Introduction to Fire Safety Management

4.4
How to assist in the development of 
a positive safety culture within an 
organisation
While the guidance contained in current fi re safety docu-
mentation is a little sparse on fi re safety culture, the HSE 
describe in their guidance document HSG65 – ‘Effective 
health and safety management’ that there are four build-
ing blocks to an effective safety culture. The blocks are 
often classifi ed as the ‘four Cs’ of control, cooperation, 
communication and competence. The following sections 
discuss these four Cs:
➤
Control – the methods by which an organisation 
controls its safety performance
➤
Cooperation – the means that an organisation will 
secure the cooperation between individuals, safety 
representatives and groups
➤
Communication – the methods by which the organ-
isation will communicate in, through and out of, the 
organisation
➤
Competence – the means by which the organisation 
manages the competency levels of individuals and 
teams.
4.4.1 Control
Establishing and maintaining control is fundamental to 
all management activities.
Control over safety management starts by allocating 
clear and unequivocal roles and responsibilities through-
out an organisation. The roles and responsibilities will 
be formalised in the safety policy (see Chapter 2) and 
will enable all those with responsibilities to be clear as 
to what is expected of them, together with the level of 
resources at their disposal and the degree of authority 
they have to act and/or make decisions.
In addition to allocating clear roles and responsibil-
ities, it is equally important to ensure that individuals and 
teams are made accountable for their performance. This 
is not to say that there need be an inappropriate level 
of oppressive monitoring or supervision, but rather a 
system whereby the individuals are aware that they will 
be required to account for the way in which they have 
discharged their responsibilities.
Without ensuring individuals are accountable for their 
action the exercise of allocating roles and responsibilities 
is merely academic. Management systems that are used 
to ensure individual and team safety accountabilities 
include:
➤
Written job description that contains reference to 
safety responsibilities and objectives
➤
Job appraisal and performance review systems that 
measure and reward good safety performance
➤
Systems that deal with failures and that identify a 
range of actions that can be taken to rectify the fail-
ures. (This is often achieved through the normal dis-
cipline arrangements of the organisation.)
Once roles, responsibilities and accountabilities have 
been established, it is then necessary to set some key 
safety objectives both for the organisation as a whole, 
and where appropriate for individual members of staff. 
For example, a company may wish to adopt a measured 
reduction of unwanted fi re alarm actuations and may do 
so by linking the reduction of false alarms to a mainten-
ance engineer’s bonus pay scheme.
Safety objectives need to be ‘SMART’ and 
supported by plans that will identify both key milestones 

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