What is a fair and just culture?
Culture juste et équitable définition
A fair and just culture is a lever to strengthen an organization’s safety culture. By creating conditions of trust and transparency, it supports the smooth flow of information. The ultimate goal: to improve safety.
How is a fair and just culture defined?
Definition: A fair and just culture supports the feedback of safety-relevant information, by creating a climate of trust and transparency, which is needed to encourage people to speak freely.
It feeds a ‘learning culture’, in other words, it is the organization’s ability to:
- have an in-depth understanding of how it really works, and
- act effectively and manage risks better.
The idea is to learn and continuously improve, based on the principle that safety information is key. The aim is to understand, in depth, what is ‘really’ happening in the field.
The long-term construction of trust and transparency...
Before information will flow from the field, it is essential to create the conditions for transparency! Transparency is one of the 7 attributes of an effective safety culture.
But it isn’t built overnight! It is built step-by-step, over time, and relies on the creation of a climate of trust to:
- encourage and reward positive, proactive contributions to safety, and
- combat people’s reluctance to report ‘bad’ news.
Psychological safety?
Some companies talk about psychological safety. The idea is that everyone feels safe if they decide to speak out, including about what’s not going well, not as planned, or not as expected.
A fair and just culture reduces mistrust and fear that someone who speaks out will be punished (what will happen to me if...). When a clear framework is put in place, both management and organizational reactions to such situations are known and accepted.
The goal: to combat organizational silence!
When organizational silence takes hold—a situation where safety-relevant information is available at field level, but is not reported—safety is considerably weakened. Risky situations aren’t analyzed, or dealt with, or taken into account in prevention strategies.
What information should be reported?
What’s going wrong or ‘not as planned’:
- Accidents, of course... along with near-misses,
- Situations and events that could be very serious,
- Anomalies, malfunctions, degraded situations,
- Deviations from the rules,
- And any unusual situation, even if the team was able to adapt to the hazard, and manage the risk.
What’s going well:
- Best practices,
- Initiatives and positive contributions to safety,
- Useful adaptations to degraded situations and unforeseen events,
- Achievements of teams in the field.
Another point of view
According to Eric Hollnagel, professor at the University of Southern Denmark, and founder of the Safety 1- Safety 2 movement, the vast majority of situations are carried out safely. However, they are rarely leveraged when analyzing feedback from experience. This reservoir of lessons learned must be explored as a priority, and shouldn’t be neglected in a fair and just safety culture approach!
Encouraging people to speak freely, a tough challenge!
Whatever people may say, in reality, companies don’t really want to hear bad news. Employees tend to keep it to themselves. Many factors can explain this need for self-protection: fear of punishment, fear of the boss’s reaction, fear of being perceived as incompetent, fear of how colleagues see them, etc.
The same applies to managers. They are often only seen as competent when they can solve problems themselves, and less so when they escalate incidents to the hierarchy.
And, another thing, acknowledging and valuing individual initiatives and proactive behavior isn’t really part of French culture. We tend to say, ‘they were just doing their job’.
So, what are the levers?
At the company level, the approach to strengthening a fair and just culture is organized around 3 levers:
- Recognize positive, proactive contributions to safety,
- Set out and share a clear framework, based on these 4 key principles:
o acknowledge the right to make mistakes,
o do not look for someone to blame,
o distinguish between a mistake and a transgression,
o distinguish between individual and organizational causes, establish clear red lines that must not be crossed... - Provide support to managers, to help them adopt appropriate and consistent responses to deviations.
Takeaways
Implementing a fair and just culture means:
- consider information as a rich source of learning for risk management,
- create a climate of trust and transparency to protect and reassure people who have information, to encourage them to speak freely,
- process this information at the right level to improve risk management, particularly serious or fatal accidents, and major technological risks.
Virtuous Circle
