5 steps to build and maintain sustainable safety culture on board of your vessel


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Dear Crew-mates and colleagues ashore,

A safety culture in each organization is the result of individuals and group exertion in regards to company goals, core values, behaviors and proficiency of organizations safety program. That’s why it is very important to established safety culture and injuries free environment in your working place.

As we are a part in keeping themselves and other safe I would like to bring to your attention a great 5 steps to build and maintain a safety culture on board of your vessel.

But first of all, remember that safety is something more than a set of activities centered on accident prevention. Is the way of thinking how we are performing our job and how we can demonstrate positive attitude to further changes across our company during this important mission.

  1. Always evaluate risks

We need to understand the risks that we are facing every day with routine or special jobs. Each of them can cause a harm. It is very important to identify and evaluate the risks before they can result in human or property loss. Always review your work and behavior to determine if there is a sufficient prevention or mitigation of loss.

There is coming a question how to identify a risk?

For this purpose we handle near misses and incidents reports. They teach us how to identify a root causes and exposures that can threat the safety of us or our properties. Need to learn? Start reading today and try to implement results in your behavior and behavior of your colleagues.

  1. Have a plan to be safe

Any plan is better than no plan at all, but in safety matter a proper plan is essential. Only when is ready you should execute the plan to completely eliminate or at least minimize a risk. There is some practical tips for your plan:

  • Always try to stay focused on performing tasks,
  • Get commitment from experience persons,
  • Think about the greatest threats which can occur. You should consider a potential loss,
  • Identify solution and resources as well use safety policies and procedures or equipment to complete task safely.
  1. Monitor and evaluate safety around you

You are looking at the mirror and you know that you are responsible for your safety, but not all people think like you. To move them from safety-maybe to safety-first all of us need to act by monitoring and continuously evaluating workplace for safety. Change bad behaviors and beliefs to implement safety culture of yours as a daily routine. This can be done easily by team conversation during safety committee meeting or transferring knowledge from you – Lead by Example.

  1. Positive Reporting Process

Yes, all of us do not like paper job, but be sure, documentation is a necessary step. Safety slogans are great, but to identify issues before they became costly in life we need to create a lesson to learn. When the safety hazards or concerns are reported, you are building a shield, a positive safety culture. Thanks to you will be much easier to find a risk factors and putting control measures in place, in your designed working plan.

  1. Celebrate your safety success

This is a reward on the end of the day, the reward that safety come’s first and nothing bad happened to you or your mates. You had everything under control.


This is just starting point to build up a proper safety culture. It is the real test of your safety behavior. How it will works is completely depend of you and your incident prevention. All our effort need to be focused on “Think & Prevent” and protect us, our colleagues and properties before that incident can happened.

Does safety win every time or only when it’s the easy and convenient option?

Safety needs to win every time or you’ve developed a toxic culture. It’s that simple.