Assessing your culture for safety is no easy task without the proper knowledge, skills, and tools. These are essential points that need to be made. Understanding what people believe and understand, what they assume to be true, and what they value is a part of assessing the hidden barriers to achieving the kind of success you want and need. It's also a part of engaging your leadership at various critical levels throughout your organization.
How can you better understand the key dimensions for improving your safety performance? How do you get to the deep seated beliefs and assumptions that are widely held by the people within your own organization? With a sound understanding of culture and the critical aspects that make up your culture for safety — it can be done and done very well. In this same regard, we can help. At David Sarkus International, we have the knowledge, skills, abilities, and the tools to move your organization forward, so that you can embrace the reality of World-Class Safety Performance!
If you desire to improve your culture for safety it will help if you begin to ask a few very simple questions:
Where are you now with regard to your culture for safety?
From a strategic standpoint — where do you want to go?
What are the gaps between "where you are now" and "where you want to go?"
Do you have a plan to close these very important gaps?
If you need help answering these questions you're not alone — we have the answers. Fundamentally, these questions provide the platform to understanding your culture, the inherent barriers to change, and the solutions that include a strategic plan for you future success in safety.
There are a number of ways to understand culture and we have a variety of tools and methods to help you better assess what going on. By working closely with you we can better customize which approach will work best for you and your organization.
Culture Shaping ToolKit TM
This very effective safety tool will help you and other key stakeholders assess the "current state of safety" and what the "ultimate state of safety performance" will look like. In a very clear and systematic fashion you can "shape your own culture for safety" in a very deliberate and concrete way. A few of the key dimensions listed below will help you to better understand the Culture Shaping ToolKit TM and how it can work for you.
These are just a few of the key dimensions we use to help you map out your future for excellence in safety performance. Just another way for you to determine "where you are" so you can "know where you need and want to go."
The Cultural Web TM
Another very effective method of culture assessment for safety is Dr. Dominic Cooper's, Cultural Web TM. This tool will help you determine "where your organization is now" but at a deeper level — nearer to your core values, beliefs, and assumptions. This tool uses a series of questions within the elements shown below in order to explore how your workers perceive safety and the ways in which safety is currently handled in your company. Your current state of safety performance and the related perceptions of your workers may be quite different from what you expect. Even more, these very important perceptions are constantly being reinforced by your own organization's underlying assumptions and related actions which become evident in a variety of daily work routines.
Both the Culture Shaping TookKit TM and The Cultural Web TM help to prompt a greater understanding about safety and how to improve your current performance in very specific ways — all from a cultural standpoint. Even more, both give you the ability to prioritize the critical components of safety and help you to identify the forces that will work in favor of positive change and those that will work against it.
The "gap" between "where you are now" and "where you want to be" will serve as the foundation for your action plans, and catapult your organization to a level of performance that you once thought was unachievable!
