Capstone: a culture improvement plan

In the second year after the spiral conveyor injury, Rachel Okoye asked Elena Novak and the three site managers to turn everything they had learned into a written culture improvement plan for Harrowgate. The board wanted a plan it could follow and hold leaders to. The joint occupational health and safety committee co-chairs wanted a plan that workers would recognize as their own. And Rachel wanted a plan that would still be working after she had moved on. This capstone lesson walks through how they built it, and gives you a structure you can use for your own workplace.

A culture improvement plan is different from an ordinary safety plan. A safety plan lists hazards and controls. A culture plan sets out how leaders will change what people believe is really expected, through consistent changes in leadership behaviour, systems and conditions over two to five years. It brings together every topic in this course.

Step 1: Understand where you are

Every plan starts with an honest assessment. At Harrowgate Foods Ltd., the baseline drew on the sources covered in lessons 1, 2 and 11: the original pulse survey and the one-year climate survey; focus groups at all three sites; records of reports, injuries, near misses with SIF potential, corrective action closure and stop-work events; the investigation of the spiral conveyor injury; and leaders' own reflections using the maturity ladder.

The team summarized the baseline as a short set of findings rather than a score:

• The main plant and the distribution centre had moved from mostly reactive toward proactive; Kentville was still reactive.
• Reporting had become safer and more worthwhile at two sites, but not yet at Kentville or among agency workers.
• Procedures still often did not match how work was really done.
• Leaders' visible commitment had improved, but depended heavily on a few people.
• SIF precursors around forklifts and pedestrians remained the largest serious-injury risk.
• Night shift was better served than before but still had less access to training, meetings and leaders.

Step 2: Set a direction people can picture

A plan needs a clear direction. Slogans such as 'zero harm' or 'safety first' are easy to write but hard to act on, and zero-injury targets can encourage under-reporting, as lesson 7 showed. The team wrote a short statement of what the culture would look like in three years, in terms people on the floor could picture:

• 'Anyone at Harrowgate Foods Ltd. can stop a job and will be thanked for it.'
• 'Leaders spend real time on every shift, ask questions and come back with answers.'
• 'Procedures are written with the people who use them and match how the work is done.'
• 'Every event that could have killed someone is investigated as seriously as an injury.'
• 'New, temporary and night workers get the same protection and voice as everyone else.'

These statements came from the focus groups. Several were close to word-for-word quotes from workers describing what they wanted.

Step 3: Choose a few priorities

The most common reason culture plans fail is trying to do everything at once. The team chose four priorities for the next year, each linked to a finding:

• Leadership consistency: make the behaviours from lessons 3 and 4 part of every leader's standard work, coach them, and build them into performance reviews so they do not depend on individuals.
• Voice and learning: extend speak-up channels and learning teams to Kentville, night shift and agency workers, and start reviewing procedures with the people who use them.
• Serious risk: separate forklifts and pedestrians at the distribution centre and both plants, and verify critical controls for the company's top five high-energy hazards every week.
• Measurement and feedback: keep the annual survey and the indicator set, add quarterly pulse checks and share results with everyone.

Step 4: Turn priorities into actions with owners

Each priority became a small number of specific actions, each with an owner, a date, the resources needed and a way to know it was done. The team insisted that every action change something people could see or experience, not just produce a document.

Step 5: Involve workers throughout

Culture cannot be changed for people; it can only be changed with them. The joint occupational health and safety committee co-chairs, Sam Pellerin at the distribution centre and Tanya Morris at the main plant, helped choose the priorities, reviewed every action and agreed to co-present the plan to workers at every site and shift. Workers on each site helped decide how the pedestrian separation would be laid out and which procedures to review first.

In Nova Scotia, this involvement is also consistent with Nova Scotia's Occupational Health and Safety Act, which gives the joint occupational health and safety committee functions that include participating in identifying hazards, making recommendations and monitoring the occupational health and safety program. A culture plan developed with the committee strengthens the internal responsibility system rather than working around it.

