Your workplace’s health and safety culture, proactive management of health and safety, and health and safety performance are interlinked. Building a strong culture of physical and psychological health and safety will have a positive impact on your workers, your bottom line, and public perception.

In addition to meeting the requirements of a basic health and safety program, enhancing health and safety culture includes focusing on the following:

• Active health and safety management
• Planning for safety
• Leadership and commitment
• Supervising for health and safety
• Engaging workers
• Due diligence

Workplace culture

Culture is “the way we do things around here.” It includes shared practices, attitudes, and perceptions that influence behaviour. Workplace culture is influenced by many things, including:

• Leadership, management, and supervision styles and priorities
• Mentoring and role models
• Workplace conditions
• Design and production logistics

In an organization with a positive health and safety mindset, the managers, supervisors, and workers share common values that make workers’ physical and psychological health and safety a priority. It leads to anticipating unsafe acts and conditions before harm is done. They engage in injury and disease prevention. Most of all, there is shared ownership of health and safety issues.

Improving health and safety culture

Taking action on health and safety items has a positive impact on your health and safety culture. For instance, putting in new risk controls (such as machine safeguarding, anti-slip floor treatments, or violence prevention measures) demonstrates commitment to protecting workers and preventing injury and illness. This in turn builds a workplace culture where health and safety are valued.

Improving your organization's health and safety culture and performance involves clearly demonstrating that the organization places a high priority on:

• Preventing physical and psychological injuries
• Minimizing risks
• Solving occupational health and safety issues
• Investing in control measures
• Engaging your entire workforce in health and safety
• Being transparent and open about health and safety
• Leading and striving for continual improvement in health and safety performance

Assessing your health and safety culture

Conducting a thorough assessment of your organization’s health and safety culture and analyzing the information gathered helps identify further steps your organization could take to improve.

There are two basic ways to assess health and safety culture:

• Subjective assessments, such as surveying the workers about their perceptions and experiences
• Objective assessments of leading processes and practices that help grow a good health and safety culture — using approaches such as health and safety management and best practice audits, compliance audits, due diligence assessments, and site risk assessments

Combining the objective and subjective assessments can provide a road map for designing focused initiatives for health and safety culture and performance improvement.