Safety Climate Tool
The Safety Climate Tool (SCT) is an on-line survey software tool that helps companies measure their safety culture and provides evidence-based improvement suggestions at the click of a button.
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What is safety culture and why is it important?
What is safety culture and why is it important?
One way of describing safety culture is: 'The way things are done around here.' It's a combination of all the attitudes, beliefs, values, taboos, peer pressure and perceptions that your organisation holds, that influence how something is actually done where you work, rather than how it should be done.
Health and safety professionals are increasingly looking at human factors, specifically 'safety culture' because of its ability to influence health and safety performance.
How can I measure my safety culture?
Safety culture is typically measured through questionnaires that explore an individual's attitudes and perceptions regarding safety.
The Health and Safety Laboratory (HSL), part of the Health and Safety Executive, has developed the 'Safety Climate Tool' that does exactly that. 'Safety climate' describes a snapshot of the safety culture at a particular point in time.
HSL's Safety Climate Tool (SCT) is a reliable and robust psychometric instrument for measuring safety climate. It's an online questionnaire that consists of 40 statements that map onto eight key factors that measure employee's attitudes on health and safety issues. The tool can be tailored to the user's organisation with bespoke questions and branding.
Once the survey is complete, the tool produces a series of automated charts that allow detailed analysis of the results. The software also generates a written summary report highlighting the key findings from the survey, and providing hints and tips to improve the organisation's safety culture.
The report also compares your organisation's SCT scores against other organisations using the tool, and HSL can access the large database of SCT scores to provide more specific data for companies wishing to benchmark their performance against others.
Does an improved Safety Culture really reduce accidents?
The Safety Climate Tool has been used for years by many organisations. For example a tailored version of the Safety Climate Tool was used during the preparations for London 2012, particularly among the co-ordinated contractors involved in the 'Big Build' of the Olympic Park. The workforce on the East London site peaked at 12,000 and a total of 30,000 people worked on the project.
Lawrence Waterman was the head of health and safety at the Olympic Delivery Authority and he describes his experience with the safety climate surveys:
'The climate surveys were invaluable to us. Too much time is spent discussing both culture and leading indicators in vague and imprecise ways - prejudice not evidence. The data we obtained from each project team and across the programme's workforce meant that we could take specific initiatives to develop the safety culture, and we knew that attitudes and perceptions on-site were a wonderful pain-free surrogate for reacting after accidents had occurred. The data and its analysis told us where we were going, and identified opportunities for improvement.'
A healthy safety culture is not, in itself, a legal requirement, but safety climate assessment is recognised as important as it has a direct impact on the safety of employees, contractors and the public.
Putting in place a programme for measuring and improving such culture will reduce incidents and help to show that your organisation takes health and safety seriously.
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