In this video, international safety expert Professor Patrick Hudson highlights the challenges that organisations face as they try to implement processes to improve their safety performance. He discusses his safety culture ladder model, and how companies can assess their safety maturity by using this model.
Mr. Hudson explains a system he created, with which he eventually became dissatisfied. He specifically realized that people were not picking the description of where they were they are, but instead they were picking a description that reflected where they would like to be.
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For this reason, organizations ask him to help them move up the so-called safety culture ladder, which has five steps. He says that in order for an organization to have a better safety culture, it needs to move up this ladder, but first he needs to understand on which step of they ladder this organization is.
Namely, most organizations answer that they are in a pretty good place and they are definitely moving up the ladder. However, Mr. Hudson asks them if the plans that they have in mind to achieve a better safety culture are already in place. Many of them answer no. So in order to move from being pathological to being calculative, organizations needs to put their plans to action.
What is more, if they do actually have these plans in place, many times they do not work. In such cases, many companies are afraid to change them, as they believe this would show lack of commitment to safety. This indicates the need for another transition. The transition from calculative to proactive, which is a difficult one. This means that the organization has a plan in place, which is actually effective and ensures a high level of performance.
Moreover, a major aspect are the major technological changes. Many organizations do not take them into consideration, and in such cases they could face serious troubles.
In my ideal world people would move up because as they start to design new approaches to work they were designing how the organization is going to handle the changes not simply in classic change management but much more also at the cultural level
Professor Patrick Hudson concludes.