The Corporate Safety Culture: Its Workings And Its Importance

Abstract

ABSTRACT Corporate culture determines the vitality of an organization. The corporate safety culture is a subset of the corporate culture. Each corporate culture and each safety culture is unique A culture is difficult to describe by people both inside and outside the culture, The reason for this is that people inside the culture are generally not conscious of it and people outside the culture describe it in terms of their paradigms. This paper describes four components of culture: symbols, heroes, rituals and values. These components are applied to the early years of the Du Pent and Conoco companies as examples of how safety cultures develop. These cultural components are then applied to the Du Pont company of today. Understanding why and how corporate cultures exist provides insight into why organizations function the way they do and how these functions can be changed. The reader is asked to compare his organization's safety culture to that of Du Pent and Conoco in order to apply the cultural components and note similarities and differences. INTRODUCTION What are your first thoughts about the words, "multipe explosions, fire, and smoke"? The odds are your mind immediately focused on one of the serious incidents in the petroleum or chemical industries. But you could have thought about a recreational activity like a racetrack and a finely tuned dragster warming up at the starting line to go 200 miles per hour. Do you ever wonder why the company you work for operates the way it does? Questions you might ask are: Why is the company concerned with safety or ethics? Why is the company concerned with occupational health or the environment? You might conclude that it's just the way things are done. These questions tend to focus thinking on corporate behavior and how individual interpretations of an event can differ or be the same. The interpretation an individual lives to an event is a result of that individual's socialization into a culture1. This paper focuses on one of several levels of culture the organizational or corporate culture. Geert Hofsted in his book Culture and Organizations describes six cultural levels: 1. a national level, 2. a regional, ethnic or religious level, 3. a gender level, 4. a generation level 5. a social class level, and 6. the organizational or corporate level2. The content of this paper is taken from three major sources: recent business literature on corporate culture, examples from the Du Pent and Conoco safety cultures, and personal interpretation, This paper hopes to pique your interest in ways to understand corporate safety culture. It represents a personal view of safety and cultural issues. The observations I make about the safety culture of my organization are made from my own set of paradigms Paradigms are the rules people use to solve problems. Paradigms work well for as long as they fit the conditions of the problem. Steven Covey describes it this way in his book The Seven Principles of Highly Effective People: