefs that undermine safety progress.

A powerful reference point developed by DuPont is the company's Relative Cultural Strength, or RCS. RCS equates an organization's safety culture in terms of its survey responses as compared to best and worst response rates of the Survey benchmark companies. Together with the historical safety performance, the RCS indicates in each stage of the Bradley curve, the company is. Relative culture strength is actually a powerful predictor of a company's safety performance. Through our experience administering the survey, we have identified RCS target scores that will correlate with world-class safety performance.

Benchmarking Safety Management has demonstrated to be an effective process for measuring and assessing an organization's culture and catalyzing safety culture improvement within organizations.