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Safety culture is a term and concept that many people in the safety and health field use regularly with varied assumptions about its meaning. For some, culture is “the way we do things around here.” For others, culture is “what we do when no one is watching.” These may be useful shorthand ways of describing an organizational characteristic, but they don’t tell us enough about what specific elements safety culture comprises, how safety culture relates to actual safety performance, and how to measure it.

This is the challenge that 70 construction industry stakeholders took on at a workshop in Washington, D.C., in June. The workshop was jointly convened by several national research organizations: the Center for Construction Research and Training (CPWR); the National Occupational Research Agenda (NORA); the Construction Sector Council of the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health (NIOSH); and the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences (NIEHS).

Attendees represented contractors and associations, owners, unions, insurers, consultants, and construction safety and health academic researchers. The workshop employed cross-disciplinary discussion groups to address three main questions:

• What are the key factors that contribute to a positive safety culture and climate?

• What tools are available to measure these culture and climate factors, and what are the key issues in selecting and applying these tools?

• Where should organizations invest to make the most valuable improvements in safety culture and safety?

A background research paper for the workshop concluded that considerable confusion existed about the definitions of safety culture (first used in the wake of the Chernobyl nuclear plant disaster) and safety climate.

A helpful way to look at these concepts is as layered phenomenon where the cultural core (the inner layers) includes elements such as basic values, assumptions, principles or convictions. The more visible expressions of culture – like rituals, artifacts and heroes – are located in the outer layers. Culture is more difficult to measure because these core traits are often unspoken or less visible.

It has become common to measure safety climate through perception surveys of employees and to assume that these perceptions are reflective of an organization’s culture. A key purpose of such surveys is to identify gaps between espoused values and policies of an organization and the practices that actually take place.

While precise definitions of these concepts remain elusive, there has been some coalescence around a set of factors and measures of safety climate and culture that will not surprise regular readers of this column. They include management commitment to safety, supervisory support, co-worker support, employee participation and competence level.

Much of the workshop discussion focused on how these can be more effectively operationalized in construction organizations and projects. Among the special challenges of construction safety culture are the distinct cultures or subcultures of different trades, the multi-organizational structure by which most projects are built, the constantly changing work environment, the transient workforce, and the wide range of size and scope of contractors.

Important questions to engage in assessing organizational culture and climate in construction include: 1, What organization are we talking about, and 2, What is the appropriate level of assessment of perceptions (crew, contractor, project, etc.)? One clear message from culture research specific to construction is that open and trusting relationships within the contractor organization and between the contractor and other parties are critical to developing and maintaining high safety standards in the dynamic construction environment.

The workshop discussions often returned to themes of leadership and worker engagement. Top management clearly establishes expectations and values for construction organizations; however, foremen and other field supervision have a critical role to play in operationalizing safety.

Foremen who ascend to their positions based on job skills and strong production may need assistance in developing the planning and communication skills required for consistent crew safety performance. In a positive safety culture, workers feel comfortable reporting hazards and injuries. In the words of leading safety culture researcher James Reason, a positive safety culture is an informed culture, a reporting culture, a learning culture, and a just culture.

In the same way that safety culture and climate are subsets of organizational culture and climate, perhaps the most effective way to operationalize optimal safety is to integrate safety as fully as possible into organizational goals, strategies and practices. Then statements about safety as a way of doing business become reflections of a core culture rather than just slogans on posters.

Materials developed for and distributed at the workshop are available at , and a full report from the workshop will be issued later this year.

Steve Hecker is an associate professor emeritus of the University of Oregon. He also is a member of the SafeBuild Alliance – a nonprofit organization working to achieve incident-free construction projects through the transformation of workplace cultures. For more information or to join, visit www.safebuildalliance.com.