Resilience Safety Culture

Abstract

Safety culture may be seen as the oil necessary for an efficient safety management system. During the work in HILAS SMS task force some weaknesses in the use of safety culture in practice were identified. A work stream was initiated to identify further weaknesses and suggest remedies for them. The objective of this paper is to discuss some of the weaknesses and propose mitigations. A major suggestion is to actively look for `holes¿ in the safety culture and mitigate them. The `holes¿ could be low-score groups, low-score aspects of safety culture, and critical time-windows. Also the efforts by top management may need to be improved. Also means for feed forward control should be used and further developed as proposed by the new school of resilience engineering. Also when problems with long questionnaires are too big shorter questionnaires could be used complemented by interviews and studies of behaviour and artefacts.