2021 Safety Culture Virtual
Master Class: Train Your Way
to a Great Safety Culture

An organization’s safety culture reflects the attitudes, beliefs, perceptions, values, and behaviors that employees share and perform regarding safety. Building an ideal safety culture is a key to establishing and maintaining world class safety performance. Understanding your current safety culture is the first step to building and maintaining it.

In this session, you’ll learn:

• How to define an ideal safety culture
• Dimensions of an ideal safety culture

This section introduces participants to basic behavioral science principles to understand when and why risk-taking takes place so that we can more effectively encourage safe behavior and discourage at-risk behavior.

In particular, system influences on unsafe behavior, why some consequences are more effective than others, and the importance of building ownership and getting employees at all levels of the organization involved in the safety improvement process is also emphasized.

In this session, you’ll learn:

• Principles of behavior-based psychology to influence behavior change
• How to understand risky behaviors and the influence of the culture, management systems, and equipment/facilities
• Principles of person-based psychology to influence behavior change
• Building ownership and involvement
• Leadership’s role in building the safety culture

Complex systems require a great deal of human contribution to maintain productivity, quality, and safety. Human error is the inevitable by-product of our necessary involvement in complex systems. To eliminate human error would require us to eliminate the best source of creativity, flexibility, and problem solving ability.

In this section, understanding and distinguishing human error from calculated risk will be discussed with a special focus on system and environmental factors that may encourage at-risk behavior. Issues effecting risk and hazard perception, hazard recognition traps, error types, and designing jobs to reduce error will also be discussed.

Understanding that error and at risk behavior will inevitably occur requires not only predicting where errors are most likely, but also ensuring hazard mitigation systems are in place, with the presence of multiple layers of protection, such as an employee-based observation and feedback process to help identify and correct error, at-risk behaviors, and hazardous conditions before injuries occur.

In this session, you’ll learn about:

• Differentiation between human error and calculated risk
• Hazard recognition traps
• Designing jobs to reduce human error
• Peer-to-peer observation and feedback

You can’t manage what you can’t measure. Reaching a world-class safety culture requires reliable tools to gauge your current strengths and weaknesses, direct your improvement efforts, and measure results. Common safety culture assessment tools, including surveys, focus group interviews, safety systems assessments, and leadership behavior assessments will be reviewed and discussed.

You’ll also learn:

• How to utilize safety culture surveys, interviews, systems assessments, and behavior assessments
• How to ensure systems include error identification/correction and multiple layers of protection
• How to use assessments for customizing your training and ensuring training is transferred to on-the-job performance

Have lingering questions about points raised during this intensive leadership-driven workshop or want to revisit a fundamental concept or two from earlier in the day? Take advantage of this opportunity to get clarification from Steve Roberts before you wrap up for the day.