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


Cultura sustenta o desempenho 

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Um excerto com 7 Insights sobre liderança em segurança Este é um trecho do capítulo 4 do livro de Tom Krause e Kristen Bell “7 Insights sobre liderança em segurança“ Leia este capítulo em formato PDF Nunca vimos um líder que não quisesse melhorar a cultura da organização onde trabalhava. Declarações como: “precisamos mudar a cultura” é algo que os consultores ouvem diariamente no trabalho. O que é estranho é que os líderes que declaram isso geralmente acham que estão falando de outras pessoas quando, na verdade, estão falando de si mesmos. Sabemos que “liderança cria cultura”; qualquer líder sabe…
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La culture soutient la performance 

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Un extrait du 7 Perspectives sur le leadership en matière de sécurité Ceci est un extrait du chapitre 4 du livre de Tom Krause et Kristen Bell “7 Perspectives sur le leadership en matière de sécurité“ Lisez ce chapitre au format PDF Nous n’avons jamais rencontré un dirigeant qui ne souhaitait pas une meilleure culture pour son organisation. Des déclarations comme “nous devons changer la culture” sont entendues tous les jours dans la vie d’un consultant. Ce qui est étrange, c’est que les dirigeants qui font ces déclarations pensent généralement qu’ils parlent d’autres personnes, alors qu’en réalité ils parlent d’eux-mêmes….
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Culture Sustains Performance

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An Excerpt from 7 Insights Into Safety Leadership This is an excerpt from Chapter 4 of Tom Krause and Kristen Bell’s book “7 Insights into Safety Leadership.“ We’ve never met a leader that didn’t want a better culture for their organization. Statements like, “we need to change the culture,” are heard every day in the…
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4 Questions Board Members Should Ask About Safety Culture

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It was 1993 and Paul O’Neill was attending his first board meeting as a Director at one of the largest companies in the world. Just as the meeting was coming to a close, O’Neill asked, “Where is the safety report?” As the story goes, no safety report was planned but the question had profound effects. It set the company on the path to creating safety excellence and embedding safety as a cultural value. Board member influence can do that — uniquely — and it saves lives while creating business value.
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5 Essential Building Blocks for Improving Organizational Culture

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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…
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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.

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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