Safety culture, safety performance and financial performance

What are the relationships between safety culture measures, total injury rates and financial performance?

A new study to be posted shortly explored these links in 829 European firms from 29 European countries.

Overall they found:

· Safety culture improves safety performance since it significantly reduces the number of accidents at work.

· The better the safety performance, the better the firm’s financial performance.

· They argue that the “development of safety culture in the company is necessary to meet the needs of employees, and thus improve safety performance”.

· Having in place a comprehensive safety culture and implementing all best practices has a strong influence on the total number of accidents.

· They found that the factors most strongly related to total injury rates was having a health and safety team and having a safety management system in place (e.g. such as those aligned with 18001 or 45001).

· Thus, “There is empirical evidence to ensure that the adoption of the OHSAS 18001 or ISO 45001 standards positively influences occupational safety.

· Having policies in place to improve supply chain management was the most influential initiative to reduce the total injury rate of contractors.

Discussing the findings, they note that “Safety culture cannot be dissociated from the general organisational culture of the company and the latter can only be conceived as a dynamic concept that is generated through the interactions between the different members of the organisation”.

Of course, several notable limitations were present. For starters there’s the overarching criticism of safety culture itself as a concept [I’ve discussed this extensively elsewhere so am not rehashing it here), problems with associating total injury rate with performance and its statistical validity and more.

So, caveat emptor.