Safety Culture for Organization

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While good aircraft maintenance is important to air safety, little thought is given to the aircraft maintenance safety. Many have different opinions on the company’s safety policies. And there are struggles between reaching performance goals and safety goals. Even if the organization has a goal for safety, is there anything that will support the aim for safety so that it will develop and become sustainable? A culture of safety is important for any industrial environment and it involves everyone in the organization.

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On one side, there are those who manage employees’ performance and implement safety policy and guidelines; on the other side, there are those who work hands-on and give their performance while following the organization’s safety policy and guidelines.

To “follow” safety rules is a passive and reactive action toward safety; the idea of safety that is being promoted nowadays is to be proactive. To have a safety culture, a self-motivated safety attitude is essential in any industrial organization.

While there is safety awareness in aircraft maintenance, not all will follow safety policies. There are cases where maintenance personnel may bypass safety policies through shortcuts because of time constraints and heavy workloads resulting in personal injuries. In some worse cases, the breach of policies may result in aircraft damages or even disasters.

Aim & Background

The aim of this paper is to find out why with all the safety policies implementation, mishaps and accidents still exist at a certain level, to find out the conflicts in an organization to the path of safety and hope to create awareness of the blocks that form a good safety culture.

This paper attempts to assess the safety culture of one of the major aircraft maintenance organizations in Hong Kong. The organization will not be named to keep the confidentiality of the organization. The data were collected through surveys, interviews, observations, the organization’s statistic, and past occurrence reports.

The organization in this research has implemented Safety Management System according to the Factories and Industrial Undertakings (Safety Management) Regulations (F&IU(SM)R) (CAP 59AF) since 2003 by the Safety Committee, a sub-department under Human Resource Department at the time. Apart from the SMS governed by F&IU(SM)R which has the most concentrate on employee safety, the organization established another SMS in accordance with CAD 712 (SMS for Air Operators and Maintenance Organizations) published by Civil Aviation Department (CAD). This SMS covers a much wider scope as well as aviation safety and associated passenger and employee safety. In view of safety as the organization’s core business, a dedicated Safety and Quality Control Department (SQC) has been established in 2016 as a focal point to handle safety matters from a corporate perspective. In 2017, JUST Culture promotion campaign was launched, with goals to encourage employees to report any potential safety hazards proactively without any hesitation, enhance the overall safety awareness, build a healthy safety culture and safer working environment.

This study is written in hope of identifying some of the causes of the gap in safety culture and making some suggestions to bring the gap a little closer. By no mean, this study will provide a sure way to “cure” the culture as it would go too deep into the psychological matters and still would not be able to come up with a straight answer for the perfect solution.

Significance/Motivation/Purpose

Maintenance mishaps may cause personal injuries or even deaths with the cost of medical bills, raise of insurance policies cost, time-off for recuperation – loss of manpower. If mishap or error happened to the aircraft, it may result in tremendous cost for the airlines and maintenance organization, for example, it would cost more than $5,000 USD for aircraft skin damage, flight delays due to maintenance error would cost $9,000 USD per hour and $66,000 per flight cancellation (Rankin 2007), in a serious situation, it could result in mass fatalities. Not to mention, they would all result in loss of reputation of the organization. An organization is in need of a good safety culture to ensure its sustainability.

Orgainzational Culture and Safety Culture

Safety culture has been a very popular topic in the 21st century in the aviation industry. The development of safety culture is greatly depended on the organizational cultures which have tremendous influences on the safety culture and is unique to each organization. A brief overview of organizational culture will be given before going into the subject of safety culture.

Culture, as defined by two American anthropologists, Kroeber and Kluckhohn (1952): “consists of patterns, explicit and implicit, of and for behavior acquired and transmitted by symbols, constituting the distinctive achievements of human groups, including their embodiments in artifacts; the essential core of culture consists of traditional (i.e. historically derived and selected) ideas and especially their attached values; culture systems may, on the one hand, be considered as products of action, and on the other as conditioning elements of further action."

A Canadian social scientist, Dr. Elliott Jaques, borrowed the term “culture” and applied it into the organizational context in 1951, in his book, The Changing Culture of a Factory (Hatch 2013, p. 161). Hofstede explained the differences between the culture that was commonly known and organizational culture is that culture is obtained through social environment since birth for recognition such as norm, behaviors judgement, and rationality; on the other hand, organization culture included various policies and guidelines based deeply in organizational practices that learned on the job (ITAP 2018). According to Hofstede, Hofstede and Minkov (2010), organization culture is very different from national culture, rather than grow up in it, members within the organization have somehow made the choice to join the organization, but only involve during the working hours and will leave it when he or she is no longer with the organization.

Hofstede, Hofstede and Minkov (2010) also compared culture to mental programming. By the term “programming”, it would suggest that culture can be learned, adjusted, and improved. Hofstede, along with other experts, agreed that it would be very difficult to change organizational culture and it would take time. Reason (1997, p. 192) had a better definition of organizational culture that fundamental beliefs of how things work and values of what were important, intermingled with people within the company, organizational structures, and policy systems that resulted in behavioral norms. In another word, the interaction between individuals and organization is organizational culture, and through mutual interaction employees’ behavior can be changed.

