Safety Culture


Creating a Strong Culture of Safety

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


The 7 Crucial Things all Leaders Need to Know About Safety

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In our work at Krause Bell Group, we’ve found that the most important ingredient in any safety program is strong leadership. But all too often, senior leaders don’t “get” safety at the level they need to in order to be effective. So what is it that senior leaders need to ‘Get’ about safety? What is it that these key safety leaders need in order to influence the organization and achieve better and better performance? We’ve devoted more than 20 years to figuring this out, and our research has yielded seven critical insights. 1. SAFETY PERFORMANCE LEADS BUSINESS PERFORMANCE The first…
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Safety Culture

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Safety culture and organizational functioning interact with each other in ways that affect decisions, safety-related behavior, and performance. Safety culture not only impacts safety but is a driver of organizational performance in general.
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Where Did the Concept of “Safety Culture” Come From?

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We’ve found that organizational culture is one of the most important dimensions of business performance, especially in the realm of safety. But “safety culture” is often taken for granted because the concept seems so obvious and so powerful and few people realize the context in which organizational culture exists. Indeed, it didn’t emerge as a…
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Why Safety Is Good Business: The Importance of a Healthy Safety Culture

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Most people readily agree that safety is good business, but they span an enormous spectrum in what they mean by that and the degree to which they truly understand the connection between safety and their business. Understanding that connection is important. Without the right understanding, anyone who recognizes their fiduciary duty to their organization will…
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What Culture Are You Creating?

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We’ve never met a leader that didn’t want a better culture for their organization. We hear statements like, “we need to change the safety culture,” every day. What is odd is that the leaders who make these statements usually think they are talking about other people, when in reality they are talking about themselves. We…
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These Three Criteria Determine the Value of a Safety Culture Survey

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Most leading organizations today use a culture survey of one kind or another. Some are directly related to safety and some indirectly. Often they are given annually. How worthwhile are these instruments and how should they be used? Whether your survey is designed to measure organizational culture in general, safety culture in particular, or both,…
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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.

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.

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.

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.

7 Insights into Safety Leadership

Ready to take the next step in finding new ways to improve safety leadership and culture?

7 Insights Into Safety Leadership offers an in-depth exploration of safety culture and leadership.

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