The Aluminium Federation (ALFED) and 5alpha, working together to measure and improve the health & safety culture across the aluminium industry. It will provide us a unique understanding of the issues faced across the industry provide and it enable to ALFED to provide specific advice and support to its members.
But… What is in it for you and your organisation?
There is an old saying, “we cannot improve what we don’t measure”. This is definitely true when it comes to health and safety culture and many of you may be using measurement tools at the moment. So why use 5alpha? Simply because it is free, this means that no matter the size of the organisation, everyone can use the tool to measure their culture and set improvement goals.
What is 5alpha?
5alpha is a unique, evidence-based approach to health and safety cultural measurement, owned and operated by Implexis Consulting Ltd. The system is designed to allow measurement across any size of organisation in line with the organisational structure.
5alpha uses a licensed online self-assessment system, which looks at five criteria of health & safety:
• Health and Safety policy, leadership and board governance
• Organising for control and communication
• Securing cooperation, competence and development of employees at all levels
• Planning and implementing risk controls through coordinated management arrangements
• Monitoring, Audit and Review
These criteria are broken down into 22 elements. Each of these elements is measured against the six stages of the Roscoe Bizzell (2014) model of SHE cultural development– see figure 1.
Figure 1: The Roscoe Bizzell (2014) model of SHE Cultural Development
This model is used as it includes the unique stage of System Obsessed, where organisations have become caught up in safety processes and internal requirements that add little or nothing of value to the progression or maintenance of safety.
Historically organisations have used culture surveys to measure their culture; whilst culture surveys may give an indication of the culture, because they are based on peoples’ perceptions at a single point of time, they often do not give a true and accurate measurement. We have spent years looking at this issue and have developed 5alpha to provide a consistent, evidence-based assessment of the culture from site to site, year on year. So rather than just looking at how people “feel” about the culture at a single point of time, using 5alpha we are able to help our clients accurately understand the level of maturity (based on evidence) of each individual site, which are improving, and which are not.
Measurement however should only be the first step. Once we know where we are, we can then put in place a clear plan for how over the next year we are going to improve, as culture development is achieved one step at a time, we just need to be clear what our next step is.
5alpha allows an organisation to set clear goals for improvement along with an owner for each goal and a target date. These goals can then be reviewed and updated as appropriate.
The 5 simple components of 5alpha
5alpha is made up of 5 components which together, support the continual improvement of health and safety culture.
We will go through each of these components to demonstrate how effective 5alpha can be in order to help organisations measure and understand both the overall culture and the range of micro-cultures that make up the overall culture.
Component 1: Self-Assessment
Self-assessment can be carried out at any level of the organisation from main Board level, to individual sites. The assessment is conducted against the evidence requirements for each of the 22 elements.
This is a simple web-based process that involves measuring the elements against the Roscoe Bizzell model of cultural maturity. The web site takes the self-assessment team through each of the elements step by step.
Each element has a description, a clarifying statement and the evidence requirements to achieve that level.
The self-assessors identify and attach evidence to show how they have achieved each level.
When they cannot show evidence to achieve a level, the score is the highest completed level.
Component 2: Goal Setting
Measuring culture and achieving a score is not the overall goal. The goal has to be to continually improve on the health and safety culture. The reason that we must continually work on the culture is simple, as soon as we become complacent and stop trying to improve culture, the culture starts to degrade.
Therefore, for each of the 22 elements, once a score has been achieved, goals are developed in order to achieve the next stage in cultural development.
The aim here is to help each site to continually improve. It is not a ranking system to name and shame, but to simply understand where a site is in terms of its maturity, to help it understand its strengths and weaknesses and therefore to help it to improve.
Component 3: Independent Audit
Some organisations like the assurance of an independent validation to ensure that the self-assessment is a reasonable reflection of the organisational culture.
As the assessors are external, they are not part of organisational politics, they have no interest in the outcome other than to show that it reflects the organisational culture.
Component 4: Results and Board Report
Once the self-assessment is complete, the data can be accessed by anyone with that level of clearance. The data is available at site level and the overall score for the organisation.
The score comes in two parts:
Level 0 – 5: This is the maturity of the culture in the vertical progression (Fully System Obsessed being 0, Avoidance being 1 and Fully Integrated being 5)
Alpha to Echo: This is the amount of data that scores within System Obsessed. This is extremely important as System Obsessed is a trap that a number of organisations fall into. We therefore measure the level of System Obsessed to identify how far over to the right of the model has the organisation become or been driven.
Component 5: Re-measure
5alpha is an iterative process, as is continuing to develop health and safety culture. Many cultural surveys will just offer a one-off snapshot of the culture, 5alpha provides a process of year on year self-assessment which builds into the health and safety planning at both a site level and at an organisational level.
Each year we therefore go back, review the goals and self-assess what improvement has been made in the culture during that year. This shows improvement through a step by step process and also identifies if any site is struggling in terms of their cultural maturity.
Summary
The 5alpha process is designed to be as simple as possible, while providing an accurate, evidence-based measure of the health & safety culture of an organisation and the micro-cultures within the organisation that make up the overall culture.
It allows for the creation and completion of goals that have a measurable impact on the organisation’s culture and help to keep the overall culture moving forward.
For more information, please go to www.5alphamodel.com or contact us at info@5alphamodel.com to arrange a demonstration.
