This conference has been published and can be accessed here.
On 19th November 2024, PACTS hosted its Autumn Conference to address the role of safety culture in advancing transport safety. While transport modes such as air and rail demonstrate mature safety cultures, the road sector lags behind. This conference explored why these differences exist and what must change to help organisations enhance their safety cultural maturity.
What is Culture?
Organisations have common, internal characteristics which say a great deal about how they operate – revealing much about their underlying values as well as their corporate purpose. If you asked colleagues to describe their corporate culture, they may struggle; but ask them how their company differs from others, and they will be quick to point out any points of contrast. This is their culture, what sets them apart; the DNA of an organisation which will influence their attitudes and actions.
The legendary management consultant, Peter Drucker, observed that ‘‘culture, no matter how defined, is singularly persistent”, articulating an understanding that our corporate cultures are typically heavily ingrained, stubbornly difficult to change and wickedly contagious. Someone once quipped that “If you tell them you have mumps when you have measles, what will they catch?!” so it is with our organisational cultures, whatever we say our desired corporate outcomes are, the underlying culture will determine how our people behave and contribute to that purpose.
Why is this important?
“Character is what you do when the leader isn’t watching, culture is what your group does when the leader isn’t watching” Adam Grant
When we make grand statements like ‘safety is our number one priority’, they are filtered through the lens of our actions. If the leaders don’t embody the ambition, and our teams come to regard the statement as window dressing, then our stated purpose loses its power, getting relegated to the class of wishful thinking at best or, at worst, downright hypocrisy. If, however, the underlying culture is one of trust, where the leaders are perceived as having high morality and integrity, borne out by the prevailing expectations, practices and processes in place, staff will align to these goals and see that their contribution to the overall ambition is vital. They will do it when the leader isn’t watching.
But we mustn’t think that changing culture is a silver bullet either. Healthy organisational development comes through alignment between our vision, strategy and culture.
A clear vision can be powerful and motivating, but if there is no strategy for how we are going to make progress, we will struggle.
Strategizing the how, without an overriding sense of direction (the why) is also a weakness in any organisation. We often end up with lots of process or meetings, but little forward momentum.
Culture can be empowering, ensuring that the vision can be sown into fertile ground, and the strategic actions meet with a climate of trust, accountability, ambition, purpose and innovation.
Safety Culture
Safety culture seeks to define the degree to which safety is given priority by the organisation’s members, reflecting the shared attitudes and values; the systems that arise from these values; and the behaviour exhibited by its members.
Not all organisations have a positive safety culture, others excel. Cultural maturity models can be used to provide a measure of how mature an organisation is when it comes to embedding safety into the way things are done.
Hudson & Parker’s ‘Hearts & Minds’ model (left) is a popular model used to help describe the maturity of an organisation’s safety culture. The absence of any serious attempt to engage with safety would be described as ‘pathological’ where the principal concern is not getting caught for violations or failures. High performing organisations have established a ‘generative’ culture where safety is simply the way that life is done in the organisation.
‘Raising Our Game’
Transport safety culture in air and rail is commonly regarded as more mature than in the road sector and so PACTS drew together a conference (19th November 2024) to explore why these differences exist and what might need to change to help organisations with responsibilities for safe operations on the road to become more mature.
PACTS recognises that to drive forward transport safety and meet ambitions for zero transport related deaths and serious injuries that many organisations will need to contribute through investment in a positive safety culture. Leading nations, who are making progress on reducing transport related harm, are actively engaging with commercial operators (freight, fleets and supply chains) to secure more active management of safety by enhancing vehicle fleets, improving policies and minimisation of high-risk activities.
Dan Campsall, Chair of PACTS, opened the conference with an exploration of the importance of culture and its potential contribution to improving transport safety, particularly through creating organisations that embrace learning and highlighting the growing number of professionals that are grappling with how they develop the maturity of their organisations.
Tanya Fosdick (Research Director at Agilysis) presented an approach designed to help road safety practitioners and policymakers understand its organisation’s approach to the Safe System; this model, the ‘Safe System Cultural Maturity Model’ incorporates thinking about the Safe System, cultural maturity and a behaviour change model. Further setting the scene, Patrick Talbot from the Office of Rail and Road unpacked expectations for rail operators and how leading companies are taking this seriously.
Discussing the characteristics of ‘High Reliability Organisations’ (HROs), Phoebe Smith from the Health and Safety Executive explored the ways in which a human factors approach can minimise failures in complex environments by building multi-layered responses to risk. Critical to the success of many HROs, such as those in aviation or nuclear power generation, is the investment in system resilience and organisational learning, ensuring that even infrequent or unlikely risks are still appraised, future responses planned and suitable resources allocated. In contrast, Stephen Briers from Fleet News demonstrated data from across the UK which highlighted how many companies are still have gaps in their approach to fleet management, especially around addressing factors such as impairment and fatigue.
Moving from theory to practice, an array of speakers shared examples from the fields of petrochemicals, rail, and road transport sectors. Saul Jeavons (The Transafe Network) offered pertinent examples of the disparity in transport modes between leaders and workers in the petrochemical sector, where social status dictated that workers travel by bus and leaders travel by cars. When research revealed that bus travel was safer, the policy position changed, mandating that leaders would share the safest forms of travel with the rest of the workforce. Tavid Dobson (The Transafe Network) unpacked work from his time developing the Risk Management Maturity Model (RM3) for the rail sector, whilst demonstrating the validity of its principles for application in other sectors. Mike Kiely (TES 2000) bought the fleet management experience to life with a more personal narrative around his year’s of practice. Finally, Luca Pascotto (FIA), introduced a further global perspective by introducing participants to a new approach to organisational road safety assessment that has been developed with international experts and already being adopted by corporate giants such as IKEA, Total Energies and Honda.
Revisiting the cultural maturity measurement approach, George Henry (Transport Scotland) unpacked how seriously the Safe System is being taken north of the border, as the first road authority globally to create a cultural maturity playbook, while supporting public and private sector organisations to evaluate their current state of Safe System maturity. The final presentation of the day allowed Caitlin Taylor, from RoSPA, to explore how we can learn from incident investigations and implement findings.
The day concluded with a panel discussion involving many of the day’s presenters, the discussion further emphasising that, while there are pockets of emerging practice that are to be lauded, if we are to embrace a meaningful ambition of eradicating death and serious injury from our transport system, there is a great deal of work still to be done.
