What It Really Means To Have A “Culture of Safety”

Five safety culture dimensions to transform how safety is perceived and practiced across your organization

People rarely disagree about the importance of safety. But recognizing its importance isn’t the same as putting it into practice.

A “culture of safety” is a term typically used by executives to mean that safety is recognized as an organizational value. However, a healthy safety culture goes beyond rhetoric. It’s built on a strong foundation of shared expectations throughout the organization that inform how everyday work is done.

Organizational leaders and frontline staff alike typically don’t wake up in the morning and think, “I really hope someone gets hurt today.” And yet, perceptions between those in leadership and those doing the work are often misaligned when it comes to safety. This misalignment rarely stems from bad intentions. More often, it reflects how different values, like safety, production, or innovation, show up at different levels of the organization.

No one wants harm to occur, but safety often takes a back seat to other organizational priorities—especially when those priorities are considered essential for survival.

I often hear from non-profit leaders that financial sustainability is their goal, and they want that goal to guide decisions at every level. It's often framed as: “If we don’t reach financial sustainability, then jobs are unsafe, and there will be no organization to keep safe.” That logic makes sense—until you realize it’s incomplete.

If staff are overworked, burned out, or harmed, programs are affected, and unexpected expenses are incurred. Organizations lose experienced people, spend more time and money on recruiting and training new staff, and spend more money re-learning old lessons and re-inventing processes and routines as institutional knowledge is drained (Westover, 2024). Outdoor programming, hospitality, and healthcare fields especially felt these effects in the years following the pandemic, when widespread turnover continued to hamper business and financial recovery efforts (Bajrami et al., 2021; Frogner & Dill, 2022; Leonard et al., 2022).

Safety is a business goal in its own right. Smart executives talk about it openly, and they align it with other goals like financial sustainability, innovation, and growth—not in competition with, but in support of one another.

So, executives declaring they have a “culture of safety” is important, but it only scratches the surface.

Safety culture goes beyond a declaration of value. It’s a concept from safety science that refers to the perceptions management and staff share about their organization’s values, and how those values inform work routines, attitudes, and behaviors around safety management and performance (Cooper, 2000). Leaders who take the time to understand how these perceptions align—or don’t—can use that insight to improve safety outcomes and meet broader organizational goals.

In this post, I’ll share five dimensions of safety culture that can help organizations move beyond intention and translate their safety values into practice.

Understanding Dimensions of Safety Culture

Leaders who understand these five safety culture dimensions can help their organization go beyond the “culture of safety” rhetoric and translate safety values into practice:

1.     Management Commitment to Safety

This dimension is about how organizational leaders visibly demonstrate their commitment to safety values. To be more precise, it’s about how the workforce perceives management’s involvement and commitment to safer work. Leaders can demonstrate their commitment by acknowledging the risk-nature of their organization’s work activities, leading by example through proactive approaches to safety, and swiftly addressing issues.

 For example, by articulating how safety values are integrated into other organizational goals, leaders emphasize that safety should be foundational to work approaches at all levels. This helps to support staff decisions to work safely.

2.     Communication, Accountability, and Coordination for Safety

 Safety depends on how clearly expectations are communicated, how consistently they are reinforced, and whether people feel they can speak up when something is not right. If policies are hard to find or interpret, or if feedback is discouraged or dismissed, safety culture, and therefore safety management, suffers. This dimension reflects whether people know what’s expected, whether they feel ownership in addressing safety issues and comfort in escalating them, and the extent to which they coordinate with one another to uphold it.

For example, this dimension is evidenced by several factors: ongoing safety-related communication that flows through the organizational hierarchy, staff who feel a sense of ownership in safety work, and policies that are accessible, understandable, and seen as relevant to daily operations.

3.     Safety Integrated into All Aspects of the Organization

 In a healthy safety culture, safety isn’t confined to a specific role, team, or phase of work—it’s embedded across the organization. This includes how safety is factored into organizational planning, program design, resourcing decisions like budgeting and staffing, and review processes. It also includes work conditions and stressors; safety improves when time constraints, workload, and other pressures are reduced (Sonnentag, 2018).

For example, when safety is embedded in the design of work systems, when it is considered during the initiation and planning of projects, and when it is evaluated after projects and other work are completed, safety becomes valued in every aspect of the organization’s work. In a healthy safety culture, safety is seen as a shared responsibility at every organizational level and within the functions of each department. As such, working conditions support safer work outcomes.

4.     Safety as Learning-Oriented

This dimension looks at the extent to which an organization treats incidents, errors, concerns, and deviations from prescribed policies as opportunities to improve, rather than problems to solve or isolate. Learning-oriented cultures are characterized by curiosity and openness to feedback. In these environments, staff feel encouraged to ask questions, report what’s not working, and engage in improving safety management systems. Over time, this creates a more responsive and resilient risk management program.

For example, this dimension is evidenced by staff questioning policies and offering feedback, and reporting is encouraged without blame. As a result, the organization adapts policies, training, and systems based on lessons learned. Safety performance indicators for jobs and departments are identified, and skills development opportunities are accessible.

