AN OVERVIEW OF 5ALPHA EVIDENCE BASED HEALTH & SAFETY CULTURE MEASUREMENT
Background 5alpha is a unique, evidence-based approach to health and safety cultural measurement, owned and operated by Implexis Consulting Ltd. The system is designed to allow measurement across any size of organisation in line with the organisational structure. 5alpha uses a licensed online self-assessment, which is externally validated. The system looks at five criteria of health & safety: • • • • •
Health and Safety policy, leadership and board governance Organising for control and communication Securing cooperation, competence and development of employees at all levels Planning and implementing risk controls through coordinated management arrangements Monitoring, Audit and Review
These criteria are broken down into 22 elements. Each of these elements is measured against the six stages of the Roscoe Bizzell (2014) model of SHE cultural development– see figure 1. Figure 1 The Roscoe Bizzell (2014) model of SHE Cultural Development
This model is used as it includes the unique stage of System Obsessed, where organisations have become caught up in safety processes and internal requirements that add little or nothing of value to the progression or maintenance of safety. In order to be able to improve the health & safety culture, we need to first be able to measure it – we cannot improve what we do not measure! Measuring culture and in particular measuring improvement in culture can be difficult, especially across diverse organisations. Historically organisations have used culture surveys to measure their culture; whilst culture surveys may give an indication of the culture, because they are based on peoples’ perceptions at a single point of time, they often do not give a true and accurate measurement. We have spent years looking at this issue and have developed 5alpha to provide a consistent, evidence-based assessment of the
culture from site to site, year on year. So rather than just looking at how people “feel” about the culture at a single point of time, using 5alpha we are able to help our clients accurately understand the level of maturity of each individual site, which are improving, and which are not. Measurement however should only be the first step. Once we know where we are, we can then put in place a clear plan for how over the next year we are going to improve, as culture development is achieved one step at a time, we just need to be clear what our next step is. 5alpha allows an organisation to set clear goals for improvement along with an owner for each goal and a target date. These goals can then be reviewed and updated as appropriate.
The 5 simple components of 5alpha 5alpha is made up of 5 components which together, support the continual improvement of health and safety culture. We will go through each of these components to demonstrate how effective 5alpha can be in order to help organisations measure and understand both the overall culture and the range of micro-cultures that make up the overall culture. Component 1: Self-Assessment Self-assessment can be carried out at any level of the organisation from main Board level, to individual sites. The assessment is conducted against the evidence requirements for each of the 22 elements. This is a simple web-based process that involves measuring the elements against the Roscoe Bizzell model of cultural maturity. The web site takes the self-assessment team through each of the elements step by step Each element has a description, a clarifying statement and the evidence requirements to achieve that level. The self-assessors identify and attach evidence to show how they have achieved each level. When they cannot show evidence to achieve a level, the score is the highest completed level.
Component 2: Goal Setting Measuring culture and achieving a score is not the overall goal. The goal has to be to continually improve on the health and safety culture. The reason that we must continually work on the culture is simple, as soon as we become complacent and stop trying to improve culture, the culture starts to degrade. Therefore, for each of the 22 elements, once a score has been achieved, goals are developed in order to achieve the next stage in cultural development.
Each of these goals is allocated a task owner who tracks the goal and updates the system to identify when the goal has been completed. The aim here is to help each site to continually improve. It is not a ranking system to name and shame, but to simply understand where a site is in terms of its maturity, to help it understand its strengths and weaknesses and therefore to help it to improve. Component 3: Independent Audit The independent validation provides assurance to the organisation that the self-assessment is a reasonable reflection of the organisational culture. As the assessors are external, they are not part of organisational politics, they have no interest in the outcome other than to show that it reflects the organisational culture. Assessors can often be seen as inspectors whose role is to find fault. This is not the case in 5alpha; in fact we often help sites to identify evidence that they have not thought of and we therefore can increase scores based on this evidence. The percentage of sites that are required to be assessed depends very much on the size of the organisation. To ensure validation of the data, we would assess a statistically valid, random selection of the sites.
Component 4: Results and Board Report Once the self-assessment is complete, the data can be accessed by anyone with that level of clearance. The data is available at site level and the overall score for the organisation. The score comes in two parts: Level 0 – 5: This is the maturity of the culture in the vertical progression (Fully System Obsessed being 0, Avoidance being 1 and Fully Integrated being 5) Alpha to Echo: This is the amount of data that scores within System Obsessed. This is extremely important as System Obsessed is a trap that a number of organisations fall into. We therefore measure the level of System Obsessed to identify how far over to the right of the model has the organisation become or been driven. It is noted that some industries can be forced over to the right by regulatory bodies. It is for this purpose that we recognise that just because an organisation may complete the evidence for System Obsessed, we also allow them to measure against Human Focused so see if there is evidence for this as well. This combined score is displayed within a spider chart in order to visually see the score for each of the 22 elements and the overall level of System Obsessed. The board report provides details of the score at organisation and site level, along with details of any changes to scores made during the validation process. We also look for similarities between the goals set, to help to identify goals at an organisational level. This can be extremely useful. If multiple sites are looking to improve the same thing, there may be opportunities for these improvements to be made at an organisational level and therefore stopping each site “reinventing the wheel”. Component 5: Re-measure 5alpha is an iterative process, as is continuing to develop health and safety culture. Many cultural surveys will just offer a one-off snapshot of the culture, 5alpha provides a process of year on year self-assessment which builds into the health and safety planning at both a site level and at an organisational level. Each year we therefore go back, review the goals and self-assess what improvement has been made in the culture during that year. This shows improvement through a step by step process and also identifies if any site is struggling in terms of their cultural maturity.
Summary The 5alpha process is designed to be as simple as possible, while providing an accurate, evidencebased measure of the health & safety culture of an organisation and the micro-cultures within the organisation that make up the overall culture. It allows for the creation and completion of goals that have a measurable impact on the organisation’s culture and help to keep the overall culture moving forward. For more information, please go to www.5alphamodel.com or contact us at info@5alphamodel.com to arrange a demonstration.