IN SAFETY, CULTURE WINS

I just completed a somewhat unexpected 2 year term as acting Director of Safety & Compliance for a mid-sized UK flight operations and engineering company and I learned a great deal from the experience. I say unexpected because I only joined them for a 3 week consultancy in March 2012 to help kick-start their SMS upgrade and implementation programme but things changed with the passage of time.

The task was straight forward – bring together the existing safety management processes under an ICAO 9859 style safety management system, enhance where necessary, create new processes and functions where there were none, and recruit a team of professionals to take the SMS into the future. That was the easy part… Far more complex and certainly less predictable were the cultural and behavioural responses to these perceived ‘new’ ways of doing safety in the business. After a cautious start many embraced the SMS with alacrity and even struck out on their own safety improvement journeys but others viewed the changes with suspicion and even disdain. The latter can be very disheartening for the team who designed and built the system and now must be its champions in the workplace. 

So it is easy to write new procedures and to ‘launch’ safety programmes but it is so much harder to win the hearts and minds, even when the entire effort is focussed on making things safer for everyone at work. If there is one important lesson for me to take away from this fantastic experience it is that culture drives behaviours far more than strategies, rules and procedures ever can, and that is where the key to change lies. If you are about to embark on an SMS upgrade or implementation I would urge you to start by winning the trust and support of the group before you type one sentence of a procedure.

Has it been a success? Well I think so but I would say that wouldn't I...