“No matter how interested individual employees might be or what assistance a manufacturer offers, or how insistent an authority might be – none of these factors will have a significant effect on safety without support from top management.”

John O’Brian, ALPA’s Air Safety Department

Of all the components of a Safety Management System (SMS), safety culture is often the most difficult to foster. Safety culture is a fundamental element to the foundation of accident prevention and SMS. In fact, a strong safety culture is one of the most effective and systemic way to reduce accident and incident levels within an organization. Unfortunately, one of the major challenges to implementing and sustaining an effective safety culture lies in the age-old battle between protection and production. It stays very hard for some decision-makers to invest in a program that does not have direct contributions to production. A strong safety culture will help prevent accidents, but it is difficult to prove that a zero accident rate is attributed to a strong safety culture.

The aviation industry has, in the past, been comfortable maintaining a reactive position to safety regarding occurrences as isolated incidents, and consistently only taking action when something happens. The introduction of SMS is shifting the focus from enforcement-centered to a more proactive approach, and hopefully will give rise to a culture a safety so firmly established that the perception will be that safety is simply the way to do business.

Creating and maintaining a safety culture sounds much easier than it actually is. Management, initially on board with the implementation of SMS, may become less enthusiastic as they realize that some changes will not be cheap or simple to implement. Some managers may be uncomfortable soliciting and responding to negative feedback, and some staff members may be difficult to convince that reporting honestly on current or potential problems is in their best interest. For some pilots, the idea of admitting personal error may be akin to admitting personal and professional failure – or possibly to committing professional suicide. These are the main hurdles which must be overcome systematically at an organizational level, with a major top-down emphasis on building trust and establishing non-punitive reporting systems. Without these two factors in place, SMS cannot be successful and a culture of safety will not develop successfully.

How to measure a safety culture? One can see a broken safety culture, but can someone see a strong safety culture? Safety culture can be seen as the seed from which all safety programs stem. A first indicator is when an organization suffer a disconnection between the written policies and the day-to-day reality. For example, one organization may have a ‘just safety culture’ policy clearly stated in the operating manual. At the same time, some reporters of incidents may suffer retributions or disciplinary actions. Resource management is also a causal factor under organizational influence. If the organization indicates that safety is paramount, but is not willing to devote the necessary resources to ensuring its success, then the consequences are twofold. First, adequate resources are not available to support safe operations, and second, this failure sends an express message to workforce: ‘We want you to value safety, but we don’t really value safety ourselves’. It is this type of perception that is the biggest threat to the success of any attempt at establishing an effective safety culture.

To conclude, establishing a safety culture early in SMS implementation is important, but it must be constantly nurtured to prevent the ‘downward spiral to disaster’. Safety culture is also enhanced when employees know that senior leadership believes in them and cares about their well-being; it makes it easier to adhere to standards and helps prevent from falling prey to normalization of deviance.

Article based on chapter 5 – Implementing Safety Management System in Aviation – Ashgate Edition, 2011