Your Own Expert in Safety Culture Assessment

Focus on safety culture at many industrial enterprises is intensifying every day, and JSC Apatit is no exception. The large-scale "Safety Culture Transformation" project began with a safety culture assessment conducted by an external contractor. At that time, extensive, unfamiliar, yet interesting work was carried out. Now, the assessment has been received, the project roadmap developed, and activities and deadlines defined. Under the slogan "Know the risks – prevent accidents!", we rushed to develop the safety culture using any non-coercive methods.

And here a logical question arises: "Are we moving in the right direction?". Just as a traveler realizes they need a compass, we realized that we need to stop periodically and check our course. Today, we have dozens of trained experts in safety culture self-assessment among our employees. But all this makes sense only under one simple but crucial condition: the baseline assessment, subsequent interim self-assessments, and the final review must follow the same methodology. If you use a safety culture self-assessment methodology different from the one used for the baseline assessment, the results might be unpleasantly (or perhaps pleasantly) surprising. In any case, it turns into something resembling a game of Russian roulette.

External and internal assessments have their own specific frequency, where the latter can be conducted much more often than the former, and the following aspects are important for it:

• a safety culture model must be clearly defined and adopted;
• a transparent assessment methodology must be developed;
• a trained human resource must be available.

The last point is the most important if we consider involving our own personnel as safety culture assessment experts, who need to prepare for, conduct, and report on the assessment. The report is then presented to management. The other two are no less important. A safety culture assessment expert must master the safety culture model and its assessment tools. Like a laboratory technician performing complex analyses, an expert must clearly identify from their observations which indicator it is, which element of the safety culture model it belongs to, and what level it corresponds to. Then the assessment process becomes not just periodic, but dynamic and even continuous.

Do you have trained experts in safety culture assessment on your staff?

• Yes, we do
• No, but we plan to
• No, and we don't plan to

Let us know in the comments :)