Safety Culture

Creating a Strong Culture of Safety

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In our work as consultants, we hear statements like, “we need to change the culture,” every day. Any leader will tell you that culture plays a strong role in the success of their organization, especially when it comes to safety. Culture will either reinforce the changes you’ve introduced or it will diminish them. But as we all have observed, “knowing” the importance of culture doesn’t necessarily mean that you’re building a strong culture within your organization. We’ve done extensive research on this topic. Below you’ll find some of our best insights into what makes “safety culture” work within organizations.

“Culture is improved by focusing on real business issues, and there is no better place to start than safety.”

Tom Krause & Kristen Bell

7 Insights into Safety Leadership

“We’ve all heard that leadership creates culture … What we are saying is a little stronger than that: We’re saying that leadership is always creating culture.”

Tom Krause & Kristen Bell

7 Insights into Safety Leadership

“Leadership stimulates growth and safety improvement in organizations; culture is the mechanism that sustains it.”

Tom Krause & Kristen Bell

7 Insights into Safety Leadership

ARTICLES On SAFETY CULTURE

5 Essential Building Blocks for Improving Organizational Culture

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By Tom Krause
Few leaders can honestly say they know how to create, maintain, and enhance their culture. At the same time, the success of a culture change effort depends on the degree to which leaders understand and relate their own decisions, behaviors, and thought processes to the culture itself. The most challenging part of culture change is often for leaders to learn how they’ve created the culture they currently have. What actions and decisions have lent themselves to dysfunction and discord? To make culture change happen, leaders must move from being distant observers who hope something will happen, to authentic leaders intent…
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How to Change Organizational Culture and Avoid Catastrophes

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By Tom Krause
Catastrophes are a risk in organizational life. From a quality issue that causes consumer fatalities and brings reputational damage to a hostile working environment leading to harassment or to employees becoming seriously or fatally injured. These things are usually a surprise to the senior-most leaders. “I knew we had some issues at that facility, but not like that!” Investigations into the catastrophe turns up causes — procedures weren’t followed; problems were known but solutions hadn’t been found; a team had been working on it for some months. Leaders admit, “That plant has always been a problem,” or the opposite, “We…
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Organizations Are Built on a Cultural Infrastructure

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By Tom Krause
Organizational culture has been defined in numerous ways. To some, it’s about what we as a group really value — production, quality, technical excellence, safety, diversity, growth, profit, engagement, goal attainment, and efficiency. From this perspective leaders start by understanding what they value, then develop what they think we should value. Then they develop a strategy…
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A Bad Workplace Culture Can Result in a Disaster, No Matter the Industry

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By Tom Krause
A bad workplace culture is a hazard in itself. But even a mediocre one can contribute directly to a disaster.  NASA won awards for being the “best place to work” among U.S government agencies. But the Space Shuttle Columbia failure, which resulted in the loss of seven astronauts and countless resources, was directly related to…
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VIDEO: What are the key takeaways from “If Your Culture Could Talk”?

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By Tom Krause
There are two sections in Tom Krause’s book “If Your Culture Could Talk:  A Story About Culture Change.” In this video he highlights the key takeaway from the initial story, and one of the five, research-based variables that leaders must pay attention to in order to build and maintain a strong culture. For more information…
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What Leadership Needs to Know about Changing Organizational Culture

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By Tom Krause
SAY you have a manufacturing location with problems — three plant managers in two years, unusual variation in quality and/or safety, seemingly unpredictable swings in productivity. The options senior leadership considers may be to sell it, give it a defined period to show or go, or take on the task of rehabilitation. Leadership may wonder…
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What is Safety Culture?

In this video, Dr. Tom Krause defines the difference between “organizational culture” and “safety culture,” and explores how these two types of culture affect safety within an organization.

What is the book, “If Your Culture Could Talk,” about?

Tom Krause’s book “If Your Culture Could Talk:  A Story About Culture Change” uses an entertaining, narrative format to shine a light on the ways in which the leaders of a troubled organization have shaped that organization’s culture.  In this video, Tom summarizes the storyline and introduces each of the main characters.

Developing an
Organizational Culture Assessment Tool for Safety

Dr. Tom Krause and Kristen Bell have a long-standing commitment to validating culture assessment tools. They are particularly proud of the work we did in the 1990’s with psychologist Dr. David Hofmann, to identify characteristics of organizational culture that predicted safety performance. The innovation process was high-quality and highly efficient: It began with a review of published academic research. New research needed only to select, model and validate a set of scales that would become an effective organizational culture assessment tool for safety.

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Organizational Culture Assessment Tool for Efficiency and Effectiveness

A senior manager at a major oil & gas company strongly believed that retirement of the baby boom generation, combined with his organization’s strong dependency on process and systems, was creating problems for efficiency, effectiveness, and safety throughout the business. He hired Kristen Bell to work with his team to develop and test his hypothesis so that they were assured of having valid and reliable data to inform an improvement strategy. A series of interviews and productive exercises provided the basis of a solid assessment tool.

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Chapter 4: Culture Sustains Performance – For Better or Worse

Leadership stimulates growth and safety improvement in organizations; culture is the mechanism that sustains it. Culture will either reinforce the changes you’ve introduced or it will diminish them, depending on the values, beliefs, and behaviors that leaders have engrained in your organization. The fourth insight in our book, 7 Insights into Safety Leadership is that leadership stimulates safety improvement, but culture sustains performance.

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7 Insights into Safety Leadership

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Learn More About “If Your Culture Could Talk: A Story About Culture Change.”