The Safety Culture You Have Is the Behaviour You Tolerate

Most organisations can describe the safety culture they want. They want people to speak up, follow critical controls, intervene when something looks wrong, report incidents and near misses, learn from mistakes and take personal responsibility for safety. These expectations appear in policies, leadership presentations, induction programmes, values statements and safety campaigns.

The more difficult question is whether the organisation's everyday decisions reinforce those expectations.

Culture is not created primarily by what an organisation says it values. It develops through repeated experience of what actually happens. Employees watch what leaders pay attention to, which behaviours are rewarded, which problems are ignored, how managers respond when production and safety compete, and what happens to people who raise uncomfortable concerns.

Over time, those experiences teach people how the organisation really works.

A company can therefore have an excellent safety policy and a weak safety culture at exactly the same time. There is no contradiction. One describes the organisation's intentions. The other describes the reality employees experience.

If we want to understand safety culture, we need to look beyond the posters and ask a more uncomfortable question: What behaviours are we teaching people to accept?

Culture Is Built Through Thousands of Small Decisions

The word “culture” can make safety improvement sound abstract. Organisations commission surveys, develop culture programmes, establish values and create multi-year improvement plans. These initiatives can be useful, but culture is also being created continuously through much smaller interactions.

A supervisor sees a worker step inside an exclusion zone and says nothing. A manager accepts a poorly prepared risk assessment because the job needs to start. A contractor raises a concern and is told to find a practical solution because the schedule cannot move. An employee reports a near miss and receives a difficult interrogation. A team stops work because conditions have changed and management publicly supports the decision despite the delay.

Each event teaches people something.

Most will never appear in a culture strategy. Collectively, they may have more influence than the strategy itself.

This is why culture cannot be delegated to HSE. HSE can develop frameworks, facilitate training, provide coaching and measure perceptions, but operational leaders create much of the lived experience from which culture develops.

What Leaders Tolerate Becomes Information

Imagine a supervisor notices a routine procedural deviation. The activity has been performed the same way for months, nothing has gone wrong and correcting it would delay the work. The supervisor decides not to intervene.

Perhaps the decision appears insignificant.

But other people see it.

They learn that this particular requirement is flexible. If the behaviour continues, new employees observe experienced employees doing the same thing. Eventually, the written procedure and the operational norm become different.

The organisation may still describe the requirement as mandatory, but the workplace has developed another standard.

This is how tolerance becomes cultural information.

Importantly, tolerance does not always mean leaders consciously approve unsafe behaviour. Sometimes they simply fail to notice it. Sometimes they are focused elsewhere. Sometimes they do not understand the significance of the deviation.

Sometimes the requirement itself is impractical.

The effect can nevertheless be similar.

People learn from what happens around them.

Employees Watch What Happens When Priorities Compete

Safety commitment is relatively easy when nothing is competing with it.

The real test comes when safe performance has a cost.

A shutdown is behind schedule. Production is interrupted. A client is frustrated. A vessel is waiting. A contractor is accumulating standby costs. A project milestone is at risk.

Now somebody raises a safety concern.

What happens next tells the workforce considerably more about culture than the safety policy ever will.

If management genuinely examines the concern and supports stopping or changing the work where necessary, employees learn that safety expectations remain valid under pressure. If the concern is technically acknowledged but the individual is immediately asked to find a way to continue, they may learn something different.

Nobody needs to explicitly say that schedule matters more than safety. People interpret priorities through behaviour.

This is particularly important because organisational pressure is rarely delivered through an instruction to “work unsafely.” It is usually much subtler. Targets, incentives, deadlines, staffing decisions and leadership reactions create the environment in which frontline decisions are made.

Culture develops inside that environment.

Stop-Work Authority Means Nothing Without Stop-Work Support

Many organisations proudly state that every employee has the authority to stop unsafe work.

That is a good principle.

But authority and confidence are not the same thing.

A worker may technically possess stop-work authority while believing that using it will create personal difficulty. Will the supervisor be annoyed? Will the contractor be blamed for delay? Will the employee have to defend the decision to several managers? Will colleagues consider the intervention unnecessary?

These questions influence behaviour.

If organisations want people to intervene, they need to examine what happens after somebody does.

A worker stops an activity because conditions have changed. Management reviews the situation and discovers that the concern was ultimately not significant. How does the supervisor respond?

If the worker is criticised for overreacting, others learn that stop-work authority should only be used when they are certain something is wrong.

That is a dangerous standard.

Employees are often being asked to intervene precisely because uncertainty exists.

A healthier response is to distinguish between a reasonable intervention made in good faith and unnecessary obstruction. Not every stop-work decision will prove technically correct, but people should not need perfect foresight before raising a credible concern.

What Happens to the Person Who Reports Bad News?

Reporting culture provides another useful window into organisational culture.

Most companies encourage employees to report incidents, near misses, hazards and concerns. The reporting system may be excellent. QR codes, mobile applications and anonymous channels make reporting easier than ever.

But employees are influenced less by the existence of the system than by what they see happen to people who use it.

