Safety Management system or SMS in organisations is the buzzword in the corporate world these days. Aviation, as an industry, has a strong safety record, and the SMS journey is intended to enhance that safety across the entire industry further. So, where does one of the biggest OEMs globally, Boeing stand on SMS grounds? Let us find out from aerospace engineer Michael P. Delaney, Boeing’s Chief Aerospace Safety Officer. In this role, he is responsible for strengthening Boeing’s safety practices and culture and developing the company’s comprehensive Global Aviation Safety strategy.
What is Positive Safety Culture?
The Positive Safety culture in an organisation has several underlying factors. It is essentially a top-down, organization-wide approach to managing safety risk, and it ensures you have adequate risk controls that you can take action on. The organisation needs to the flexible in dealing with the issues as they come along the way, thereby making substantive decisions and taking action accordingly. The organisation also needs to be open-minded to learn, unlearn and re-learn new things to create compelling and informed choices that conclude safety that affect the outcome. Besides, the organisation also needs to be informed and knowledgeable about the technical factors, the environmental factors, the changes going on. As Mike Delaney correctly states, SMS came out of the airline part of the business for Boeing.Boeing follows what they call the reporting piece or in-house “speak up.” Under this, People can voluntarily raise safety issues to respond and learn from them.
One of the most critical aspects of the concept is culture. It’s a balance between, on one extreme, a highly punitive culture and, on the other extreme, a culture that has no consequences. And what you want to do is define where the line is. When you’re on the one side of the line, the organisation’s response is to learn, adapt, get better, stronger, and safer. And if you cross the line, then there is a consistent behaviour of taking action. And you don’t want to blend those because that becomes critical to enable people to speak up, learn, understand the risks, and make flexible responses, Mike adds.
As a commitment to this positive safety culture, Boeing has voluntarily stepped up the SMS. Apart from the compliance- and a conformance-based requirement of their regulation, Boeing has also added the Safety Management System piece, which goes with the quality management and compliance systems to enable Boeing to unlock further safety in the operator. Mike continues, we’re starting to see these relationships through this common language and behaviour that will allow us to talk with our airlines and take action that will improve the flying public’s safety in the commercial space-based on actions we take in the OEM space.
The Challenge – Imbibing the positive safety culture in employees
When asked about how do the employees embody this positive safety culture and work together to make it happen, Mike responded by saying that it is a collective effort by our team to understand this positive safety culture and to think about the actions and controls we have that can impact the safety of the fleet. When we say employees, every individual is working for the Boeing company. He further adds, today, we’re leading through commercial. But this has implications for our defence and services sides. Having our employees understand this is something we get to do to make the flying public better, to create The Boeing Company better. These are not things we’re doing to our employees. We are doing these things to improve the safety of the people who fly and use our products.
Where does Boeing stand on the SMS front?
Historically, the aviation industry has a strong safety record. And the SMS journey is intended to enhance that safety across the entire industry further. But the OEMs are just starting this journey. Mike emphasises the good news aspect; Boeing has people we can look at. Externally, the airlines have been on this journey for quite some time. Some of our customers use the same language around culture, SMS, and positive safety culture. Adding further good news, he says we have a couple of locations in Boeing that have mature SMS, positive safety cultures, and just cultures. And those look very similar to some of our big customers.
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One of them is in Boeing Defence UK. We have been working with them, benchmarking them, and using them as an example. We are going to learn from our team. We will steal shamelessly from our customers that are already down the line on this journey and try to leverage it and connect it — connect our SMS and our risk register to our customers and the industries and ideally to the other prominent players in the industrial space. That’s how we will move the needle on safety, Mike concludes.
