Your safety culture should be promoted throughout your organisation and led from the top, so that it is felt and observed throughout your organisation. You should try to promote a culture with the following elements:

• ‘compliance’ with applicable standards and procedures;

• ‘right first time’;

• ‘not accepting poor standards of work’;

• ‘understanding’: – the overall risks that are being managed, – that risk is not constant and that new hazards need to be captured and managed as they arise, – what the organisation is supposed to achieve,

• ‘learning’ from incidents and near misses to improve the safety of work and overall safety of the railway;

• ‘sharing information’ so that your maintenance staff become the eyes and ears necessary to detect things that are wrong; and

• ‘action’ where something is found to be wrong. You should recognise that that there can be a tendency for safety culture to deteriorate, particularly where repetitive tasks can result in perceived familiarity and a false sense of security.

It is essential to put measures in place that minimise the potential for complacency, such as varying people’s tasks and encouraging ownership.

The benefits of a safety culture

In an organisation with a good safety culture, everyone:

• is aware of the importance of safety;

• makes safety the highest priority in all that they do;

• continually strives to improve safety; and

• understands the parts of the law and other regulations that are relevant to them. The benefits of nurturing a good safety culture are that:

• safety is built into the organisation’s products and services;

• potential hazards and failures are detected and eliminated or controlled early;

• the organisation’s products are safe and visibly so;

• the organisation realises efficiencies and cost savings; and

• the risk of not conforming to legal obligations is reduced.

A good safety culture will enhance an organisation’s reputation, whereas a single major incident can ruin it. Indeed, a major incident can mar the reputation of the industry as a whole, and cause harm to many of the interdependent organisations that contribute to and rely on the industry’s success. James Reason, in his book ‘Managing the Risks of Organizational Accidents’ [F.7] provides a clear account of how safety culture contributes to risk and the elements of a good safety culture. This book is recommended for further reading on ESM.