Fair and Just Culture
The purpose of a Fair and Just Culture is to ensure that:
- All employees are treated fairly when things go wrong
- An atmosphere of trust is built and maintained in which employees are encouraged to provide essential safety related information
- The focus remains on identifying and addressing systemic issues and underlying causes
The overall objective is often to increase reporting and therefore improve safety monitoring. In Cortexia’s experience, designing Fair and Just Culture Procedures and Decision Tools is often the easiest part. Implementing the change is far more challenging, requiring organisational persistence and good change management.
Here are our top lessons learnt from our implementations and some of the key aspects of just culture best practice:
- Ensure coverage of the full spectrum of behaviour and violations within decision tool
- Include both employee and manager consequences
- Clear ‘no blame’ demarcation
- Clear procedure alongside decision tool
- Refresher training provided with case-studies focussed on applying decision tool
- Development of a change management plan alongside effective socialisation of new procedure
- Consistent application across managers is key – ongoing training
- Provide feedback to people inputting reports so as not to reinforce view of paper pushing exercise
Feel free to contact us with any questions or take a look here how we can help your company with a customised Fair and Just Culture Program.
Cortexia: Leading Human Factors Consultancy Australia