Oiling the wheels: integrating safety culture and SMS
A compelling argument for safety management systems (SMS) is their ability to nourish a safety culture and make safety a priority in all areas of an organisation. But like any cultivation, this takes time and effort
Graham Edkins contends that an SMS cannot be truly effective if the organisation does not work on its safety culture.
Edkins, former general manager safety systems at Qantas, now works on the highly regarded Integrated Safety Management Systems course hosted by the Singapore Aviation Academy.
He has a mechanical analogy: ‘The SMS is like the engine components in a high-performance sports car; those individual components will not function efficiently without the engine oil. Safety culture is the enabler for the SMS,’ Edkins says.
Like an engine, an SMS will not function if its parts are not connected. ‘For many years aviation has had in place systems for managing safety, and these have served us well,’ he says. ‘However, some aviation service providers have yet to achieve fully integrated safety management systems.’
Edkins says integration requires conducting a link analysis where we ask how each SMS element will communicate with each other. For example, the SMS element ‘management of change’ can be linked to ‘risk assessment and mitigation’ through understanding that any change to the environment will impact the effectiveness of risk controls.
Organisations can also link core business processes such as finance, legal and marketing to each SMS element. For example, safety training and education can be linked to marketing by ensuring there are specific requirements for any information provided to members of the public or customers to have consistent safety messaging.
‘Striving for an integrated SMS provides a practical demonstration that you have a positive safety culture,’ Edkins says.
Stairway to safety: Levels of safety culture
The pay-off for integrating SMS into your operation is climbing the ladder of safety culture.
Professor Patrick Hudson, one of the world’s leading authorities on the human factor in the management of safety identifies 5 levels of safety culture:
- pathological
- reactive
- calculative
- proactive
- generative.
In the pathological stage, management believes accidents are caused by stupidity, inattention and even wilfulness on the part of employees. Fine sounding messages may flow from on high, but the majority still reflect the organisation’s primary aims, often with ‘and be safe’ tacked on at the end.
The reactive stage is where safety becomes a priority after an accident. It can be a temporary stage for otherwise pathological organisations, or it can develop into the calculative stage, where an organisation puts safety processes and systems into operation. ‘Calculative cultures both have a process and use it,’ Hudson says.
However, calculative organisations run the risk of going through the motions of safety management, Hudson says.
The transition to becoming a proactive organisation involves making the processes and systems that are now in operation truly effective. Proactive organisations use their processes and systems to anticipate safety problems before they arise. This is a broadly similar idea to the military developed concept of a high-reliability organisation.
In the generative culture, all these elements come to fruition. In the proactive culture, the top of the organisation is still driving safety but has created the potential to let those who are the subject matter experts take responsibility and accept it as well.
Hudson describes generative organisations as ‘the lunatics that are running the asylum’ but means this as praise. It is a state where safety awareness is spread throughout the organisation.
Success is, ironically, a problem for organisations attempting to climb the safety culture ladder.
‘A common problem in organisations that are struggling on the borderline between the calculative and the proactive/generative levels is success,’ Hudson says.
‘Once significant improvements in outcome performance have been achieved, management “take their eyes off the ball” and downgrade efforts, on the grounds that the problems have been solved. But this is behaviour typical of the reactive stance and represents a reversion.’
Further information
Useful resources including a kit with videos to help you develop your Safety Management System are available on the CASA website.