5.     Co-worker Influence on Safety

Peer attitudes and norms shape behavior—especially in settings where staff operate without direct supervision, as is common in outdoor activity programs (Jackson, 2016). This dimension highlights how co-workers’ influence can either reinforce or undermine the organization’s intended safety values. Social pressure and trust among team members are the key drivers of an environment where peers actively encourage each other to work safely.

For example, staff who trust and feel responsible for one another are more likely to have peer norms that promote socially conscious and safe behavior. Even without direct supervision, team culture supports speaking up and performing work in a way that is aligned with safety expectations.

How to Put Safety Culture into Practice

Treat it like a language

Learning safety culture dimensions is just the starting point. To make them useful, think of them like a language. Typically, a language is learned by understanding basic vocabulary and sentence structure. Once you learn these foundations, you can start to recognize them on the street, and then to understand the words and use them to convey meaning. As you grow more comfortable with the language, you utilize it by manipulating the words within the rules of the language.

Learning and applying safety culture happens the same way. Start by noticing how the dimensions show up, such as in conversations, planning meetings, and site and field visits. Name your observations by matching them with a dimension, for example, “that looks like co-worker influence” or “that’s an example of learning for safety.”

Thinking of safety culture as a language changes it from an academic concept to a skill that can be developed. The more fluent you become in the language, the more precisely you can wield it.

Get a pulse on each dimension

Once you are familiar with the dimensions, begin to understand how your organization’s leaders and workers perceive them. Ask questions like, "What value is driving that decision?” and "How does safety show up in this task?”

Consider using formal survey instruments to gather safety culture data. Jeff Jackson has a fantastic one specific to outdoor and experiential programs. As a National Risk Management Director, I found this kind of data to be the single most helpful metric for understanding the health of our program as a leading indicator of safety (Jackson et al., 2021).

Use safety culture data to add color and depth to other safety metrics, like incident data, program review findings, and risk assessments. Using a suite of metrics gives a clearer picture of where your safety management system is strong, where it is vulnerable, and where to focus next.

Leverage the dimensions to put safety values into practice

Once you understand how the dimensions are perceived across your organization, you can leverage them to deepen safety as an organizational value.

Think of the dimensions as a roadmap showing where to target changes that will improve everyday work. For example, co-worker trust can be used to improve front-line safety behaviors and practices, and safety performance indicators for administrative work can be used to improve the safety context inherited by frontline workers. Encourage leaders to be more visible on safety decisions and issues, to demonstrate their commitment to, and value for safety. Work to establish an organization-wide attitude that safety work isn’t done just for the sake of being safe—it’s done to support learning, improvement, and better work overall.

By treating safety culture as a language and a roadmap, you can begin to shift perception, practice, and values into behaviors and systems that truly support people. All levels and functions of an organization have a role in living its values, whether for safety or for production.

Leaders who want a culture of safety don’t just ask their staff to care about safety; they ask how it shows up.

Safety culture is just one piece of the puzzle.

If your team is working on risk management planning, leadership alignment, or staff training, let’s connect. I help organizations modernize and enhance their risk management systems. Learn more about my work or get in touch.

References

Bajrami, D. D., Terzić, A., Petrović, M. D., Radovanović, M., Tretiakova, T. N., & Hadoud, A. (2021). Will we have the same employees in hospitality after all? The impact of COVID-19 on employees’ work attitudes and turnover intentions. International Journal of Hospitality Management, 94, 102754.

Cooper, M. (2000). Towards a model of safety culture. Safety Science, 36, 111-136. https://doi.org/10.1016/S0925-7535(00)00035-7.

Frogner, B., & Dill, J. (2022). Tracking Turnover Among Health Care Workers During the COVID-19 Pandemic. JAMA Health Forum, 3. https://doi.org/10.1001/jamahealthforum.2022.0371.

Jackson, J. S. (2016). Beyond Decision Making for Outdoor Leaders: Expanding the Safety Behaviour Research Agenda. Journal of Outdoor Recreation, Education, and Leadership, 8(2), 103–118. https://doi.org/10.18666/JOREL-2016-V8-I2-7692

Jackson, J., Harper, N., & McLean, S. (2021). Trust, Workload, Outdoor Adventure Leadership, and Organizational Safety Climate. Journal of Outdoor Recreation, Education, and Leadership, 13(4). https://doi.org/10.18666/JOREL-2020-V13-I4-10529

Leonard, A. M., Ewert, A. W., Lieberman-Raridon, K., Mitten, D., Rabinowitz, E., Deringer, S. A., ... & Anderson, I. (2022). Outdoor adventure and experiential education and COVID-19: What have we learned?. Journal of Experiential Education, 45(3), 233-255.

Sonnentag, S. (2018). The recovery paradox: Portraying the complex interplay between job stressors, lack of recovery, and poor well-being. Research in Organizational Behavior, 38, 169-185. https://doi.org/10.1016/J.RIOB.2018.11.002.

Westover, J. (2024). The Hidden Costs of Neglecting Employee Well-Being: A Financial Case for Prioritizing Burnout Prevention. Human Capital Leadership Review. https://doi.org/10.70175/hclreview.2020.16.1.11.