Safety Culture

Safety culture in the workplace guides what your people do when no one's looking. It’s shared perceptions, it’s beliefs, it’s attitudes. For industries that are grappling with labour shortages, building a strong safety culture has never been more important. But what does it mean to have a strong safety culture? How do you build one and more importantly, how do you measure and improve it?  We invite you join us for a conversation around creating a strong safety culture with WCB CEO Stuart MacLean and his guest Dr. Mark Fleming, an internationally recognized researcher who aims to provide best practice guidelines and criteria for more successful safety programs.

Dr. Mark Fleming has been enhancing industrial health and safety management through applied psychology research for over two decades. He joined the Department of Psychology at Saint Mary’s University (SMU) in Halifax, Nova Scotia in 2001, and in 2002 he was instrumental in founding the CN Centre for Occupational Health and Safety. He supervises the work of the safety culture team at SMU where researchers work in partnership with local, national, and international organizations to study and address safety issues. He's currently involved in researching safety culture in a wide range of industries, including rail, petrochemical, construction, and power generation, and he turns usable practices and guidelines from these industries into practical tools such as his Changing Minds Guide and the Cultural Maturity Model. He also advises several Canadian international organizations on safety, culture assessment and improvement, including the International Atomic Energy Agency.  

Key quotes

“They want their employees to go home safely, and they want to do the right thing. But they often are working in this wrong framework where they're seeing safety as the absence of injury, and they don't sometimes see the conflicted messages that they themselves are sending.” Mark Fleming

“It's more important to reframe how you think about safety. So rather than thinking about it as the absence of injuries, to think about it as a presence of defences, the presence of the controls that are in place within our organization.” Mark Fleming

“What they need to do is go and ask the question about how are you doing this job safely? And how can I help you be safe?” Mark Fleming

“If an organization is having a safety challenge, they probably have some other challenges as well.” Mark Fleming

“Safety improvement is not a wham bam, let's get better in a one-off event, because it never lasts, it's about getting a little bit better every day.” Mark Fleming

What they’ll talk about

Research has shown that a safe environment makes workers happy, and happy workers are more productive. As our province embarks on an aggressive growth strategy to double our working population over the next four decades, businesses who make a visible commitment to safety and creating a safety culture will be the ones that attract and retain employees. 

What you’ll learn

The Role of Senior Leadership

Senior leaders need to understand safety in a different way. Even if safety practices and guidelines are in place, if leaders are not talking about the importance of safety in the workplace, then they are not sending a clear signal to their employees. 

Productivity vs Safety

Instead of thinking about safety as something you do, business need to think about safety as a way you do things. An organization that is safe is also efficient, and organizations that do safety very well, do planning and organizing very well too. 

Don’t Focus on Injuries of the Past

Organizations need to start looking at the extent to which the controls are present within their workplace, rather than focusing on the limited number of injuries that happened in the past. You can learn from them, but if you only look at past injuries, you tend to miss the high potential injuries and are very unlikely to prevent future serious injuries and fatalities.

Make sure you follow WorkShift, a podcast from the Workers' Compensation Board, that's helping to rewrite the narrative on what makes a healthy, safe and successful workplace.

To learn more visit: https://www.worksafeforlife.ca/