Towards an action-oriented safety culture maturity scale

Abstract

Whilst safety culture is seen by many as an essential ingredient for safety, it is often vaguely described. This can make it harder to lead safety culture in an organization, particularly for those at senior management level, as it is not always clear what to do in concrete terms. Since senior managers are accustomed to benchmarking systems, the approach undertaken in this study was to adapt an existing benchmarking system to safety culture, and to populate it with safety culture activities and actions. This development built on work in the Maritime sector, which focused on safety learning, and resulted in the elaboration of a dozen safety learning approaches. These approaches, together with safety culture elements taken from existing maturity scales in the air traffic management domain, have resulted in a safety culture maturity scale that is more ‘action-oriented’. This paper gives an overview of the journey towards the development of this scale, outlines the twelve safety learning approaches, and then presents the proposed safety culture maturity scale itself.