Safety Culture vs Safety Climate

Contents
Introduction 2
3.1 Safety Culture 3
3.2 Safety Climate 5
3.3 Culture versus Climate 6
3.4 Why is addressing culture, being promoted as the panacea to the problem of health and safety performance, particularly in the construction industry? 8
3.5 Can culture be measured in an organisation? If so, how can it be measured? 9
3.6 What are the factors/components of culture? 10
3.7 How can health and safety culture be promoted in an organisation? 12
References 18

Introduction
Health and Safety until very recently have been terms and conditions that have been overlooked by many industry participants. Companies don’t want have to spend their money and time on something they feel does not contribute directly to the production process and seems more of a disadvantageous task more than anything else. According to Bakri et al (2006:19), providing a safe and healthy workplace can actually be considered as one of the most effective cost reduction strategies. Accidents and property losses can result in a great loss to the company, not only do they cause delays in operations but also directly and indirectly incur excess costs.
Wiegmann and von Thaden (2007:2) agree and conclude with various authors that the beginning of the safety culture period of accident investigation and analysis can be traced back to the nuclear accident at Chernobyl in 1986 in which a “poor safety culture” was identified as a factor contributing to the accident by both the International Atomic Energy Agency and the OECD Nuclear Agency.
The Chernobyl disaster was the worst accident with regard to nuclear power generation. The recognition of the importance of safety culture based from this experience and to prevent future accidents has led to a plethora of studies attempting to define and assess safety culture in a number of complex, high-risk industries (Zhang et al, 2002:2).
In the remaining portion of the document we elaborate further around issues dealing with safety culture and safety climate

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