I'd like to thank the committee for inviting me here to appear before you.
First of all, I'm an organizational psychologist, and I've been studying safety culture for the past 20 years, so I was very pleased to see the prominence of safety culture in this review process.
I've been working with a range of safety-critical industries such as offshore oil and gas, petrochemical, nuclear power, construction, and transportation. I'm currently the CN professor of safety culture. I also contributed to the National Energy Board's recent policy document on safety culture, which will be relevant for pipeline transportation.
I think it's useful, when we talk about safety culture—and a number of witnesses have already mentioned it—to define what we mean by that term. The definition I use is that safety culture refers to the attitudes, values, norms and beliefs which a particular group of people share with respect to risk and safety.
Safety culture has been around as a concept for over a quarter of a century now and was coined initially from the Chernobyl nuclear disaster. Safety culture can be viewed as the heart or the soul of an organization's safety management system, as it provides the energy or drive to bring the safety management system to life. Safety culture determines the extent to which an organization lives its safety management system. The safety management system describes how an organization controls hazards. For these controls to be effective, they need to be implemented in practice. Safety culture determines to a greater or lesser extent the degree to which these controls are implemented as intended. Therefore, an effective functioning of the safety management system requires a positive safety culture, which is somewhat different from thinking that a safety management system gives you a positive safety culture. It actually is a necessary prerequisite for the safety management system to work as intended.
There are many different safety culture models and frameworks and there is a high degree of overlap between safety culture models. Most models cover the majority of important dimensions such as leadership commitment. Much time and effort, mainly by people like me, has been dedicated to arguing which model is best and which one is better than the other. Broadly speaking, these debates have not been of much use. Most models are adequately acceptable and cover the main themes and concepts. Therefore we should spend less time arguing about which model is best and choose one that works for us and implement it.
There are many different frameworks. The one that's been adopted or developed by the rail industry is fine, yet it's different from others.
I think it's also important to have a sense of why safety culture is important. There's good evidence linking safety culture with important safety outcomes. Numerous studies have shown a link between worker-perceived safety culture and injury rates in that organization. There's also evidence linking safety culture threats to major disasters such as the Deepwater Horizon or the Chernobyl incident, as I mentioned before.
Recent research conducted in the nuclear industry in the U.S. links employees' perceptions of the safety culture to nuclear plant status, which is the main, primary indicator of the level of safety within a nuclear installation. There's good evidence showing that safety culture, irrespective of how you approach it or measure it, is associated with important safety outcomes.
I think it's important, though, to focus a little bit on what organizations should do when we talk about safety culture. If I were a senior leader in a safety-critical organization, I would want to have an accurate picture of our safety culture, including strengths and weaknesses. I would want to know that we had active processes to promote a positive safety culture and how these processes are working in practice. I would also want to know my role and the role of my direct reports in promoting a positive safety culture. Safety-critical organizations should adopt a systematic approach to promoting a positive safety culture. This should be a continuous improvement process that includes a clear vision of the desired safety culture, clearly articulated roles for key groups such as managers, specific activities to promote the desired culture, ongoing safety culture assessments, auditing, and program review.
One of the things that gets a lot of attention when we talk about safety culture is safety culture assessment. A range of different methods and tools can be used, and a lot of the work that's been done over the last 20 years has principally been in this field.
Assessment can be helpful in identifying areas of relative strength and weakness that can be used to guide improvement activities. Often there is too much focus on safety culture assessment and not enough focus on improvement. There is, I think, a naive belief that if we measure something, by definition we will be able to improve it or change it, and that's often not the case. Knowing that it's raining is often not desperately helpful unless you have a strategy to stop it raining, which we don't.
Assessment for the sake of assessment provides little or no value, and may do harm. It is therefore important that safety culture assessments are only conducted as part of an improvement strategy. Organizations should not conduct a safety culture assessment unless they plan to improve as a result of that assessment.
That's all I have for you. If you have questions, we're happy to answer them.
Thank you.