Promoting safe behavior is not the ultimate challenge when improving safety performance

Safe behaviors have long been the holy grail for safety-conscious organizations. We now know where the boundaries lie: the behavioral approach places risk management at the individual level, which is also where we look for the causes of accidents.

However, safe behaviors must be seen within a broader vision of risk management. It is essential to look at the whole system: this is the human and organizational factors approach.

In her Thoughts on Safety Culture, Myriam Promé invites us to complement the behavioral approach to safety with two other ideas:

• the creation of a new managerial climate in the workplace,
• ensuring that the company’s key processes are coherent.

Promoting safe behaviors is not, therefore, the real challenge. Instead, the entire organization (individuals, management, processes, technology) must be structured around a shared vision of the level of risk management.