It’s a new era for safety culture. Gone are the days of perceiving culture as a static, top-down pyramid where training is considered a check-off-the-box to-do that transforms performance into being “safer” after a single dose of learning. Peak safety competence doesn’t happen overnight, like magic; it’s cultivated. Safety is a journey, and the road to get there requires longevity, consistency, and commitment fueled by continuous learning. Its practices are embedded into the organization’s culture, largely manifested by how management codifies knowledge, and learning and development.
This paper explores the definition of a learning culture, the value of knowledge management, and the benefits of using technology to facilitate continuous learning. Practical tips and real-life examples of learning and development programs that positively impacted safety culture will be shared. Top three components of a learning and development plan will be identified to reveal a blueprint to improve your organization’s safety culture.
The 2005 Texas City Refinery explosion in the United States and the Buncefield fire in the United Kingdom led to legislative changes that drove corporate safety culture to the foreground of process safety. Media coverage and public opinion shifted, calling for workplace safety an ethical responsibility of a corporation. It instilled a moral imperative that demanded that organizations do better to protect their people, surrounding communities, the environment, and society at large. From a certain point-of-view, this was considered the “humanizing” of an organization. Ironically, automation and other new technologies are commonplace and have introduced new risks. Change is also constant, and with this digitalization comes more competition and regulation, especially in today’s tightening market. As such, process safety is subjected to a myriad of new operational and regulatory challenges.
It’s a new era for safety culture. Gone are the days of perceiving culture as a static, top-down pyramid where training is considered a check-off-the-box to-do that transforms performance into being “safer” after a single dose of learning. Peak safety competence doesn’t happen overnight, like magic; it’s cultivated. Safety is a journey, and the road to get there requires longevity, consistency, and commitment fueled by continuous learning. Its practices are embedded into the organization’s culture, largely manifested by how management codifies knowledge, and learning and development. As an industry, this work is never-ending. We still have a lot to do, as evidenced by the Coalition of Accident Prevention, which claims that, on average, an industrial chemical accident happens every 2 days in the US.
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