Step 6: Plan for the hard moments

Every culture plan will be tested by something: a serious incident, a production crisis, a change in leadership, a downturn that brings cost cuts. The team wrote down in advance how leaders would respond to the most likely tests, so that the response would not depend on the mood of the moment:

• After a serious incident: leaders will respond with care for the people affected, use the just culture framework from lesson 6, and share what was learned at all sites.
• Under production pressure: no shortcuts on life-saving rules or critical controls; delays will be explained to customers rather than passed to the floor.
• During change: every significant change goes through management of change with workers involved (lesson 10).
• When leaders change: new leaders receive the plan, the leader standard work and a briefing from the joint occupational health and safety committee co-chairs in their first month.
• When the numbers look good: leaders will stay uneasy and keep looking for SIF precursors and drift (lessons 2 and 9).

Step 7: Measure, review and adjust

The plan included the measurement approach from lesson 11: an annual triangulated review using the survey, focus groups, observation and records, with quarterly pulse checks and indicators shared with all staff. Each quarter, the leadership team reviewed progress on every action, removed obstacles, and adjusted actions that were not working. Each year, the plan was refreshed with the joint occupational health and safety committees.

Elena built a simple tracker to show the leadership team, each quarter, which actions were on track and which needed help.

# Quarterly tracker for the year 1 culture plan actions.
from datetime import date
today = date(2026, 9, 30)
actions = [
    ("Leader standard work", date(2026, 3, 1), 100, 100),
    ("Behaviours in performance reviews", date(2026, 7, 1), 100, 70),
    ("Monthly learning teams incl. sauces plant", date(2026, 4, 1), 18, 18),
    ("Procedure reviews, top 20 tasks", date(2026, 12, 31), 20, 9),
    ("Pedestrian separation, all sites", date(2026, 6, 1), 3, 2),
    ("Weekly critical control checks", date(2026, 3, 1), 100, 96),
    ("Quarterly pulse survey", date(2026, 4, 1), 3, 3),
]
for name, due, target, done in actions:
    pct = 100 * done / target
    if pct >= 95:
        status = "on track"
    elif due < today:
        status = "LATE - needs help"
    else:
        status = "in progress"
    print(f"{name:<44} {pct:5.0f}%  due {due}  {status}")

Leader standard work                           100%  due 2026-03-01  on track
Behaviours in performance reviews               70%  due 2026-07-01  LATE - needs help
Monthly learning teams incl. sauces plant      100%  due 2026-04-01  on track
Procedure reviews, top 20 tasks                 45%  due 2026-12-31  in progress
Pedestrian separation, all sites                67%  due 2026-06-01  LATE - needs help
Weekly critical control checks                  96%  due 2026-03-01  on track
Quarterly pulse survey                         100%  due 2026-04-01  on track

At the end of the third quarter, two actions needed help: leader performance reviews were only 70 percent complete, and pedestrian separation was finished at two of the three sites, with the third held up by a racking supplier. The leadership team agreed to extend the review deadline for one month with HR support and to escalate the racking order. They also noted that procedure reviews, though only 45 percent complete, were ahead of the pace needed to finish by year-end.

What made the plan work

Two years after the spiral conveyor injury, the triangulated review showed the main plant and the distribution centre solidly proactive, and Kentville moving out of reactive. Reports and learning team actions continued to rise. The number of SIF-potential forklift events at the distribution centre had fallen by more than half after pedestrian separation. The injured worker had returned to work, helped train new sanitation staff and joined the joint occupational health and safety committee. When the night sanitation crew was asked what had changed, the most common answer was simple: 'They come and ask now, and they come back.'

Looking back, Rachel identified the things that had made the biggest difference: leaders who changed what they did and admitted their own say-do gaps; responses to bad news that made people want to bring more; a fair way of handling mistakes; a few visible decisions that put safety ahead of production when it cost something; and workers involved from the start. None of these required large budgets. All of them required consistency over time. The remaining courses in this track build on that foundation: supervisor responsibilities in HSE-402, investigation in HSE-403, management systems in HSE-404, committees in HSE-405, contractors in HSE-406, metrics and audits in HSE-407, and the final course, HSE-408.

Communicating the plan

A plan that lives in a binder changes nothing. The team presented it at every site and shift, in short sessions led jointly by the site manager and a joint occupational health and safety committee co-chair, with translation where needed. Each session covered three things only: what leaders had heard from workers, the four priorities and what people would see change in the next three months, and how to tell leaders if it was not happening. A one-page summary went on every notice board and in the break rooms, and the quarterly tracker was posted beside it. Rachel insisted that the first visible action at each site, such as a new pedestrian crossing or a learning team on a task workers had asked about, happen within a month of the presentation, so that the plan was linked from the start to something people could see.