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Old 6th Dec 2021, 03:47
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Mr Approach
 
Join Date: Jan 2016
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Safety Culture is an aspiration, recommended by everyone from ICAO/IATA and down. In my limited experience, the extent to which it is adopted is dependent on how well an industry is regulated and what additional pressures are placed on management to introduce such a culture.
Every organisation wants to have a culture - the shared values, attitudes, and practices that characterize an organization. There are said to 4 main types Clan, Adhocracy, Hierarchy, and Market. Note that safety is not included, so where does it fit? IMO it can appear under all of them except Adhocracy. One website gives a motto for such an organisation as “Risk it to get the biscuit.”!

Sidney Dekker (The Field Guide to Understanding Human Error - Ashgate Publishing - 2006) encapsulates safety culture as "a culture that allows the boss to hear bad news". He says that it requires Management Commitment, Management Involvement, Employee Empowerment, Incentive Structures, and Reporting Sytems
Your concentration on operational standards is too narrow although, assuming you are a pilot, I can understand why that would be your focus. I envisage an organisation where anyone can raise a safety issue if they think that they have identified one. They would then be congratulated, shown, or included in the investigation, rewarded depending on the outcome, and recognised within the organisation for being part of the "company culture". The larger an organisation gets, IMO the harder such a culture is to maintain. It only takes one poor manager to undo all the good that has been done by others.

A safety culture can be real but regrettably, I too have never worked in an environment where such a culture is not continually beefed up or watered down. To finish again with a Sidney Dekker quote:
  • Complex systems are not basically safe
  • Complex systems are a trade-off between multiple irreconcilable goals (eg Safety v Efficiency)
  • People have to create safety through practice at all levels of an organisation
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