Safety Culture Survey

Despite safety procedures and safety management systems being well established, the safety culture of a work site and worker attitudes often result in procedures not being followed to achieve the best safety outcome.

It is largely for this reason that the concept of safety culture is receiving widespread attention as a means to move organisations to higher standards of safety. Safety Management Systems will function better in organisations that have developed a safety culture.

Safety culture is a term used to describe the way in which safety is managed in the workplace, and reflects the collective attitude / mindset that employees share in relation to safety.

Attitudes drive behaviour. Therefore, measuring employee attitudes towards safety is a proactive way to identify the state of safety within a workplace, without having to wait for the system to fail.

Quantum’s Approach: Safety Culture Survey

Quantum measures the Safety Culture of an organisation on two distinct levels:

1. Attitudes and Perceptions - the extent to which employees think in ways that promote safe behaviour (e.g. reporting of incidents and near misses, attitude towards rules, regulations and risk taking behaviour, adoption of safe practices and safety lessons learned, taking responsibility for one’s own safety and that of others, dealing with production pressures etc.)

2. Safety Management – the approach to managing safety within the organisation including organisational structures, accountabilities, policies and procedures (e.g. management commitment to safety, supervisor competency, safety communication, monitoring of safety performance, hazard prevention and control, risk management strategies, safety training and induction, how people are organized and motivated as well as the condition of workplace amenities tools and equipment).

Measuring attitudes and perceptions toward safety is a proactive way to identify the state of safety within a workplace. Measuring the effectiveness of Safety Management within a workplace enables identification of specific processes or practices which may be contributing to an underperforming safety culture.

Benefits: Safety Culture Survey

• Determine if your culture is supportive of health and safety
• Identification of your current workforces’ attitudes to important aspects of safety
• Assess your supervisors / managers ability to be safety leaders
• Make sound management and training decisions and target interventions where they are needed
• Provide a useful baseline for determining progress
• Identify the strengths and weaknesses of each work site / department
• Determine how your safety culture and safety management compares with similar sized organizations within your industry sector.
• Provide Senior Managers, Line Managers, Supervisors and employees with specific information appropriate to their position and responsibilities within the health and safety management system.

Outputs: Safety Culture Survey

• Executive Summary Report
• Graphical reports presenting Attitude / Perception and Safety Management results for each worksite and demographic with sufficient responses
• Open ended feedback about safety issues from workers / supervisors
• Comparisons to industry benchmark data