Safety culture and safety climate are two critical concepts in Occupational Health and Safety (OHS). Safety culture refers to the shared values, beliefs, and practices that shape an organisation's approach to safety. On the other hand, safety climate refers to the perceptions and attitudes of employees towards safety within an organisation. While safety culture focuses on the underlying values and beliefs that drive safety, safety climate is more concerned with how employees perceive and behave towards safety in their day-to-day work.

Work as imagined (WAI) versus work as a done (WAD), some abstract terms, but really useful in terms of their implications. We could also refer to the terms collectively, a different label, the job perception gap.

Asking ‘why?’ about incidents several times and answering, ‘because … ’, inevitably leads to the answer, ‘culture’—the climate of practices, values, accountability and communications pervading in an organisation, summed up in the phrase, ‘the way we do things around here’.

Understanding safety culture is part of the journey towards improving organisational reliability. Organisations have responsibilities for the management of their risks, and to ensure adequate and appropriate risk mitigation. Obviously, the various Work Health and Safety Acts and Regulations exist to protect workers of all Australian organisations. 

Understand What You Want to Achieve:

Do you want to improve, benchmark your organisation against others, or evaluate the impact of change initiatives? At the outset, you need to consider why you are carrying out the survey, what you hope to achieve and how the information gathered will help meet your goals.