Does the reporter receive appreciation or interrogation? Does management focus first on understanding the issue or determining who failed? Are reported problems addressed? Does the person receive feedback? Are contractors commercially disadvantaged for reporting more events than competitors?

These experiences determine whether the reporting system produces useful information.

A company can have a technically excellent reporting platform and still have serious under-reporting if people believe bad news creates trouble.

This matters because leadership depends on information travelling upward. If the organisation gradually teaches people to filter uncomfortable information, senior management can become increasingly confident at exactly the same time that operational visibility is deteriorating.

Psychological Safety Does Not Mean Lowering Standards

Psychological safety has become an increasingly common term in organisational discussions, and it is sometimes misunderstood.

It does not mean people can do whatever they want without consequences. It does not remove performance standards, technical requirements or accountability.

It means people can raise questions, admit uncertainty, report mistakes and challenge assumptions without unnecessary fear of humiliation or retaliation.

That is highly relevant to HSE.

A technician who is uncertain about an isolation needs to be comfortable saying so. A new employee needs to be able to ask what more experienced colleagues may consider an obvious question. A contractor needs to be able to challenge a client's proposed work sequence. An HSE professional needs to be capable of telling an executive that a decision may be creating additional risk.

If people cannot do those things, the organisation loses information.

In high-risk operations, losing information can be far more dangerous than experiencing disagreement.

Accountability Still Matters

There is an equally important counterpoint. A positive safety culture cannot mean that every behaviour is explained away by the system.

People make choices. Some behaviours are reckless. Some individuals knowingly bypass important safeguards despite understanding the risk and having reasonable alternatives available. Deliberate misconduct may require disciplinary action.

The challenge is creating fair accountability.

Before deciding how to respond to a violation, organisations should understand the context. Was the requirement known? Was compliance realistically possible? Was the risk understood? Was the behaviour common? Had supervisors previously accepted it?

Were organisational pressures influencing the decision? Would another reasonable person have behaved similarly?

These questions do not remove personal responsibility. They help ensure that responsibility is assigned intelligently.

A culture that never holds anyone accountable can become permissive. A culture that automatically punishes every mistake becomes defensive and secretive.

Neither supports good safety performance.

The objective is a culture in which people understand the boundaries, expect fair treatment and know that deliberate disregard for serious risk will be treated differently from an honest mistake made while trying to do the right thing.

Supervisors Have Enormous Cultural Influence

Employees may see the chief executive several times a year. They may see their immediate supervisor every day.

That makes supervisors among the most influential culture carriers in any organisation.

A corporate campaign may encourage employees to speak up, but if the supervisor reacts badly when challenged, the supervisor wins. The company may promote learning from mistakes, but if the supervisor routinely looks for somebody to blame, the local experience will shape behaviour.

This is why supervisory development should go beyond technical competence and procedural knowledge. Supervisors need to understand how their reactions influence future behaviour.

When somebody reports a mistake, what is the first response? When work falls behind, what signals does the supervisor send? When an experienced worker challenges a plan, is the challenge welcomed or treated as resistance? When a requirement is impractical, does the supervisor escalate the problem or quietly allow a workaround?

These everyday decisions shape culture at the level where work actually happens.

Incentives Tell People What Really Matters

Organisations should also examine what they reward.

If project leaders are rewarded heavily for cost and schedule performance while safety performance is represented by a single injury statistic, employees can reasonably infer what matters most.

The same issue appears in contractor management. If procurement decisions are dominated by price and delivery while HSE capability has relatively little influence, the commercial system is communicating a priority regardless of what the corporate values statement says.

Even safety incentives can create unintended consequences. Rewarding teams solely for achieving long periods without reported injuries may appear positive, but it can create subtle pressure not to report minor events.

Better recognition focuses on the behaviours and conditions the organisation wants to strengthen: effective planning, early reporting, meaningful intervention, improvement of critical controls, successful problem-solving and lessons that benefit other teams.

People pay attention to what gets rewarded.

Culture Is Often Local

Large organisations frequently talk about having one safety culture.

Reality is usually more complicated.

Different sites, departments, projects and contractors can develop distinct local cultures within the same company. One team may have open communication and strong supervisory leadership while another operates defensively. One project may treat stop-work intervention positively while another subtly discourages it.

Both may operate under exactly the same corporate HSE management system.

This is why organisation-wide culture survey results need careful interpretation. An average score can conceal significant variation.

Suppose an organisation receives an overall positive response of 82% to the statement, “I feel comfortable raising safety concerns.” That sounds encouraging. But what if one business unit scores 95% and another scores 55%?

The average is not the interesting information.

The variation is.

Leaders should look for cultural hotspots, particularly where local conditions combine with significant risk.

Contractors Experience Your Culture Too

Contractors often have a particularly clear view of organisational culture because they work across different clients and quickly learn how each organisation actually operates.

They notice whether client supervisors intervene consistently, whether schedule pressure affects decisions, whether concerns receive attention and whether contractual relationships change after difficult conversations.

Organisations should therefore include contractors when trying to understand safety culture.

Ask them what happens when they raise a concern. Ask whether they believe they can stop work. Ask where client expectations conflict with their own procedures. Ask whether they receive consistent messages from operations and HSE.

