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As supply chains and businesses become more global, safety professionals must develop and carry out work-based safety programs in cross-cultural settings. Safety professionals work on both sides of these exchanges: companies send safety professionals to oversee operations in a foreign country, and foreign companies employ local safety personnel. In either case, safety professionals must adjust their own approaches to safety, and that of their organizations, to effectively adapt to the global economy.
Safety professionals need both theoretical and practical tools to promote OSH while working crossculturally. These tools help safety professionals identify the importance of culture and better understand different cultures so they can work effectively with employees they supervise, as well as with those who supervise them. This article discusses key areas that safety professionals should consider when evaluating their individual capacity, and that of the institutions they represent, to promote safety in cross-cultural settings. It highlights common challenges, approaches and mistakes that safety professionals and organizations make when working cross culturally. Finally, it provides a starting point for learning how to identify and avoid these mistakes.
Culture & Safety
The first step to address culture and safety is to understand culture. Although culture is a common concept in our society, people often have an easier time giving examples of culture than defining it. Indeed, even events that promote respect for workplace diversity often focus on outward manifestations of culture, such as food or holidays. However, culture plays a much deeper role in our lives than simply the clothes we wear or the food we eat. To remain effective, competitive and safe, organizations need managers and safety professionals who can understand culture's role in the workplace and can navigate cultural differences (Kanter, 1995).
Culture can be defined in many ways. For OSH, we can understand culture as a system of shared beliefs and behaviors that affects how workers from different ethnic and social groups perceive, understand, adapt to and address safety concerns at work. A group of people builds culture through social interaction, which shapes how they think, act and feel in the world (Carpenter-Song, Schwallie & Longhofer, 2007). This ranges from the esoteric (e.g., what is beauty) to the mundane (e.g., how we manage time). These interactions develop in response to specific physical...