Central Safety Group Melbourne

When a company is small and risks are high

In a refreshing change, we heard about a specific industry this month when Ben Thomson from Flight Academy Australia presented to us. While it was fascinating in itself to learn more about the subject of aviation safety, it was inspiring to learn about ways of instilling a better safety culture into smaller organisations more generally.

Ben began by giving a brief overview of the evolution of safety approaches. It was interesting to see how it began with "airmanship", which focussed on the individual, and gradually evolved to the holistic approach of a full-blown safety management system that they have today, where the focus is on the culture.

Ben outlined some new thinking into the 5 ingredients of an effective safety culture that are really useful for all organisations, no matter the size. The one that resonated most with us was the concept of a Just Culture and Ben delved into that, particularly in relation to incident reporting. One of the main challenges is encouraging people to admit when they've made a mistake, because it is counterintuitive for people to do so. The way an organistaion responds has an effect on the value that can be derived from reporting.

Another challenge with reporting is if the process to do so is overly complicated: while it's important to document incidents, it shouldn't be too onerous for the person reporting. This put me in mind of a great presentation a few years ago from David Provan about Safety Clutter, which complements Ben Thomson's advice for smaller organisations. Financial members can access it here.

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Rebuilding safety culture – a case study

There was keen interest from the large turnout at Mary Kikas’ lunchtime talk on 11 February where she presented a case study on rebuilding safety culture. 

Mary described the process and steps she implemented to address workplace risk in the context of hazardous manual handling and fatigue management. She found an important key to success was being hands-on and practical, as well as consulting with the workforce. This helped restore a positive workplace culture in an organisation where employee job satisfaction and trust had fallen after significant change following a series of redundancies.   

A highlight of the presentation was how open she was about the obstacles and setbacks, as well as the approaches she took to dealing with these.  The message was there’s no quick and easy way to build safety culture, as it needs to be multifaceted and contextually relevant to the organisation, but hard work where you involve all levels of the company can get results.

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