What is safety culture?

Safety Culture is repeated patterns of behavior—influenced by people, systems, processes, and the environment—that contribute to or detract from safety.

Why is safety culture important?

A positive, proactive safety culture is vital because it minimizes incidents, reduces SIF-potential, provides psychological safety to employees, boosts productivity and retention, and improves the overall well-being of employees.

What does a positive, proactive safety culture look like?

 Common elements of a strong safety culture:

  • An entire workforce that relentlessly pursues the identification and remediation of hazards.
  • Employees at all levels are equally comfortable stopping each other when they see at-risk behavior and recognizing each other when they see safe behavior.
  • The pursuit of systemic causes of incidents and forward-looking accountability has replaced blame. Changes are made to prevent incidents from recurring.
  • Fear of discipline, which drives under-reporting and stifles involvement, has been driven out of the culture.
  • Safety is integrated into daily work, not treated as something separate.
  • Safety values, systems, processes, and practices and aligned to promote safety.
  • Safety-related behaviors at all levels are expected and positively reinforced.
  • Pride not only in the safety record, but also in what is being done every day, all day, to achieve that record.

How can we objectively assess our safety culture? 

Self-assessments can be difficult and/or misleading. ADI’s safety culture experts provide an independent and objective assessment of your safety culture. We begin with a safety culture survey or safety leadership surveys. The survey results guide the focus of our follow-up site assessments. 

Through document review, direct observation, and feedback from all levels of your site or organization, we identify practices that support safe behavior and those that enable at-risk behavior. We merge our findings from the survey and assessment(s), place your current culture on our safety culture continuum, summarize strengths and improvement opportunities, and recommend next steps for improving your safety culture. 

How can we take our safety culture to the next level?

Whether your safety culture is high-performing or merely compliant, ADI can help you get to the next level. We do this by shaping and aligning safety leadership practices, processes, and systems so they intentionally and systematically encourage safety-related behaviors from leaders and frontline employees. 

ADI offers the tools, support, and expertise needed to help organizations build a positive, proactive safety culture:

  • Follow-Up Consulting – Behavioral expertise to support the refinement of safety systems, processes, and leadership practices based on the survey/assessment results.
  • Behavioral Roadmapping – Pinpointing leading indicators and the critical safety-related behaviors that must occur at each organizational level for safety engagement, safety culture improvement, and incident reduction.
  • Safety Leadership Training – Two-day facilitated workshop to prepare leaders to implement the behavioral roadmap through positive, proactive behavior.
  • Follow-Up Coaching – Positive accountability and skill-building with leaders to ensure successful implementation of the roadmap, safety-related decision making, and improvements to the safety culture.