When it comes to safety, most companies limit their focus to compliance and retrospective indicators like accident frequency and severity. That’s understandable – for large organizations in particular, successfully doing compliance is already a huge undertaking.
But this approach is not without problems. As Daniel Ramelsberger of MAN Truck & Bus notes, it reduces safety to a few standard KPIs that constrict a company’s ability to make real progress – and it turns safety into a siloed issue that relies too heavily on making and imposing rules. A recent Harvard Business Review article concluded that companies can achieve better sustainability and business performance when safety is frame as a business value driver rather than primarily a compliance issue.
Here we present five principles for developing a positive, collaborative safety culture – one that prioritizes prevention, inspires safe behaviors, and opens the door to wider benefits for the company and everyone in it.
We show those principles in action at MAN Truck & Bus, a company that is changing its safety culture through a dedicated department: Corporate Safety Solutions (CSS), headed by Daniel Ramelsberger.
MAN Truck & Bus
MAN Truck & Bus is one of Europe’s leading commercial vehicle manufacturers and providers of transport solutions with annual sales of around € 14.8 billion (2023). The product portfolio includes vans, trucks, buses, diesel and gas engines as well as services related to passenger and freight transport. MAN Truck & Bus is a TRATON SE company and employs approx. 33,000 people worldwide.
corporate safety solutions at MAN
Head of Occupational Safety at MAN Truck & Bus
Corporate Safety Solutions (CSS) was founded in 2021 as part of MAN Truck & Bus. It began in the safety department at the Munich site, when the team there formed an idea for approaching safety differently. The aim was to adopt a wider view of safety that would make prevention visible and drive cultural change. Now CSS works in partnership with multiple levels of the company to collaboratively shape the safety culture and track progress towards their shared vision.
1. adopt a clear vision and develop the tools for implementing it
Engaging people in cultural change requires a shared vision – one that’s specific, motivating, and promises clear benefits. A custom set of KPIs that reflect multiple dimensions of safety can help make and track progress towards the vision. Choosing a limited number of relevant key metrics that are actionable and consider the realities of the business will focus efforts and avoid overloading staff.
Keep in mind that these metrics are about more than just recording numbers: They provide the foundation for understanding, discussing, and forming an individualized approach to safety throughout the organization, thereby helping to shape the mindset of employees.
CSS has linked its vision to its Safety Performance Index (SPI), a tool developed in-house that covers compliance, prevention, behavior, and retrospection. Each of these four sub-indices is tied to five indicators that can be evaluated via four levels inspired by the Bradley Curve. Level 1 reflects a purely reactive safety culture. At Level 4, safety is a matter of course, with everyone looking out for themselves and others.
To define the SPI, Daniel explains that CSS convened collaborative workshops to gather input from everyone involved in safety at MAN. This kind of approach can help ensure that KPIs are relevant and achieve broad acceptance across the company. Daniel also notes that it’s as much about the “how” as the “why”: “Instructions, inspections, risk assessments – these are familiar terms to anyone involved in occupational safety. But if you ask people what a good risk assessment looks like, you’ll get multiple different answers. With the SPI, we’ve produced clear definitions and benchmarks that everyone understands.”
Collectively, the company will realize its vision through two overarching goals: Achieve Level 3 on the Safety Performance Index by 2025, and Level 4 by 2030. This long horizon is deliberate: “You can’t change culture in two years,” says Daniel. “It takes time.”
2. change structures to replace silos with collaboration
When occupational safety is viewed and managed as an add-on to daily business, it’s a problem: Culture is collaborative by nature and silos are an obstacle to collaboration. Businesses will struggle to evolve their safety culture if they keep it isolated in specific roles or departments.
When safety tangibly permeates the entire company from the C-suite to the shop floor, everyone feels ownership of it. This paves the way for a culture where safety is an integral, automatic part of everyone’s day-to-day behavior. Multi-stakeholder communication is one way to drive this structural change.
With the CSS team, MAN has created a network that gives safety more visibility and attention. Senior leaders and around 60 safety experts at the various sites all participate agilely in safety. Crucially, the CSS team has the expertise necessary to produce guiding principles for all the company’s safety experts. Within this framework, each site is free to develop its own safety measures.
