Safety Culture:

Measuring the Unmeasurable?

Dr Fred Sherratt, Associate Director of Research, Construction Safety Research Alliance

Achieving a ‘positive safety culture’ has long been a goal of safety management programmes – but there is still no agreed scientific definition of ‘safety culture’ and no agreed scientific way to measure it as a holistic concept.

IPLOCA warmly thanks the members of the HSE & CSR Committee who sponsored this workshop, namely Caterpillar, Denys, Max Streicher GmbH & Co KG a.A, Max Streicher S.p.A., J. Murphy and Sons, Serimax, SICIM, Spiecapag and Tekfen Construction.

News from the HSE & CSR Committee

In September the Committee welcomed its new Chair, Giovanni Muriana Giovanni, a member of the IPLOCA Board of Directors, is the Managing Director of MAX STREICHER S.p.A. He holds a Master’s Degree in Civil Engineering and has more than 20 years of international experience in the oil, gas and energy industry. In 2012, when he joined MAX STREICHER S.p.A., the German group gave him the responsibility for strengthening the company and boosting business development efforts abroad.

The Committee welcomed a new member, John Kinirons, who is Group SHES and Sustainability Director at J. Murphy and Sons. John is a Chartered Civil Engineer and Health and Safety professional who has used the knowledge and experience gained working in operations to drive significant improvement in health and safety performance. John has managed and led the health and safety function in a number of large multidisciplinary construction-based organisations. He has worked across many different environments in his career and is vastly experienced in the building, rail and power sectors.

Despite decades of research and practice since the term was first coined after the Chernobyl incident in 1986, we are not really any closer to any answers.

The Construction Safety Research Alliance was asked by its members to look into this situation. Some US utility regulators are asking firms to report on their safety culture as a licensing requirement, and many C-Suites are becoming more interested in safety culture as phrases like ‘culture eats strategy for breakfast’ become more popular. Yet safety culture is not like other safety operations and initiatives. Culture itself is a social science concept. It tries to capture what it feels like to work in a company – the unwritten rules and norms of ‘how things are done around here’. Culture is how your company does what it does, and safety culture is just the part of your organisational culture that relates to safety.

But this has consequences for its use as a management tool. We just can’t ‘measure’ culture in the same ways we usually measure safety, with numbers, percentages and dashboards. To measure culture using appropriate social science methods takes unique skillsets, immersive fieldwork and more time and recourses than commercial operations could support.

So instead, we just grab some safety things we can easily measure using numbers – e.g. the presence of safety policies, numbers of leadership safety engagements, safety training records – add them all together, and call that ‘safety culture’.

But mathematically that’s a fallacy of logic – and bad science. It’s also unnecessary! The safety toolkit already contains many different tools to best measure the different