Organizational culture and accidents are inextricably linked and, ultimately, the severity and frequency of accidents reflect the culture of an organization. La culture organisationnelle et les accidents sont inextricablement liés et, en définitive, la gravité et la fréquence des accidents reflètent la culture d’une organisationOrganizational culture and accidents are inextricably linked and, ultimately, the severity and frequency of accidents reflect the culture of an organization.
Prof. Patrick Hudson, International Safety Practitioner and Expert
Workplace Safety: A Concern for Everyone
Workplace safety is often viewed as a purely technical or systemic issue—protective equipment, procedures, training... However, beyond these tangible elements lies a crucial intangible factor in accident prevention: safety culture.
What Does Safety Culture Really Involve?
Safety culture encompasses an organization’s beliefs, behaviors, attitudes, and practices regarding safety. It reflects how safety is perceived, embedded, and implemented daily by both employees and management.
A Key Factor in Your Organization
Despite being central to prevention efforts, safety culture is often overlooked, unmeasured, or left to subjective interpretation. Yet, evaluating and improving it can significantly reduce workplace risks and accidents.
Incident analyses consistently show that human and behavioral factors—combined with weak safety culture—are behind many accidents. Not only the worker who ignores a safety rule is to blame; managerial behavior is often a contributing factor.
Why Assess Your Organization’s Maturity Level? Understanding your organization's maturity level helps determine how to measure safety culture and act effectively. This article explores how.
Safety Culture: A Driver of Performance
Studies show that risky behaviors—like not wearing PPE, disregarding procedures, taking unnecessary risks, or lacking vigilance—cause many accidents.
Cognitive Biases Affect Employee Exposure
Research shows that cognitive biases distort how employees behave and react. A cognitive bias is a thinking pattern that leads to irrational decisions by distorting judgment, attention, reasoning, and logical interpretation.
Examples of cognitive biases in workplace safety:
- Overconfidence biasUnderestimating or denying the existence of risk.
- Illusion of controlOptimism
- Le biais d’bias: Thinking positive outcomes are more likely for oneself than for others, and underestimating negative events (Taylor & Brown, 1994).Taylor & Brown, 1994).
- Invulnerabilitybias: Believing one is less affected by biases than others.
Incidents and Human Behavior
As a complement, it is worth mentioning the work of James Reason on human error models, particularly the Swiss cheese model. These studies show that most incidents result from a chain of events initiated by inadequate human behavior or a poor safety culture. Incident analyses in sectors such as the chemical, nuclear, or aerospace industries confirm that many events are linked to failures in safety communication, human errors, and a lack of commitment from both employees and management. The figure below illustrates James Reason’s taxonomy of human error.
Furthermore, habits and routine can also lead workers to adopt careless behaviors, even when safety procedures are clearly defined. The brain switches to “autopilot,” significantly reducing the level of concentration.
Finally, the absence of individual responsibility can result in negligent behavior, as employees may not feel compelled to follow or enforce safety rules.
Organizational and Behavioral Factors: A Key Solution?
In an organization with a weak safety culture, staff tend to minimize risks or engage in behaviors that disregard safety rules. They may also fail to report hazardous situations or near misses, which often allows these situations to escalate into serious accidents.
To effectively manage accident risk, beyond investment in operating a safety management system and providing suitable work equipment, it becomes essential to focus on organizational and behavioral factors.
Developing such an approach requires a shift in attitudes, continuous awareness-raising, and strong commitment at all levels of the organization. A company that establishes a strong safety culture will see a significant reduction in accidents, as safety becomes a shared reflex, deeply embedded in the daily behaviors of all employees.
The Stakes of Developing Safety Culture
Creating a collective momentum around safety involves long-term effort, but the benefits are significant. It's a strategic, organizational, and human challenge that goes beyond regulatory compliance.
Organizational & Strategic Challenges
Management Commitment : A strong and visible commitment from top management is essential. Without it, safety initiatives risk being perceived as secondary to production goals.
Balancing Productivity and Safety : It is essential to reconcile production targets with safety requirements. The pressure to meet objectives can lead to shortcuts at the expense of safety.
Resource Allocation : Investments in training, work equipment, the creation of procedures, and the operation of the safety management system require both financial and human resources.
Sustainability : As with any project, maintaining momentum and commitment to safety must go beyond the initial enthusiasm of the program. Standardizing the level of competence in safety-related topics is a key lever for developing a shared culture and sustaining the initiative.
Human and Cultural Challenges
Behavioral Change : Changing long-established work habits is a complex process. Employees may resist change out of comfort or fear of the unknown.
Effective Communication : Establishing and maintaining two-way communication channels that encourage the reporting of problems and the upward flow of information—without fear of retaliation—is crucial.
