A Happy New Year to you all.
This post is a recording of a chat I had at the end of last year with Diane Chadwick Jones, who is a former Human Performance Director at BP.
I’m afraid my transcription failed to work this time, so there is no written transcript. I will try to do better next time, but in summary, we spoke about:
How Diane came to be involved in Safety Culture and Safety Management.
What is Safety Culture? (2:57)
The link between safety performance and reward structures (6:14)
The use of leading indicators, and points reward schemes (10:29)
Pressures that might be created by the current economic climate (13:40)
The importance of safety culture to the prevention of rare, major accidents (16:15)
All industry sectors are under pressure at the moment from a range of challenges, with inevitable impacts for the workforce. This discussion was a timely reminder for me - as I hope it will also be for others - of some of the key principles of safety culture, and how to encourage the behaviours that are needed to prevent the occurrence of major accidents.
Diane’s paper “Rewarding safety performance: Improving safety or maintaining beliefs?”, which we discussed, is available here.
Thanks for listening
Please feel free to feed back any thoughts or comments and please do drop me an e-mail on george.bearfield@ntlworld.com: My particular area of professional and research interest is practical risk management and assurance of new technology. I’m always keen to engage on interesting projects in this area.
I will continue to mix podcasts with written posts in 2023, covering topics as diverse as software safety engineering and the emerging security challenges in the war in Ukraine. Please do subscribe to make sure you don’t miss a post.
And if you know anyone else who you think might appreciate a thought-provoking read or listen every few weeks, please let them know:
Safety Behaviour and Incentives