Challenging the safety culture

Industrial disasters are rare in Australia but what Emeritus Professor of Sociology, at the Australian National University, Andrew Hopkins has gleaned studying catastrophic industrial accidents and high-risk environments can be applied in a normal industrial safety context.

“You need to ascertain the worst thing that can happen and then focus on that,” he said during an interview for National Safety magazine. “What I’ve learned is that there are always warning signs, so you need to work out what they are and how to pick them up.

“While these things must be recognised in order to better manage incident prevention, change needs to be driven from a senior level and you may have to overcome existing inertia.”

Developing a ‘safety culture’ is often talked about, but Prof Hopkins believes this phrase is so “widely misused and misunderstood as to be an impediment”. He will be discussing this topic further during his keynote at the upcoming National Safety conference, which is part of SAFETYconnect being held in Brisbane from 29–30 August.

During the keynote titled ‘The use and abuse of culture’, Prof Hopkins will advance seven clarifying propositions:

1. Culture is a characteristic of a group, not an individual, and talk of culture must always specify the relevant group.
2. Organisations have it within their power to ensure that organisational culture overrides national cultures.
3. The most useful definition of the culture of a collectivity is its set of collective practices — ‘the way we do things around here’.
4. In the organisational context, it is usually better to use culture as a description of group behaviour, rather than as an explanation for individual behaviour.
5. Organisational cultures depend on the structures that organisations put in place to achieve desired outcomes. These structures reflect the priorities of top leaders. The priorities of leaders in turn may depend on factors outside the organisation, such as regulatory pressure and public opinion.
6. The distinction between emergent and managerialist views of culture is misleading.
7. The term safety culture is so confusing that we should abandon it.

To find out more about SAFETYconnect, visit www.safety-connect.com.au.

The full interview with Prof Hopkins will be featured in our next issue of National Safety magazine.

Image credit: ©stock.adobe.com/au/Mondela