Multicultural Integration : In international companies, adopting safety practices to different cultures and local contexts, while maintaining consistent standards, requires careful attention.
Accountability : To ensure sustainability, every member of the organization must feel personally responsible for their own safety and that of others
Technical and Operational Challenges
Risk Assessment : Identifying and monitoring relevant indicators to measure safety performance—beyond just accident statistics—is a complex task.
Adapting to New Technologies and Emerging Risks : Incorporating emerging risks related to new technologies is essential to evolving and strengthening the safety culture.
Finally, from a social and economic standpoint, developing a strong safety culture brings numerous benefits: improved working conditions reduce absenteeism, accident-related costs are controlled, and productivity increases. Moreover, a company recognized for its safety performance is more likely to attract and retain both talent and clients.
To meet these challenges, it is essential to adopt a structured methodology and a systemic approach, supported by patience and a long-term vision. Safety culture is built gradually over time, rather than through sudden, radical changes.
Assessing the Maturity Level of Safety Culture
Given the various challenges highlighted earlier, the process of assessing an organization’s safety culture maturity proves to be the essential first step to take stock of the situation before developing an action plan.
Data Collection
The maturity assessment collects data to quantify qualitative statements about the perceptions and beliefs of the entire workforce across approximately ten thematic areas. This is primarily done using a rating scale (from Strongly Disagree to Strongly Agree) and prioritization.
The evaluation results help identify organizational weaknesses as well as strengths or areas for improvement to be leveraged, enabling the definition of concrete actions to enhance the company’s performance.
How to Assess Your Organization’s Maturity Level in 5 Steps?
By the end of the project, you will be able to answer the following questions:
- Is our organization’s safety culture conducive to safe and efficient operations?
- Does the staff clearly understand our safety requirements?
- Are we focusing on the right issues?
The Questionnaire as an Internal Communication Channel
Since the first step involves gathering staff perceptions, using an anonymous survey proves to be the most appropriate tool.
The survey contains around one hundred questions covering 14 dimensions of safety culture such as Leadership & Management, Hazards & Dangerous Situations, Competencies, Subcontractor Management, and more. It is also possible to customize the content by adding or adapting certain questions to better reflect your organization and help staff identify with the survey, thereby encouraging their engagement.
Below are some example questions:
Rating Scale
Roles and responsibilities regarding safety are clearly defined.
The organization and resources provided allow me to perform my tasks without feeling pressured in a way that compromises my safety.
The company takes effective measures to ensure my work environment is safe.
Numerical
In the past six months, how many hazardous situations have you reported?
Prioritization
Improving communication about incidents and learning from our mistakes.
The survey remains open for a given period, long enough to collect a representative number of responses from the target population.
Following this, an analysis phase identifies initial trends in safety culture maturity and highlights priority themes, strengths, and weaknesses.
Onsite visit
Field Observations
Additionally, field observations are conducted to analyze behaviors and practices during daily activities. This helps identify gaps between procedures and actual operational realities.
Interviews
Finally, discussions with employees—either individually or in groups—are scheduled to understand their perceptions and expectations, with conversations guided by the survey results.
Analysis and reporting
All the data collected across the various themes are cross-analyzed to assess the organization's safety culture maturity level, based on the Hudson-Parker model. An expert in organizational safety, Hudson-Parker developed a safety culture maturity model often represented as a five-level scale. This model helps organizations evaluate and improve their safety culture by identifying their current position and providing guidance to progress toward a more mature culture.
The Five Maturity Levels According to the Hudson Scale
Generative : Safety is fully integrated into the organizational culture. It is considered a core value, and all members at every level actively participate in its continuous improvement.
Pathological : Safety is perceived as a burden. The organization adopts an attitude of "what you don’t see can’t hurt you."
Reactive : The organization recognizes the importance of safety but only acts in response to incidents.
Calculative : Systems and processes are put in place to manage hazards, but the focus is mainly on statistics and procedures.
Proactive : The organization anticipates safety issues and actively seeks to prevent them before they occur.
Roadmap: Safety Culture Development
In the final step, the organization must define its priority themes in alignment with its corporate strategy and objectives, based on various parameters discussed during a workshop.
Finally, the organization participates in a concluding workshop to establish specific actions and develop a roadmap for improving the safety culture.
Examples of actions that can be implemented:
- Strengthen safety training programs
- Evolve the organization’s safety vision and strategy
- Improve communication around risks
- Encourage exemplary leadership from managers
- Establish a rewards system for good safety practices
Conclusion
Assessing your safety culture is a crucial lever to protect the health and well-being of your employees. By adopting a proactive approach, you strengthen team engagement and optimize your company’s overall performance. Don’t leave safety to chance: assess, act, and improve!
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