The Just Culture | Safe to Speak Up and how to Structure it

The definition of the Just Culture is one in which the front-line employees are being encouraged to voluntarily report any incident that occurs, even minor ones, that would otherwise have for the inadvertent human error, but reckless behavior and willful violations will not be tolerated. A Just Culture is the foundation of the Safe Culture.

The response from leadership should reflect which category they fall in. System accountability is then investigated to discover if it is fostering human error, and if so, it must be altered. This talk will cover identifying workplace themes of:

• Human Error – something that just happened and could have happened to anyone of us
• Unsafe Behavior- they made a bad choice-unknowingly introducing risk into the system
• Reckless Behavior – knowingly introducing unjustifiable risk into the system

Safety Culture and Cost Avoidance | Why We Want an Effective Safety Culture

In the 1980s, the airline industry was crashing an airplane every 8 weeks in this country. The airline that I worked for crashed 5 major jets in five years. By the time I was 31 years of age, 17 of my friends had died in aviation. Additionally, nearly 500 passengers were killed at this airline. Most of the aircraft were fine, Boeing and Airbus were delivering good planes. It was the culture that was killing us. With all the mergers happening in the industry, our safety culture had deteriorated. We needed to change how we did things, and we did. The aviation industry then catapulted itself into a zero-hull loss standard… there was an effective culture change, a “culture of safety” which would be heralded as one of the most dramatic and permanent evolutions in the American workplace on record. Millions of lives were saved as well as the aircraft that transported them. We discovered that human error is inevitable – not accidents!

We needed to put systems in place to catch these inevitable human errors before they became accidents. The old philosophy was “punish the hell out of them and that will make the pilots, doctors, nurses or mechanics stop having errors.” This actually caused more accidents. After we put the first system in place- Crew Resource Management or CRM, we continued to fly for more than three decades with no accidents. CRM introduces the necessary teaming behaviors as initiated by the leader. "