Ensuring the health and safety of employees is a core value at Sterling Crane and therefore the company president set the goal of becoming the safest crane rental company in North America and the world. To achieve this vision it was important that Sterling had a clear picture of the existing company safety level and the actions required to develop and maintain a zero harm culture. Good systems on their own, do not ensure successful health and safety management, the level of success is determined by how organisations ‘live’ their systems. The importance of safety culture is illustrated by the fact that although airlines across the world fly the same aircraft and train their crews to similar levels, the risk to passengers varies across the world’s carriers. Since all airlines use similar technology, systems and structures, the difference in performance is largely attributable to variations in their safety culture.

In order to achieve a continuously improving safety culture, Sterling Crane commissioned Dr. Mark Fleming of Saint Mary's University to undertake a project to measure the safety culture at Sterling Crane and to identify and recommend potential actions for improvement.

The Safety Culture Improvement Process consists of five stages or levels of maturity, and ten elements. The five levels of maturity are Level 1 - Documenting, Level 2 -Controlling, Level 3 -Engaging, Level 4 - Participating and Level 5 Institutionalizing. The Safety Culture Improvement Process consists of ten elements, which are listed in table 1 below.

Table 1: Safety Culture Improvement Process elements

1. Leadership
2. Supervisor visible commitment
3. Production pressures
4. Organizational learning
5. Communication
6. Resources
7. Rules and procedures
8. Trust levels
9. Training
10. Workforce involvement

An organization’s level of maturity is determined on the basis of employee perceptions of the company’s performance on these elements. Organizations progress sequentially through the five levels, by building on the strengths and removing the weaknesses of the previous level.

The safety culture measurement and improvement process is designed to:

• Establish the maturity of Sterling Crane's safety culture.
• Identify actions required to improve the safety culture.
• Improve safety performance on Sterling Crane through the implementation of actions identified.

Sterling Crane has now been running its SCAIP system for three years and is soon to move into the second phase of data recording where we again check the company’s safety pulse. We look forward to improving on our previous results.