Pathways to Safety is our innovative catalyst, which enables sustainable mindset change to foster a mindful and safe environment for our employees. The basic idea? Principles travel, solutions are local.
Discover the journey
Discovering Pathways starts with a kick-off module to create a shared vision among the top leaders. Subsequently, two teams – two top leaders with their teams – deeply dive into practice-based projects, diagnosing the current status of their safety culture via an intense self-evaluation. Furthermore, the teams examine actual incidents in an innovative format called event analysis to even better understand collective attitudes, mentalities and practices in their organization.
Navigating Pathways also starts with a top leaders workshop to create a shared understanding. In two following agile sprint modules, the participants experience behavior change in practice guided by the Pathways Change Process. This way, the participants step by step learn how concrete, small changes and their underlying factors lead to tangible improvements of their safety culture. Finally, all participants share their experiences and plan next steps during a concluding evaluation workshop.
Dive into the background
The thyssenkrupp safety culture ladder is our framework to assess the maturity level of our safety culture. Our ladder is based on the five-level safety culture maturity model developed by Hudson (2007).
With the thyssenkrupp safety culture principles we give answers to the three following questions:
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Why does a safety culture not develop on its own?
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How can we improve?
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What can we do in practice?
Working 'on' and 'in' the system
How leaders shape safety culture
Shaping a culture can be done by working 'on' the system. That means, you as leaders determine the conditions for the targeted culture. In this way, you design the system by creating favorable conditions. This can be accomplished by improving the organization, processes, or rules, as well as your own behavior and of course, the you distribute the resources accordingly.
Nearly even stronger is the aspect of working 'in' the system: By your behavior, your decisions and the questions you ask. You draw attention to what is important and what is not, and what approaches should be employed in order to achieve safety, reliability and performance in general.
In organizations, a balance must constantly be struck between conflicting expectations of e.g., shareholders, customers, employees, public policy. Whereas a leader it is your job to make the decisions required and to manage these contradictions, as well as accepting responsibility for decisions that are frequently quite consequential. For this reason, your behavior is being closely observed and has a strong impact on the culture. Your employees note very carefully: Do you opt for safety even if efficiency losses need to be accepted? According to what criteria are investment or procurement decisions made?
In other words, your task is not only to work on the system, but also in the system and to shape the sphere of social interaction.
