Understanding your HSE culture (2018)

Summary

Understanding your HSE culture is one of the world's most widely used tool for measuring HSE culture.  The tool measures organisational HSE culture against the Hearts and Minds/Hudson and Parker safety culture ladder.

Content

Understanding your HSE culture  helps organisations explore their culture by providing descriptions of how companies behave at the 5 different levels of culture:

• Pathological: people don’t really care about HSE and are only driven by regulatory compliance and/or not getting caught.
• Reactive: safety is taken seriously, but only after things have gone wrong. Managers feel frustrated about how the workforce won’t do what they are told.
• Calculative: focus on systems and numbers. Lots of data is collected and analysed, lots of audits are performed and people begin to feel they know "how it works". The effectiveness of the gathered data is not always proven though.
• Proactive: moving away from managing HSE based on what has happened in the past to preventing what might go wrong in the future. The workforce start to be involved in practice and the Line begins to take over the HSE function, while HSE personnel reduce in numbers and provide advice rather than execution.
• Generative: organisations set very high standards and attempt to exceed them. They use failure to improve, not to blame. Management knows what is really going on, because the workforce tells them. People are trying to be as informed as possible, because it prepares them for the unexpected. This state of "chronic unease" reflects a belief that despite all efforts, errors will occur and that even minor problems can quickly escalate into system-threatening failures.