Designing a Safety Culture Maturity Model

Abstract

Safety culture has received increasing attention during the last decades. A recent critical review compiled previous models established for the evaluation of safety culture. A need still exists for a maturity model that covers the most important factors of the existing validated models and proposes an approach to maturity evaluation. The aim of this study is to design a new maturity model for measuring and analyzing safety culture. Fourteen safety culture maturity models that had been assessed for validity or reliability were selected, analyzed, and compared. The most common themes and evaluation criteria for safety culture were used as a basis for the new model. The five main themes of the model were communication, training, organizational learning, management commitment, and employee commitment and involvement. The model evaluates maturity by combining written descriptions of best practices and the overall satisfaction of employees in the evaluated aspects. The perspective of employee satisfaction with safety culture acknowledges the need to fit the practices into contextual needs. The model is unique because of its balance between rigor (validated content from the literature) and relevance (written evaluation levels). The model can be used as an assessment, audit, benchmarking, and improvement tool.