EHS professionals are familiar with safety culture and what it means. Establishing, promoting and maintaining a strong safety culture lead to a reduction of incidents and improvements in safety performance. If you read about safety culture, you may come across another term that sounds similar: safety climate.
Safety culture and safety climate are two different things, but they work together. In this post, we define both concepts and explain their relationship.
Safety culture takes time to develop
There are many definitions of safety culture, but I like this one included on a webpage of the Australian state of Queensland:
Safety culture embodies the value placed on safety and the extent to which people take personal responsibility for safety in an organisation. Safety culture is often described as the “personality” of an organisation, as it is a shared value of safety.
According to a factsheet from the same webpage, a positive safety culture exists when employees understand the importance of safety and exhibit positive safety behaviors, such as wearing personal protective equipment without being asked, completing risk assessments for all jobs and reporting all incidents.
Safety culture encompasses a set of shared beliefs, values, attitudes, and customs regarding workplace safety. A safety culture can take time to develop, sometimes even years, and can remain unchanged for a long time.
Safety climate gives a snapshot in time
Most people are more familiar with safety culture, but safety climate appears to precede safety culture, according to an OH&S article. It is generally accepted that “safety culture” was first described in relation to the 1986 Chernobyl accident, while “safety climate” was used as early as 1980 or even earlier.
Here’s a useful definition of safety climate included in a factsheet from the Australian state of Queensland:
Safety climate is the perceived value placed on safety in an organisation at a particular point in time. Therefore, we can think of safety climate as the “mood” of an organisation, based on what workers experience at a specific time.
Since safety climate is a snapshot of safety, it can change quickly, even daily or weekly. For example, an incident or the implementation of a new safety process may heighten the safety climate.
Also, safety climate is a good indicator of safety performance because it captures attitudes and perceptions towards safety at a specific point in time. The best way to measure safety climate is through employee surveys. Discussions within safety committees can also help to determine the safety climate.
Which came first: safety culture or safety climate?
The relationship between safety culture and safety climate is a “chicken or the egg” dilemma. Which term comes first, and which term affects the other? To answer the question, let’s look at the concepts from the standpoint of time. Safety culture is built and sustained over time. Safety climate is a snapshot of perceptions at a particular moment.
If safety climate is consistently positive over time, it will have an impact on safety culture because positive behaviors and attitudes are reinforced. Similarly, if safety culture is strong, safety climate will be reflected in positive survey feedback and other measurements of safety perceptions.
So, which comes first, safety culture or safety climate? An article from The Jobsite, a website on construction industry news, describes the relationship as “a two-way arrow,” which is a great answer. Safety culture and safety climate are mutually formative, meaning they affect each other. While we can’t definitively say whether safety culture or safety climate comes first, we can say for certain positive safety culture and safety climate are essential for building a successful safety management system.