What is safety culture?

“The safety culture of an organisation is the product of individual and group values, attitudes, perceptions, competencies, and patterns of behaviour that determine the commitment to, and the style and proficiency of, an organisation’s safety management system (within the overall business management system).”

Adapted from ACSNI Human Factors Study Group: Third report - Organising for safety HSE Books 1993

Working Group Purpose

Safety Culture Working Group (SCWG) seeks to ‘Improve safety culture in safety critical organisations focussed on product and functional safety, by sharing examples and latest approaches collated from real life case studies’.

The Terms of Reference for the working group are available to registered members or on request from the group leader.

Objectives

SCWG's current focus is to improve the following specific aspects of Safety Culture:

• Measuring Safety Culture
• Independent and repeatable assessment of Safety Culture
• Safety Culture between organisations
• Safety Culture in boards of large corporate organisations
• Safety Culture in teams developing safety critical systems

Membership

If you would like to become a member of the SCWG, please contact the group leader at michael.wright@scsc.uk

Membership is open to all, and is done through nominations through an existing Working Group member or the group leaders. All memberships are approved by SCWG members based on individual's industry and experience of Safety Culture or Safety Critical Industries.

Safety cuture assessment and improvement survey

Click on our SCWG survey page to see the results of our survey of organisational approaches to assessing and improving safety culture.