Safety Culture - what are you talking about?

Earlier this year we were privileged to host a webinar with Fred Sherratt who took us through where the CSRA were with their research into safety culture as a concept. You can find that webinar here .

This week the associated peer reviewed research paper has been published and I believe it is essential reading for any safety professional, regulator or person considering the use of "safety culture" in their business. The paper is available here - please pass this onto your network.

I have been troubled for a long time about the use and abuse of "Safety Climate" as a term and basis for safety strategies, consulting engagements and benchmarking. It is very prevalent as a "thing" asked for by boards, executives and often will result in some sort of corporate push across a business which often results in nothing more than either a false sense of "didn't we do well" and/or targeting (often unfairly) people or functions that aren't driving the "right" culture and asking them to do more.

"Seeking a ‘positive safety culture’ is a common goal within larger organizations, it is something myriad safety consultants will happily sell you tools to measure, monitor, and improve, and it is even seemingly growing in influence and power."

This paper doesn't hold its punches ,"It is time for safety culture to be retired from the safety science lexicon. We need to put it out with the trash."

However it doesn't throw the baby out with the bath water and points to components of what we think of as safety culture, still being useful to focus on. For example Safety Climate which "remains the one validated predictor of safety performance within the safety culture realm making it a useful predictive tool for any safety professional" can be used instead of a wide ranging and the unhelpfully ambiguous concept of safety culture. We at CHASNZ have seen a wide growth in the use of our free Safety Climate assessment tool for construction organisations as it is seen as something far more tangible and useful.

Safety climate is also recommended by the Australian Institute of Health and Safety " given its validated relationship to safety performance. This is a pragmatic approach that does not claim ‘safety culture’ but rather explicitly acknowledges that workers are in the best place to judge if the way we do things around here is working for safety, or whether it is not"

The paper has a useful model for looking at how Safety Climate has typically been described and used and suggests how to approach this topic in the future. I fully support the final call out to the safety professional community which is that " we should abandon safety culture and instead direct our energy to researching the wide range of phenomena that contribute to safety management and performance uniquely, independently, and in appropriate ways"

Thanks to our friends at CSRA for publishing this resource and those that contributed to the research.

Seeking a scientific and pragmatic approach to safety culture in the North American construction industry,

Safety Science,

Volume 181,

2025,