International Helicopter Safety Team Safety Management System Toolkit

Do You Work in a Safety Culture?
The following questions have been adapted from Professor James Reason and are intended to help determine
if your organization is a true safety oriented culture. The fatal accident rate varies from one every
260,000 flight-hours to 1 in 11,000,000 --- depending on one big variable: the safety culture of the organization.
Where does your organization fit in? Answer these questions and find out. If you do not know the
answer, give it a 0.
I work in ___ Management, ___ Flight Crew, ___ Maintenance, ___ Support Staff
Give each question a rating by circling: 0, 5 or 10 according to the following scoring.
0 5 10
No, not my organization. Sometimes Yes, this is my organization.
1. MINDFUL OF DANGER: I believe our organization’s
management is very mindful of the human and
organizational factors that can endanger our operations.
0 5 10
2. MISSION STATEMENT: Our organization
illustrates its commitment to safety in its mission statement
that includes the call to operate safely.
0 5 10
3. SAFETY POLICY: Our organization has a safety
policy that is readily visible to all and spells out everyone’s
responsibilities toward safety.
0 5 10
4. ACCEPTS SETBACKS: I believe our organization’s
management understands and accepts occasional
setbacks and nasty surprises as inevitable. They
realize that staff will make errors and trains them to
avoid, or detect and recover from them.
0 5 10
5. COMMITTED: I believe our organization’s
management are genuinely committed to aviation
safety and provide adequate resources to serve
this end.
0 5 10
6. HF TRAINING: In our organization, all employees,
including management are trained in human
factors in order to learn how to avoid the error they
never intend to make.
0 5 10
7. EVENTS REVIEWED: In our organization, past
events are thoroughly reviewed at top level meetings
and the lessons learned are implemented as organization
wide reforms, not local repairs.
0 5 10
8. IMPROVED DEFENSE: After an incident in our
organization, the primary aim of management is to
identify the failed system defenses and improve them,
rather then to seek to divert responsibility to the
incident individuals.
0 5 10
9. DATA: I believe our management recognizes that
effective management of safety, just like any other
management process, depends critically on the collection,
analysis and dissemination of relevant information.
0 5 10
10. HEALTH CHECKS: In our organization,
management adopts a proactive stance towards
safety. That is, it does some or all of the following:
a) Takes steps to identify recurrent error traps and
remove them,
b) Strives to eliminate the workplace and organizational
factors likely to provoke error,
c) Brainstorms new scenarios of failure,
d) Conducts regular “health checks” on the organizational
process known to contribute to incidents.
0 5 10
11. STAFF ATTENDS SAFETY MEETINGS: In our
organization, staff attends meetings relating to safety
from a wide variety of departments and levels.
0 5 10
48 SMS Toolkit