Safety Culture Surveys
If you do a search for ‘safety culture survey’ on Google it gets 2,720,000,000 results, a sure sign of an industry that thinks it knows what culture is and how to change it.
Of course, the institutionalisation of the charisma (https://safetyrisk.net/safety-as-a-knowledge-culture/ ), deontological ethic (https://safetyrisk.net/the-aihs-bok-and-ethics-check-your-gut/ ) and zero (https://safetyrisk.net/three-lessons-in-how-to-be-unprofessional/ ) ensure traditional safety will remain fortress safety (https://safetyrisk.net/echo-chambers-and-thinking-about-risk/ ).
There are some in the industry who claim there is no such thing as ‘safety culture’ or that such cannot be defined, or it is too complex. These claims are only true if one accepts the assumptions they emerge from. If you interrogate the methodology behind such thinking it is often shallow and anchored in a behaviourist or engineering worldview.
Interrogating methodology, assumption and ideology is not something Safety does. Safety shows no interest in Critical Discourse Analysis, Ethics, Anthropology, Social Psychology or Politics and so is NOT equipped for research culture.
If one seeks guidance on a discussion of culture in safety and a culture of safety, the best you might get is a very narrow and simplistic definition posed by the AIHS BoK Chapter on ‘organisational culture’. Safety tends to define culture as either behaviours and/or systems and this is evidenced in products on the market. I have looked at all of the following and none have a holistic or sophisticated sense of culture. All of the following are behaviourist or systems surveys.
- https://www.ltu.edu/engineering/csrc/projects.asp
- https://www.epigroup.com.au/blog/visible-vs-invisible-safety-cultures/
- https://www.epigroup.com.au/safety-consultants-perth/safety/safety-culture-surveys/
- https://whsmonitor.com.au/landing/campaign-sm-li/
- https://www.bamboohr.com/pl-pages/employee-survey/
- http://www.generativehse.com/
- https://www.safertogether.com.au/resources/initiatives/safety-culture-survey
- https://www.cec.health.nsw.gov.au/
- https://www.worksafe.qld.gov.au/safety-climate-and-safety-culture
- Safety-Culture-Assessment-in-Health-Care-A-review-of-the-literature-on-safety-culture-assessment-modes.pdf
- https://www.honestly.com/survey-templates/safety-culture-survey
- https://www.ahrq.gov/sops/index.html
- https://insync.com.au/insights/how-to-measure-and-improve-your-safety-culture/
- https://safetyculturesurvey.online/
- https://www.arpansa.gov.au/sites/default/files/safety-culture-assesment-report2019.pdf
- https://nbaa.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/04/nbaa-conducting-a-safety-culture-survey.pdf
- https://sentis.com.au/safety-culture-assessments/safety-climate-survey
- https://www.hse.gov.uk/foi/internalops/fod/inspect/mast/safetychecklist.htm
- https://survey.forgeworks.com/
- https://globalsafetyindex.com/experience-gsi/safety-culture-index/
- https://www.mysafetysurvey.com/
- https://qualitysafety.bmj.com/content/14/4/231
- https://osha.europa.occupational-safety-and-health-culture-assessment-review-main-approaches-and-selected-tools
- https://www.safemap.com/en/programs/risk-e-profile/
- https://safetystage.com/safety-culture/safety-culture-perception-survey/
- https://ijaers.com/uploads/issue_files/3-IJAERS-MAR-2019-49-WorkplaceSafety.pdf
- https://www.cdc.gov/nora/councils/hcsa/stopsticks/survey.html
- https://heartsandminds.energyinst.org/toolkit/UYC
- https://risk-engineering.org/concept/safety-culture
- https://www.value4life.com.au/program/safety-climate-survey
- file:///Users/rl/Downloads/MillerNatalieH2017.pdf
- http://www.behavioral-safety.com/behavior-based-safety-solution-center/safety-culture-assessments
- https://www.cat.com/en_US/support/safetyservices/safety-culture/safety-perception-survey.html
- https://leadingedgesafety.com.au/how-to-diagnose-your-workplace-safety-culture/
- https://hseglobal.com.au/wp-content/uploads/2021/02/HSE-Global-GSI-Safety-Culture-Index.pdf
- https://www.hsl.gov.uk/what-we-do/safety-culture
This is why it is so easy in the safety industry to make money out of ignorance, even running a business called “safetyculture”, that is not about safety or culture. Check listing and selling auditing products is not culture. No wonder it is so popular in the culture of Safety.
The information sought, structure of questioning, assumptions about persons, ethics, politics, power and definition of culture, all demonstrate these surveys as behaviourist or systems surveys (https://safetyrisk.net/safety-culture-does-exist/ ).
Many critical elements of culture are simply NOT explored by any of the so called ‘safety culture surveys’ on the market.
For example, none of these surveys include any focus on: linguistics, Discourse, semiotics, mythology, religion, artefacts, tacit knowing, heuristics, anthropological issues, archetypes, ethics, collective unconscious, organizational psyche, visual and spacial archetypes or politics. None of the safety culture surveys on the market have considered the work of Lotman or Jung (https://archive.org/details/in.ernet.dli.2015.218430 ) or a host of other Transdisciplinary knowledge about culture.
Indeed, you know what Safety really believes about culture through its noise and silences. https://safetyrisk.net/speaking-truth-to-power-and-safety/
Culture is such a wicked problem that only a Transdisciplinary approach can come close to tackling and giving justice to an understanding of culture (https://sts.univie.ac.at/en/research/completed-research-projects/transdisciplinarity-as-culture-and-practice/ ). Indeed, there is such distrust across professional cultures (and Safety is NOT one) that even bringing them together for a Transdisciplinary approach is a huge challenge (https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S1462901113000336 ).
As much as Safety would like to make culture simple and simplistic, that doesn’t make it so. All of the binary focus of Safety on making culture easy and simple, makes things worse. Indeed, speaking to Safety as an archetype in itself as I do, demonstrates the possibility of Safety having a power unto itself, more than the sum of people in it. Such thinking is in no safety culture survey on the Market and by Market, I mean the archetype of its force unto itself.
Just look at all that is listed above as NOT being included in any safety culture survey and you will quickly realise that culture for Safety is NOT being measured. Indeed, the quest to measure is one of the seductions of a culture of Safety. No wonder nothing changes in safety, another one of its cultural characteristics.