Creating and sustaining a safety conscious work environment - 15240
- Advantage, Inc. Transuranic Waste Processing Center 100 WIPP Road Lenoir City, Tennessee 37771 (United States)
Organizational Culture, Safety Culture, and a Safety Conscious Work Environment (SCWE) are psychological constructs that describe behaviors of organizations, especially with respect to behaviors needed to ensure safe, highly reliable work. These attributes of culture are often singled out in surveys, root cause analyses and management expectations as the basis for being safe or as the cause of an incident. Organizations that wish to improve culture often do not have a framework to measure and act upon tasks or projects that will promote a positive safety culture (and thus a positive SCWE). Combining the work of organizational behavior pioneers with the 'blue collar' approaches to continuous improvement offers framework organizations may use to improve safety culture while devoting efforts to improving conditions that are meaningful and tangible to floor level employees. The framework consists of the use of Safety Culture and SCWE surveys and focus groups to complement each other and offer topical areas that need improvement or study in the organization. A Safety Culture Improvement Panel will then direct specific improvement projects based on these topic areas and relate these projects to causal variables that effect incremental changes in culture. By applying principles of process improvement to the improvement of culture, the framework is formed to have employees work 'day-today' issues while effectively addressing the often vague or abstract notion of improving culture. A case study of the use of these principles is given by following the SCWE Assessment conducted by the Transuranic Waste Processing Center (TWPC) and subsequent improvements derived from data found in the assessment. The attributes of a SCWE and an effective safety culture accomplish much more than just having a safe place to work. These characteristics result in a high performance, continuously improving organization. The experience of commercial nuclear power, the aviation industry, and other high performing endeavors bear this out. Achieving an effective SCWE is not easy, and sustaining it is even more difficult, but the results are surely worth the effort. The techniques discussed in this presentation are effective, available, and cost-effective; they are easily adaptable for use in other organizations to create, sustain and improve a SCWE. (authors)
- Research Organization:
- WM Symposia, Inc., PO Box 27646, 85285-7646 Tempe, AZ (United States)
- OSTI ID:
- 22822768
- Report Number(s):
- INIS-US-19-WM-15240; TRN: US19V0758067683
- Resource Relation:
- Conference: WM2015: Annual Waste Management Symposium, Phoenix, AZ (United States), 15-19 Mar 2015; Other Information: Country of input: France; 6 refs.; Available online at: http://archive.wmsym.org/2015/index.html
- Country of Publication:
- United States
- Language:
- English
Similar Records
LANL Safety Conscious Work Environment (SCWE) Self-Assessment
PUREX/UO3 Facilities deactivation lessons learned history