While researching on safety culture and organizational culture, the term “culture” and “climate” had been shown up frequently. At the beginning of organizational culture researches, many researchers had been using the terms interchangeably. Until later, some of the research began to have better definitions for each term. A culture is compared to a person’s personality, whereas climate is compared to a person’s mood or traits (Cox & Flin 1998); a culture in an organization is like how people live within, how they interact with each other, whereas a climate of the organization is like how people see the organization from outside, its atmosphere in the organization.

Safety Culture Models

The concept of safety in an organization used to be treated separately from the organizational culture. Although safety was important, it was not a priority. Safety might often be looked at as a burden (Hancox 2012), especially in the performance-oriented organizations. Organizations often followed safety regulations and policies just to entertain the local and national government agencies.

Since Cheynobyl disaster in 1986, the term “safety culture” began to surface in scientific debates (Cooper 2000, p. 113). Cullen (1990, cited in Cooper 2000) loosely described safety culture as the culture of an organization in which safety is understood and accepted as the highest priority. In the beginning stage of safety culture development, safety culture models did not integrate into general models of organizational culture (Grote & Künzler 2000). Geller (1994) proposed a Total Safety Culture (TSC) applying three dynamic and interactive factors: environment, person, and behavior (Figure 1) (Also refer to Appendices A).

Ten principles were presented for achieving TSC including:

Safety process should be driven by the culture. Safety concerns everyone and should not be relied on rules and regulations;

Behavior/person-based approach. Personal factors such as feelings and attitudes are unobservable, yet behavior factors are observable and objected evaluated. Behavioral factors can be changed and manipulated such as applying safe work practices. Safety practices may imply caring and helping behaviors for others, in turn, enhance personal moods. Thus behavior factors enhance personal factors (Carlson, charlin miller positive mood and helper behavior);

Focus on safety process not results. When put too much focus on the outcome, people tends to have a can-do attitude and ignore safety precautions during the process. When put the focus back into the process and safe practices in each step, overall safety will improve;

A view of how activators directed and consequences motivated behavior. This is an ABC model representing Activator, Behavior, and Consequence. Activators such as safety reminders serve as reinforcement for safe behaviors and driven by positive feedback;

Putting focus on success not on avoiding failure. This is to put focus on the goals achievement, not injury avoid. Documenting on negative terms will become a negative reinforce and reactive approach to safety;

Observation and feedback on work behaviors. When people look out for each other’s behaviors and give appropriate feedback or reminders on the safety performances, safety conduct will improve, because they know that their behaviors are being observed and evaluated;

Effective feedback by behavior/person-based coaching; observation and coaching as key processes. The key aspects for COACH are Communication, Observation, Analysis, Change, and Help. Effective coaching on staff will correct unsafe practices and reinforce safe behaviors;

A view how self-esteem, belonging, and empowerment increase performance and safe behaviors. By making others feel being as part of the team and as a valuable player in the safety culture;

Shift safety to a value rather than a priority. Priority can change over time, but value is deep within the mind as a belief a part of the culture.

Cooper (2000) presented a safety culture model, which was adapted from (Bandura 1977; cited in Cooper 2000) model of determinism, recognizing the reciprocal relationship between three factors: psychology, situation, and behavior. His idea was parallel with Geller’s model; the only difference was that Cooper used the term situation instead of environment.

Importance of Safety Culture

Why safety culture is important in an organization? A good safety culture in an organization would create an atmosphere where everyone would remind each other on safety awareness, identify safety issues, and encourage safety attitude and practices. Heinrich (cited in Johnson 2011) presented a theory that in every major accident, there would be 29 accidents resulted in minor injuries, and 300 incidents happened, and of those 300 incidents, most of them would likely be ignored. Some interpreted Heinrich’s pyramid theory as the 300 incidents would cause 29 accidental injuries and eventually resulted in a major accident. But Bob LoMastro (cited in Johnson 2011) later argued that they missed the big picture that before one big accident occurred, the majority of the minor accidents could be forecasted; if the hazards which caused those minor accidents were corrected, the major accident could likely be eliminated. James Reason (1998) presented his Swiss Cheese Model Theory in which a series of unsafe acts if not corrected and safety barriers were broken, would result in a major accident. Bear this in mind; a good safety culture can serve as a proactive measure to prevent major accidents from happening.

Usually when a serious accident occurred, safety performance would improve in organizations. However, serious accident seldom happen, as time goes by, an organization may begin to forget the threats and risks they would face and exceed the safety practice limits (Rasmussen 1997). For this reason, it is imperative to have systems in place to collect safety-related information, measure safety performance, and get everyone involved in learning safe practices at work (Ostrom, Wilhelmsen & Kaplan 1993).