Introduction to Fire Safety Management

Involvement of staff
Effective employee participation should be supported 
with good systems and training, and allow employees to 
be responsible personally for areas of safety.
The existence of a learning culture
Whereby systems are in place that allow:
➤
Employees to contribute ideas for improvement in 
procedures
➤
Effective analysis of incidents, and good communi-
cations of the outcomes.
The existence of a just culture
Organisations with a blame culture overemphasise indi-
vidual blame for human error, at the expense of correcting 
defective systems. Blame allocates fault and responsibil-
ity to the individual making the error, rather than to the 
system, organisation or management process.
To reduce the impact of a blame culture organisa-
tions should:
➤
Promote 
accountability
➤
Understand the mechanism of human error
➤
Demonstrate care and concern towards employees
➤
Maintain 
confi dentiality
➤
Enable employees to feel that they are able to report 
problems without fear of reprisal.
The safety culture of an organisation is 
the product of individual and group val-
ues, attitudes, perceptions, competencies 
and patterns of behaviour that determine 
the commitment to, and the style and profi -
ciency of, an organisation’s health and safety 
management.
Organisations with a positive safety cul-
ture are characterised by communications 
founded on mutual trust, by shared per-
ceptions of the importance of safety and 
by confi dence in the effi cacy of preventive 
measures.
The term safety climate is used to refer to psycho-
logical characteristics of employees, in other words the 
way that people feel about the safety culture within an 
organisation. An investigation into safety culture by the 
HSE into the two major rail crashes in 2000 and 2001 
concluded that the safety climate within an organisa-
tion is an expression of the values, attitudes and per-
ceptions of employees with regard to safety within an 
organisation.
So it can be seen that the safety climate of an 
organisation is an important infl uence on its overall 
safety culture. If employees’ own values, attitudes and 
perceptions do not motivate them to support and/or 
comply with safety rules the safety culture will be a 
negative one.

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Safety culture
61
There are various ‘safety climate’ assessment tools avail-
able which allow employers and responsible persons to 
assess the state of their safety culture. These normally 
take the form of staff questionnaires which can be used 
along with tangible indicators of safety culture (see 4.3 
below).