MEDIA RELEASE
18 August 2008
Safety culture summit aims to save lives
Business leaders are being urged to show the way in encouraging a “safety culture” within workplaces.
The Leaders in Health and Safety Summit held by the Department of Labour in Wellington today was attended by more than
120 senior executives and health and safety managers.
Department of Labour Chief Adviser on workplace health and safety David Tregoweth said the department was delighted with
the good response to the Summit.
“We want more workplaces to commit to building safer work cultures,” he said. “Safety and productivity are the result of
good management and good leadership. Safety is not a trade-off for productivity. The two go hand in hand.”
Speakers at the summit discussed instances where safety culture had been applied successfully, as well as catastrophic
occasions when it hadn't.
“Safety culture is what everyone does, when no one is looking,” said Mr Tregoweth. “It is the ‘unwritten’ rules about
what is and is not okay in a workplace. It’s about the collective practices which are supported by both managers and
workers which reflect people’s values and beliefs.”
A positive safety culture could ultimately help reduce workplace injuries and save lives, he said. International
research showed it also helped productivity, job satisfaction and corporate reputation.
“For all that to happen, we need great leadership. Good practices come from the top down. This summit is about
supporting businesses and encouraging that leadership to come from within industry. After all, good health and safety is
simply good business.”
Key note speaker Professor Andrew Hopkins from the Australian National University, a world-renowned safety culture
expert, said good safety culture placed an over-riding priority on safety and ensured that safety issues received the
attention they deserved.
“Cultures of denial” prevented organisations from picking up the warning signs that were always present before
accidents, he said. “Such cultures must be overcome if organisations were to become truly ‘mindful’.”
Reporting systems were vital for picking up indicators of danger and management must carefully consider the sorts of
things that should be reported and find ways to encourage such reports, he said. Management should also be made more
effectively accountable for the way they responded.
“A cultural approach to safety is not saying ‘ignore the systems; all we need to do is get the culture right’. On the
contrary, the right culture is necessary to make safety systems work.”
Prof. Hopkins was invited to New Zealand by the Electricity Engineers Association (EEA) for a series of workshops that
marked the launching of the Electricity Supply Industry Health and Safety Strategy to 2020.
ENDS