Safety Culture is loosely used to describe the corporate atmosphere or culture whereby ’Safe Production is understood to be, and is accepted as, the number one priority’ and is often defined as ’the way we do safety around here’.

A company’s safety performance is strongly linked to its safety culture. Safety culture can be divided into three aspects: psychological, behavioral, and situational . The psychological aspects dictate how people think and feel about safety, and is usually referred to as winning over people’s ‘Hearts & Minds’ to the safety cause. The behavioral aspects comprise of people’s everyday actions in regards to safety. The situational aspects cover the safety management systems that a company uses to set the guidelines for what people should do in various circumstances. These three aspects are inter-related: what happens in one aspect influences the other two.

The Business Process Model uses these three aspects to illustrate that the Inputs are processed by a combination of the company’s goals, expectations, and management practices, and Transformed into the safety culture Output to create the safety culture Outcome.

The Transformation Process shows that the company goals, expectations, and management practices demonstrated by the Company's Leadership are the key aspects for creating and maintaining a positive safety culture.

Assessing Safety Culture

Truly measuring safety culture often requires the use of more than one method (e.g. focus group exercises, observations,, safety system audits and Safety Culture Maturity assessments) each of which would broadly focus on the same topics associated with Incident Causation (e.g. senior management commitment, line-management actions, supportive actions, on-the-job behaviour, incident reporting and corrective actions). Ideally, data should be collected for all methods used at more or less the same moment in time, as one method helps to validate another.

Each method provides a different assessment perspective. In essence, these attempt to establish a baseline (beginning benchmark) by which future efforts can be compared or evaluate whether [1] the safety culture has changed for the better and [2] How do we know?

As safety culture experts, we can assess your safety culture using all the methods available, separately or in combination, to provide you with an effective and focused path forward, to put you on the right road to achieving a world-class safety culture.

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