Why be concerned about culture when it comes to safety? The answer: corporate culture influences all the important things that go on in a company.

It determines how employees, suppliers, and customers are treated and work together; how well production or services are performed; how distribution is handled and how employee safety is addressed.

What causes employee accidents? The most frequent answer is "carelessness of the employees." This is not surprising as committee of industrial safety, stated in the 1990's "The unsafe acts of persons are responsible for the majority of accidents". Even today knowing the important role culture plays on reducing accidents most managers still firmly believe "unsafe actions" or "at risk behaviors" are responsible for most employee accidents.

The idea seems to be embedded in their DNA. In other words it is part of their culture.

There are four essential elements for effective team management:

The culture of the organization must lead, support and protect teams.
People, managers and workers, must have or acquire the interpersonal and rational skills required to work effectively on a team.
People must be given the opportunity to practice team skills before working on an actual team managed project and continually thereafter. It will take time and patience to develop and hone these skills.
As teams progress they must be given the appropriate level of authority to implement ideas and recommendations without management oversight. Teamwork has to become the intricate part of management structure and culture.
The two important questions for the future of our company are:

Is our culture the right one for the new challenges of management?
Is our company ready for teams to manage quality, productivity and safety in our operations?
Culture has a direct effect on how managers interact and treat employees relative to work performance, training, ethical behavior, individual job skills and safety. Culture plays a major role in determining what a manager will do when he is forced to make a choice between production vs. safety. Culture guides a manager's thinking about safety when stress or a crisis is introduced to the system.

Culture ultimately determines if management walks the talk when it comes to living the safety values of the company. Many managers believe safety is a shared responsibility. But if responsibility for safety is shared or divided then no one is responsible for the result. Safety is a joint effort where each party involved has specific obligations they must abide by so a goal can be reached. In a joint safety effort management works on the system and employees work in it. Management improves the system with the help of the employees. The two must cooperate to achieve safety goals.

Safety should not be a zero sum game where one side wins and the other loses. Management and hourly works are jointly responsible for the results. When you have good safety outcomes everyone wins.

Few Fact to be addressed: organizations must abide by to make certain safety is prioritized properly for everyone in its operations every day. They are cultural in nature:

Top management must be committed and have constancy of purpose to ensure all managers and employees truly believe safety must be taken into consideration in every operation every day.
Top management, middle management and hourly workers each have a role to play and must collaborate as a team to make all operations safe. Leadership is required at all levels.
When it comes to safety, management's obligation is to remove any barriers that prevent middle management and hourly workers from being able to perform their jobs safely every time, every day.
All management and hourly workers must learn the value of "operational definitions" to get the Voice of the Safety Customer into the Voice of the Process. "Safe" must have the same meaning to everyone in the organization.