To support the safety experts in their work, CSS runs coaching sessions that allow them to discuss cultural issues such as how to address unsafe behavior and develop a safety mindset in their teams. For the C-suite, CSS convenes workshops that provide a forum for leaders to share experiences and set safety goals for the coming year. And, importantly, meetings between the C-suite and all health and safety experts worldwide create a space where everyone can contribute and be heard on matters of safety.
The approach is having the desired effect: It’s creating a sense of community around safety. “We’re all in much closer contact now. It’s a much tighter network,” says Daniel.
3. create a new mindset and a level playing field
Achieving cultural change also involves changing perspectives on safety. This can be achieved by creating an environment where everyone is equally included in safety, understands why the change is happening, and sees how they can play their part.
Within the CSS concept, a safety expert is a collaborative coach, not a distant consultant. Instead of merely issuing warnings, setting out generic solutions, and leaving the decision to the manager, MAN’s safety experts are encouraged to see themselves as supportive partners, contributors to a dialogue, and able to actively steer safety.
The Safety Performance Index treats employees as experts in their field: To reach the highest SPI levels, managers must actively involve their employees. For instance, instead of issuing instructions on safety as a purely box-ticking exercise, managers need to ask their employees what risks they see in their workplace and what safety measures would make the most sense to them. This helps incorporate safety into day-to-day business, giving it a concrete, relatable meaning that inspires people to care about it.
Everyone benefits from the shift towards pragmatism and involvement: “One of the major advantages of the SPI is that it finally makes safety transparent,” says Daniel. The KPIs define exactly what good safety looks like, and the criteria for moving up the levels is crystal clear. This specificity can be motivating and keep everyone pulling in the same direction.
4. keep track of data to visualize and drive progress
Once a company has defined its vision of safety and chosen its KPIs, it needs to monitor these KPIs regularly via questionnaires at each of its locations. To clearly visualize developments over time, these questionnaires should remain consistent over multiple years. A complete and well-maintained database is also key for ensuring meaningful results.
MAN uses the AMCS EHS Management solution to digitally model its safety culture. The tools make it easy to stay compliant while also recording preventive and behavioral data: Managers can log observations of safe or unsafe situations with just a few clicks – using the mobile app, for instance. “They don’t have to record things on paper and do manual calculations anymore,” explains Daniel.
He also notes that the data can flow seamlessly into MAN’s sustainability reports, which it must produce under Europe’s Corporate Sustainability Reporting Directive (CSRD). In other words, digitalizing the evolving safety culture helps MAN also comply with its wider sustainability obligations: “What we’re doing with the Safety Performance Index fully supports the CSRD data, because a lot of that is also about prevention and softer factors, not just accident rates.”
A centralized EHS data system with tools that support MAN’s goal of increasing its company-wide commitment to safety does more than just deliver valid insights for corporate reporting: It also allows the company to strategically incorporate and steer future measures from both a corrective and preventive perspective. “If you have no KPIs and no system, then you’re likely to implement lots of individual, unconnected measures. At MAN, we want to do things differently by addressing safety holistically,” says Daniel. This also includes the ability to identify individual areas and potential for improvement, and to set deliberate priorities and pursue them in a results-oriented way.
5. harness the performance benefits
While the primary benefit of better workplace safety is that it protects people, a positive safety culture can also benefit companies financially: Poor safety is estimated to have cost the US, employers, and individuals $171 billion in 2019 – whereas effective safety can boost productivity and profitability.
As Daniel says, cultural change takes time, but with CSS, MAN is well on its way: Senior leadership is now fully on board and views the activities and communication around safety as an integral part of the business. Managers are even proactively approaching their safety experts to ask for advice and evaluations so they can see if they’ve improved and can plan what to focus on next.
Daniel believes a positive safety culture has great potential for enhancing performance on quality: “Success for us means very few accidents and no negative impacts on health. This leads to fewer absences and a greater sense of connection to the company. And that produces a high level of quality that customers recognize and are willing to pay for.”
For safety experts who want to develop a positive safety culture in their company, Daniel advises agreeing on a clear idea of how you want to change things and why. Then define your tools and bring the C-suite on board. After that, it’s best to just dive in. Doing something like this is undeniably a major project, but “don’t wait for the perfect moment. It won’t come, so you have to get started,” says Daniel.
If you want to start managing your safety data differently, check out the AMCS EHS Management solution today. The comprehensive tools include the EHS Platform for connecting all your health, safety, and environmental issues in one central system, the EHS App for quick and easy on-the-go task management, and EHS Analytics for advanced KPI evaluation.