Who is responsible for safety culture?

Ultimately management, because it sets the priorities and frees up resources. Supervisors translate that into daily work, and every employee contributes by reporting and speaking to colleagues. The safety officer or QHSE coordinator facilitates and measures, but does not own the culture.

How often should you measure safety culture?

For a questionnaire once a year or once every two years is a common rhythm, supplemented by continuous records such as reports and actions. Asking too often causes survey fatigue, too rarely makes adjusting difficult. More important than the frequency is that after each measurement you show what you did with it.

What is the difference between safety culture and safety behaviour?

Behaviour is what people do at a given moment. Culture is the whole of shared beliefs and habits that keeps producing that behaviour. You can sometimes steer behaviour with a rule or supervision, but lasting change requires addressing the culture underneath.

Is an anonymous questionnaire fair for a small team?

With small groups anonymity is hard to guarantee. So only report outcomes for groups with a minimum number of respondents, and explain beforehand what you will do with the answers. For very small teams, conversations and observations work better than a questionnaire.

Improve and measure safety culture: what works

What is safety culture?

Safety culture is the sum of habits, beliefs and behaviour around safety. It is what people do when they are in a hurry, when the supervisor is away and when a rule is inconvenient. A policy document or a pile of procedures does not show that; behaviour on the work floor does.

That is why culture is not a project with an end date. You build it through daily choices: what does management discuss, what happens to a report, and is someone who stops the job thanked or looked at sideways? Standards such as ISO 45001 put the emphasis on leadership and on worker involvement for good reason.

How do you recognise a strong or weak culture?

You often feel it during a walk around the workplace, before you have a single figure. Watch what people do when they think nobody is looking, and how they react to a report or a stop-work order. A few signals that come up a lot in practice:

Strong: people report near misses without hesitation and know what happens next.
Strong: work is stopped when something is not right, and nobody suffers for it afterwards.
Weak: reporting counts as complaining or as a mistake by the reporter.
Weak: rules are followed when the safety officer is present, and not otherwise.
Weak: production and scheduling structurally come before working safely.

How do you measure safety culture?

A single number does not exist, and that is not a problem: you combine three angles. An anonymous questionnaire shows how people experience safety. Conversations and observations on the work floor show what really happens. Records show what the system does with signals.

Accident figures alone are a weak measure. They arrive after the fact, fluctuate by chance and can even mislead: if reporting is punished, an organisation looks safer than it is. So also look for leading signals, which say something about what is going to happen.

A questionnaire works best with short statements about experience, such as: when I report an unsafe situation, something is done with it. Or: I can stop work without being held accountable for it. Keep the list short and report per group, so nobody is recognisable.

Which indicators can you use?

Pick a handful of indicators and follow them over time. A baseline measurement now is worth more than a perfect set-up in a year. Watch the interpretation: more reports often means people dare to report, not that things have become less safe. Useful examples:

The number of reports of near misses and hazardous situations
The time until the reporter receives feedback
The share of actions completed within the agreed deadline
Participation and input in toolbox talks and work meetings
Scores per theme from an anonymous questionnaire, compared per team with the previous measurement

What works: leaders who set the example

People look at what managers do, not at what they say. A director who wears the PPE personally, accepts a safety stop despite the deadline and asks first what happened rather than who did it after an incident, achieves more than a campaign.

So put safety permanently on the agenda of the management meeting, regularly walk the work floor and talk to people about their work. A fifteen-minute walk with real questions yields more than a tick-box list.

What works: involvement and easy reporting

People take safety on as their own when they help think it through. Ask employees to help write work instructions, toolbox talks and risk analyses; they know the pitfalls of their work better than whoever devises it at a desk. Also give them room to stop work without consequences.

Make reporting so simple that it takes no more than a minute: a short report by phone or via a QR code at the workplace. The lower the threshold, the more you learn from near misses before things really go wrong.

What works: feedback people actually see

This part is often missing. Someone who files a report and never hears anything again will not do it a second time. So let the reporter know what was done with the report, even if the answer is that you will not act on it, and why.

Discuss in toolbox talks which reports led to which measure, and share the small improvements too. Say honestly when something cannot be done right away, for example because of budget or planning. That way people see that reporting pays off, and safety becomes a conversation instead of an obligation.

Schemes such as the Safety Culture Ladder

Besides your own measurements, there are schemes that assess culture. Well known in the Netherlands is the Safety Culture Ladder: an instrument that places an organisation on a ladder with five rungs, from low to high safety awareness. Some clients ask for a certain rung in their tender documents.

You do not need such a scheme to get started. The themes it covers, such as leadership, involvement and reporting, are also in this guide. If you want to be assessed, ask the owner of the scheme and a certification body about the current requirements and way of working.

Common mistakes and how to start small

The classic mistake is a campaign without a structural approach: posters, a slogan, a one-off training and then back to the old habits. A second mistake is measuring without doing anything with the outcome, so the next questionnaire is filled in with cynicism. Rather start small and keep going:

Choose two or three indicators and do a baseline measurement.
Discuss the outcome with the teams and let them choose the improvement points.
Agree one improvement action per quarter and report back on what happened.
Measure again after six months and discuss what has changed.

How BrydgeOne supports this

In BrydgeOne you use Toolbox talks to record who has had an instruction, with signatures and knowledge checks. Incidents & reports captures reports via the platform, the employee app or a public reporting point with a link or QR code, anonymously if desired, and gives the reporter status updates.

With Satisfaction you run an anonymous employee survey, including on safety culture, and in Objectives & KPIs you follow your indicators as measurable goals and trends. That lets you follow how your indicators develop.

Improving safety culture: what it is, how to measure it and what works