“The safety culture of an organisation is the product of individual and group values within Health and Safety”
Its not difficult to see when faced with conflicting information as in the title image above, the health and safety culture of an organisation comes into sharp focus as the tool of last resort that will enable employees and their managers to “do the right thing”.
What value and behaivours would support you here when faced with the conflicting information on both Asbestos and location of the penetrations. Would your site based teams be empowered to stop the job and seek support? The true test here is wheter the first line supervisors and managers within that company both trust the initial “read” of the situation and in turn the site team trust the managers to stand behind them. This mutual trust is much lacking in day to day operations and a more individual, progress based, get the job done approach is prevalent.
Companies with a proactive or generative safety culture are rock-solid at dealing with just this type of occurence. By that I mean there is management commitment to a director level, evident through decision making and support, that makes sure safety leadership and values drive continous improvement rather than prioritising work completion / cost over safety.
Always a good place to check your current level of achievement on safety culture is the HSE’s page here HSE Human Factors
We support a number of companies with just this sort of advice, changing cultures and empowering all employee’s to “do the right thing”. If you would like us to do the same for you, just drop us a message, we are always ready to help out.