CoR culture matters

When it comes to chain of responsibility, we believe culture is the key linchpin that makes your documents, manuals, processes and people work to achieve CoR and safety outcomes.  Paul Gaynor, CoRsafe founder, says “culture and systems are just reverse sides of the same safety coin.”

This topic should matter if you have:

-          Internal people that don’t follow policy/procedure?

-          Leaders who aren’t aware or don’t prioritise CoR?

-          Teams that ignore visible problems such as unsafe loads?

-          Supply chain parties unwilling to invest time to complete the register or self-audits?

-          Organisations that discount gaps identified in audits for improvement?

-          CoR managers struggling to influence those that you can’t seem to control or direct?

Culture is about whether people are ready, willing and able to behave in a certain way – it is a team’s underlying beliefs and drives their actions, even when nobody is looking.  Culture elevates CoR away from the existence of systems and documents (work imagined) and into the practical and observable actions (work being done) by the whole supply chain – making it real and effective.

WHAT DOES GOOD CoR CULTURE LOOK LIKE

CoRsafe have worked with our clients at the management and exec level to define what that means in observable chain of responsibility practices, across a range of levels….

We have recently introduced a CoR culture survey to help customers identify where they are on their journey (defined above).  This allows you to get a “cultural temperature check” before, during, and after the implementation of safety management systems – and to more accurately measure the degree to which cultural attitudes are aligning with formal CoR obligations.

Attendees at the November 2022 CoRsafe client workshops in Brisbane, Sydney and Melbourne self-identified their organisations CoR culture at the following levels.  This shows there were a broad range of needs present, and with one that felt they were absolute best in class, but a number that felt much improvement was needed.

CHANGING CULTURE

“One of the big capability gaps within transport and logistics is that often teams lack the leadership, planning, and strategic skills to effect cultural transformations that prioritise safety,” says Kelly McLuckie, NTI culture and change management expert.

“Often times the organisational will is there to create a good safety culture, but leadership doesn’t know how to achieve it. With so many competing priorities in front of them, people fall back to what they know, which is the technical work of transportation – despatching trucks or solving loading problems – while safety concerns fall by the wayside.”

The first step in changing this is building awareness of what level your culture is at today – and then mapping a path to improvement.

Reach out if you would like to undertake a CoR culture survey, or to discuss how to drive change and improve CoR culture within your business and/or supply chain.

Our team have put out numerous other pieces over the years about what is culture, why it matters and how to improve culture, including this ebook on building a high performing culture if you’d like to read more.

 “A good culture equals a good business,” Kelly says. “A profitable business is one that doesn’t waste time dealing with avoidable accidents, and where people feel psychologically safe to speak up and raise concerns directly.”

Sections republished from MHD Supply Chain Solutions https://issuu.com/primecreativemedia-2016/docs/mhd1021_lr/s/13578680