Guidelines - Required competencies and relevant training for management to improve safety performance

Summary

This leaflet identifies the competencies and training required by management to create the conditions for implementing a sustainable safety culture in railway companies in terms of values, beliefs, attitudes and behaviour.

It posits a competence-based approach to safety management, underlining the importance of starting with the top management level, to ensure ownership of and responsibility for safety by individual managers and by the organisation as whole. Safety must be integrated with other strategic objectives, which should be written down, to ensure that potential conflicts between safety and other objectives are avoided. Individual and corporate safety goals and criteria must be aligned to ensure that management responsibilities for safety are clearly identified within the organisation as a whole.

The safety management system will normally be based on 5 steps following the Deming cycle:

The leaflet then goes on to define the specific roles and required competencies for various managerial levels from senior management down and recommends forms of training to ensure that the relevant competency levels are achieved.

Finally, it includes a guideline for a training standard.