Safety Culture Measurement: How to Assess and Change It Without Slogan Campaigns

What is safety culture, and how does it differ from safety climate?

The UK Health and Safety Executive (HSE) describes culture as “the way we do things around here”: the context in which people judge whether their behaviour is appropriate. It treats safety culture as a subset of overall organisational culture. ^[1] The International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) defines it as the assembly of characteristics and attitudes in organisations and individuals which ensures that protection and safety issues receive the priority attention their significance warrants. ^[4]

The IAEA guide likens culture to an iceberg: above the surface are visible artefacts such as behaviour, words and symbols; below it are less visible elements such as norms, values and assumptions. ^[4] The sign at the site gate is only part of the surface.

Hence the difference between culture and climate. Safety climate usually refers to workers’ perceptions and attitudes at a given time, typically measured by survey. That is why HSE describes its Safety Climate Tool as measuring an element of safety culture, not the whole of it. ^[2]

Why don’t campaigns and slogans change the culture?

HSE identifies the largest influences on safety culture: management commitment and style, employee involvement, training and competence, communication, compliance with procedures, and organisational learning. ^[1] Nothing on that list is called an awareness campaign.

HSE also notes that many organisations focus on whether employees follow rules, when management culture matters even more, and it names a common mistake: confining change efforts to those below the manager who started them. It expects senior managers to accept that their own perceptions and behaviours will be examined and challenged. ^[1]

The same warning applies to behavioural safety programmes used as a substitute for working on culture. HSE sees them as a useful addition for occupational safety, but with limited benefits for controlling major hazards; they can shift responsibility from management to individuals, and they fail if trust is low or if workers see them as “another programme” or a blame culture. ^[3]

How do you measure safety culture?

The first rule in the IAEA’s self-assessment guide is that using multiple methods is essential, because each method gives different information and engages people differently. The guide recommends analysing each method’s results independently at first, to avoid premature conclusions. ^[4]

The second rule is that analysis starts descriptively: describe what you see and hear without mixing it with how things “should be”, and only then compare with the reference framework as a separate step. ^[4] If the assessment team arrives with a verdict already formed, it will find what it is looking for.

When bringing results together, look for commonalities and discrepancies across methods, choose representative examples while preserving anonymity, and go back to the data or collect more where a conclusion needs clarifying. ^[4] A contradiction between what the survey says and what observation shows is not a measurement error; it is often the most important finding.

In practice, a medium-sized organisation can start with a simple plan: a survey of all staff, separate focus groups for each job level so workers do not hold back in front of their supervisors, interviews with a number of supervisors and managers, observation of work across more than one shift, and a review of incident reports, procedures and safety meeting minutes.

The guide’s practical cautions include protecting respondents’ anonymity, because breaching it undermines any future assessment, and not relying on a single interpreter of the results, because every interpretation is biased to some degree. ^[4]

What does a safety climate survey ask?

If a questionnaire is one of your tools, borrow the structure of HSE’s Safety Climate Tool. It is an online survey of 40 questions with anonymous responses, measuring eight factors: ^[2]

• Organisational commitment.
• Health and safety oriented behaviours.
• Health and safety trust.
• Usability of procedures.
• Engagement in health and safety.
• Peer group attitude.
• Resources for health and safety.
• Accident and near miss reporting.

A useful feature of the tool is that it compares management and employee results and allows segmentation by group. ^[2] That comparison often matters more than the score itself: if management sees near-miss reporting as safe and workers see it as risky, you have found your first priority.

On Gulf work sites where people work in several languages, check that every group understands the questions and that responses are collected in a way workers trust will not reveal who they are.

Where does your organisation sit on the maturity ladder?

The Energy Institute’s Hearts and Minds programme presents a five-level ladder of safety culture maturity. ^[5]

The calculative level is a common trap for large organisations: lots of data and frequent audits, and a feeling of understanding how safety works, without always proving the data is effective. ^[5] At the proactive level, by contrast, the workforce takes an active role, line management leads on safety, and safety staff are mainly advisers. ^[5]

To locate your position on the ladder, the programme uses the Understanding Your Culture tool: a workshop of up to 20 people from across the organisation, each choosing the descriptions that best match how the organisation actually behaves, after which the results are presented and discussed by the group. An Arabic score sheet is available for version 5, which comes in several languages, while the latest version 6 is in English only. ^[6]

From measurement to change: what are the steps?

The IAEA guide sets out the self-assessment steps: prepare the organisation, prepare the team, prepare the plan, conduct the pre-launch, carry out the assessment, analyse, summarise the findings, communicate them, and develop and implement actions, with a follow-up within 6 to 18 months. ^[4]

What sets this path apart from a campaign:

1. Results go to management first, in a facilitated dialogue rather than an audit-style presentation; management then takes them to the rest of the organisation with the assessment team, mostly face to face, including shift workers and contractors. ^[4]
2. No quick fixes at the assessment stage: proposing immediate corrective actions misses the point of the assessment. ^[4]
3. The plan is built with the groups affected: a plan imposed from the top without real engagement does not build commitment. ^[4]
4. Focus on specific areas: HSE notes that targeting particular areas, such as safety leadership, competence or procedures, has produced positive results. ^[1]
5. Measure again: repeated measurement lets you track progress ^[1], and HSE’s Safety Climate Tool is designed to track improvement year on year. ^[2]

If you use an external provider, keep ownership of the process and build in-house skills so you can continue on your own, as HSE recommends. ^[1]

Hypothetical example: when good numbers are not enough

Hypothetical example: a maintenance company recorded a low injury rate, so its management assumed its safety culture was good. The survey showed a clear gap between management and workers on near-miss reporting, and interviews revealed that supervisors saw reports as evidence that their team was performing poorly.

The company did not launch a new campaign. It presented the results to senior management first, then agreed three actions with supervisors and workers: removing the number of reports from supervisors’ performance appraisals, responding to every report with what was done about it within a set time, and opening each weekly management meeting with one report and what was learned from it. It then planned to measure again after a year.

Conclusion

Safety culture is not measured by a poster or changed by a slogan. Measure it with more than one tool, describe before you judge, take the results to management before the workforce, build the plan with the people who will carry it out, and then measure again to see what has really changed.