What are the key HOF issues?
In 2015, SNCF launched a major safety program (called PRISME) to improve its overall safety performance. As baseline of this program, the company has deployed a Just & Fair (J&F) approach to create a climate of trust and then encourage everyone to report safety problems and thus being able to fix them.
What did you do?
To support its just culture approach, SNCF provides the J&F booklet. This useful tool is designed to help operational staffs in analising safety incidents by considering Human and Organisational Factors (HOF) in order to determine the actions needed to prevent a safety incident from happening again.
The approach is “Just” because it distinguiches between the individual and the system root causes of a safety event; it is “Fair” because the precessing of similar behaviors results in the same outcome.
Recently (in 2022), the booklet was updated and, to go even further, the J&F approach was complemented by no-blame charter, signed by top managers.
What were the results?
The work carried out has made a significant contribution to enrich just culture (which is one of the 7 characteristic of the SNCF’s Safety Culture model).
The J&F approach (i.e. the booklet and the charter) helps to develop freedom to speak about safety issues in the entire group and thus to have a better understanding of system strengths and weaknesses.
The SNCF’s Just & Fair approach booklet
Author: Florence Magnin-Lot (SNCF)
