With an array of safety culture and safety maturity programs being touted within the Industry, we are seeing organisations turn their attention to the tackling safety culture often at the expense of the safety management system.
Concerning recent trends have emerged in audits of late, with regulatory requirements being missed or overlooked, systems documents not being maintained, breakdowns in training compliance, and gaps in workers’ understanding of their basic safety responsibilities. These are all key foundations of a WHS Management System. The gaps are sometimes even glossed over by the internal stakeholders, who often believe that the work being undertaken in the safety culture space will address it. Unfortunately, it won’t.
A safety management system provides the fundamental framework of processes that enables and supports the effective management of health and safety risks, but these processes need to be reinforced and maintained.
Whilst Safety Culture programs are useful, they have their time and place in the spectrum of safety improvement work, especially in supporting work to address the management of psychosocial hazards. However, for these to be effective, there also needs to be a solid foundation of an embedded management system to ensure legislative compliance requirements are in place, risks are being identified and managed, and the responsibility for managing WHS is affirmed.
It’s also not a matter of considering the system as done and in place, so therefore all attention can move onto the safety culture work.
A management system is not a set-and-forget process. It’s not even a set ‘and I only need to commit 10% of my time to maintain it’ type of process. Without these fundamentals being regularly reinforced and well maintained, all the management processes become ineffective. If compliance is done correctly, it should see safety maturity move through the Hudson’s Safety Culture Maturity stages from ‘Pathological’ to the ‘Reactive’, the ‘Calculative’ and hopefully the ‘Proactive’ and then ‘Generative’ stages.
As we near the end of 2025 and new year approaches, it may be timely to consider what planning needs to be put in place to ensure that the management system is addressing all the regulatory requirements, that the entire workforce has a good understanding of what they are responsible for, and how the management system supports and aids them to fulfil their responsibilities.
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