The answers may be uncomfortable.

That is exactly why they are useful.

A contractor who believes commercial consequences may follow from raising problems will manage information differently from one who believes early reporting is genuinely valued.

Culture Surveys Are a Starting Point, Not the Answer

Safety culture and climate surveys can provide valuable information. They allow organisations to explore perceptions of leadership, communication, reporting, supervision, trust, workload and other factors across large populations.

But the survey score should not become the objective.

The value lies in understanding why people answered the way they did.

If employees report low confidence in incident investigations, investigate why. If contractors feel less comfortable speaking up than employees, understand the difference. If one site reports significantly higher workload pressure, examine the operating conditions.

Focus groups, interviews and field conversations can provide the context behind the numbers.

Culture cannot be managed effectively through a dashboard alone.

Leaders Should Look for Contradictions

Some of the strongest cultural signals appear where organisational messages and organisational behaviour contradict one another.

“We encourage reporting,” but reporters are treated as problems.

“Safety comes first,” but schedule recovery consistently overrides operational concerns.

“Everyone can stop work,” but employees who intervene face aggressive questioning.

“We learn from mistakes,” but investigations begin by identifying who failed.

“Our procedures are mandatory,” but supervisors routinely accept deviations.

These contradictions matter because employees resolve them quickly. When formal messages conflict with lived experience, lived experience usually wins.

Leaders should therefore deliberately look for the gap between what the organisation says and what people experience.

That gap is where culture becomes visible.

You Can Change Culture, but Not Through Slogans

Culture can change.

But it changes through repeated experience rather than communication alone.

If leaders want stronger reporting, they need to respond constructively to reports. If they want more stop-work interventions, they need to visibly support reasonable interventions. If they want better procedural compliance, they need to ensure procedures are usable and respond consistently to important deviations. If they want greater openness, senior managers need to demonstrate that difficult information is welcome.

This takes time because employees do not judge culture based on one leadership speech. They watch what happens repeatedly.

A new manager may say all the right things about safety, but the workforce will wait to see what happens when a difficult decision arrives.

That is rational.

Culture is built through evidence.

Start With What You Are Willing to Walk Past

There is a simple leadership question that cuts through much of the complexity surrounding safety culture:

What are you willing to walk past?

The unsafe behaviour you see but do not challenge. The recurring workaround nobody fixes. The overloaded supervisor everyone knows is struggling. The contractor practice that is tolerated because delivery is good. The poor-quality investigation that closes quickly. The critical action that remains overdue without meaningful escalation.

Every time these conditions are accepted, the organisation communicates something about its standards.

That does not mean leaders should intervene aggressively in every minor imperfection.

Good leadership requires judgement and proportionality.

But significant behaviours cannot be repeatedly ignored while leadership simultaneously expects culture to improve.

People notice inconsistency.

Culture Is the Result, Not the Programme

Organisations sometimes talk about “implementing a safety culture.”

Culture is not something that can be installed.

It is an emergent property of how the organisation operates. Leadership, supervision, systems, incentives, workload, accountability, communication and everyday decisions all contribute to it.

That is actually encouraging, because it means culture does not require another standalone programme to improve.

It requires existing management practices to become more consistent with the culture the organisation says it wants.

If you want people to speak up, make speaking up worthwhile. If you want people to follow critical controls, make those controls practical and enforce them consistently. If you want learning, respond to mistakes with curiosity before judgement. If you want accountability, apply it fairly. If you want supervisors to lead safety effectively, give them the capability, authority and time to do so.

Most importantly, examine what the organisation already tolerates.

Because employees learn safety culture every day.

They learn it from what leaders celebrate, what supervisors challenge, what managers ignore, what happens after somebody reports a problem and what decisions are made when safety competes with something important.

The policy tells people what the organisation intends.

What you tolerate tells them what it really means.

References and Further Reading

International Association of Oil & Gas Producers (IOGP). Human Performance. IOGP's Human Performance principles emphasise that error is normal, blame fixes nothing, context drives behaviour, learning is vital and leadership response matters. These principles provide a useful framework for understanding how organisational conditions and leadership behaviour influence safety performance.

UK Health and Safety Executive (HSE). Reducing Error and Influencing Behaviour (HSG48). Guidance examining how job, individual and organisational factors influence human behaviour, error and performance.

UK Health and Safety Executive (HSE). Managing for Health and Safety (HSG65). Guidance on integrating leadership, worker involvement, organisational arrangements, risk management, monitoring and learning into effective health and safety management.

International Organization for Standardization (ISO). ISO 45001:2018 – Occupational Health and Safety Management Systems. Includes requirements relating to leadership, consultation and participation of workers, organisational context, competence, communication, performance evaluation and continual improvement.

Energy Institute. Human Factors Briefing Note No. 18 – Leadership. Guidance addressing the influence of leadership behaviour on safety culture and organisational performance.

Energy Institute. Guidance on Effective Workforce Involvement in Health and Safety. Guidance addressing workforce participation, consultation and ownership as components of effective health and safety management.