Learning from mistakes, striving for excellence.
What is Just Culture?
A just culture is a culture where people are not punished for decisions and actions that are commensurate with their skills, experience and training. Human error, while it can be minimised, is inevitable and is seen in Just Culture as an opportunity for organisational learning and systemic improvement. However, people are held accountable for malevolent behaviour or acts of gross recklessness. A Just Culture allows leaders to identify and fix the underlying systemic issues, the things that make the next person more likely to make the same error.
Growing a Just Culture takes time, sustained commitment from leadership, and follow through, but brings significant benefits in a whole host of areas including team performance, staff turnover, safety, wellbeing, continuous improvement, and the bottom line.
See on this page how fostering a just and fair workplace through a Just Culture approach functions to improve safety, risk management, and organisational culture generally.
Safety
Just Culture has its origins as a necessary sub-culture in an overall safety culture, with the end goal of improving safety outcomes. Together with a reporting culture, informed culture, learning culture and flexible culture, a just culture will encourage safety reporting, particularly of errors or mistake that might otherwise remain hidden due to fear of punishment. Higher rates of disclosure of safety issues enables the organisation to address them through systemic improvement of the factors that give rise to them. To date, the aviation industry has been the biggest adopter of just culture in a safety context. It has also been increasingly adopted in medicine over the last 10-15 years. The classic example is an airline wanting to encourage pilots to report their errors to enable it to improve systems such as training to decrease the chance of aircraft accidents.
An increase in safety data from increased staff reports
Reductions in workplace injuries
Reductions in losses, delays, and damages from human error and poor work system processes
Better identification of gaps between 'work as done' and 'work as imagined'
Improved regulatory and ethical compliance
Better performing work systems
Better protection against psychosocial hazards
A well embedded Just Culture which is trusted by people within and around the organisation will help drive:
Risk
Just Culture can be utilised a way to improve the management of risk. Those risks might include safety, legal, financial, reputational, environmental, ethical, security, and many others. This utilisation has a focus on encouraging reporting of risk issues so they can be known and managed rather than hidden. Just culture has been adopted in institutions such as banks to improve managing of financial risks and legal compliance. Through a commitment to organisational learning from human error rather than punishment leaders can identify systemic causes of error and make them less likely.
Just Culture in the context of risk management and leverage also allows leaders to promote positive risk-taking and innovation. In a Just Culture our decisions and actions are assessed on the quality of those choices rather than the outcomes, which are often out of our control. This gives people the freedom to take considered risks, helping to build a more innovative organisation.
A well embedded Just Culture which is trusted by people within and around the organisation will bring:
A more just and fair workplace
Reductions in losses, delays, and damages from human error and poor work system processes
More effective risk management
Fostering a mindset of continuous improvement, innovation and creativity as employees are more willing to take calculated risks
Improved regulatory & ethical compliance
Better performing work systems
Organisation
Perhaps most importantly, Just Culture is a way of improving the overall culture of an organisation. An organisation which treats its people justly and fairly is a good thing in of itself. People generally have a desire to be treated fairly and will be feel deeply aggrieved if they feel this is not happening. None of us like to be treated unfairly, and one of the quickest ways to build a toxic workplace culture is through arbitrary, capricious, or inconsistent leadership.
However, when leaders instil and model a Just Culture, the organisation will not just feel like a better place to be, but it will perform better. An environment where employees feel safe and encouraged to speak up will be more willing to bring their ideas for innovation and solutions to problems, allowing the organisation to learn and grow.
When an employee leaves an organisation, so much organisational knowledge is lost, and so much time, energy, and money must be invested in finding a replacement and bringing them up to speed. A Just Culture approach means leaders can both avoid letting go employees unnecessarily (mistakenly thinking the individual is the problem) and encourage employee retention because staff feel they are in an environment where they are treated fairly and their contributions are valued.
Organisations where there is a high level of trust of fair and just treatment between staff and management will perform better, be attractive places to work, and have greater capacity for innovation.
A well embedded Just Culture which is trusted by people within and around the organisation will bring:
A more just and fair workplace
Increased employee wellbeing
Improved team performance
Being an ‘Employer of choice’ – more attractive to talented potential employees
Reduced employee turnover costs
Reduction in legal costs from workplace grievances and disputes
