Safety culture categories

Through our safety culture Dashboard, your employees will be asked quick questions categorised in six distinct areas that help explain the safety culture in your workplace. These categories are science based, and developed by industry experts alongside the University of Manchester🔬

• Leadership
• Communication
• Compliance
• Environment
• Social
• Culture

The 'Hudson model' and your safety score

These six categories and the anonymous feedback from your employees are processed using the Hudson model to calculate your overall safety culture maturity score, on a scale of 0-5 across both your organisation as a whole, as well as the six categories. You can find out more about the Hudson model here. 

Let's dive into what these six categories mean below (5 minute read)👇🏻

Leadership Leadership is about how you lead in your workplace!  Good leadership can come in many forms; from being calm in safety situations, listening to your employees needs, to being compassionate and thoughtful in your decision making.

Communication Communication is a key part of safety culture, as it's important to keep in mind how safety decisions are conveyed and received. Miscommunication or ineffective communication channels are likely to be enablers of future incidents, so it's crucial to not take communication for granted, recognising it as a vital and integral part of your health and safety strategy.

Compliance Your organisation may have the best systems in place. The difficulty arises in getting everyone, from your leadership to employees and contractors to implement the processes on a daily basis. Ensuring that systems are easy to apply and that non-compliance is the more difficult option will foster the right behaviours. Safety compliance and safety culture go hand in hand, you can’t have one without the other.

Environment Your people's attitudes and performance can be significantly affected by the working environment around them, even leading to an increase in human error. Minimising exposure to things like noise, lighting and temperature, and mitigating the more subtle effects of workspace layout, cleanliness and nature/planting will help nurture a good safety culture.

Social It may seem like a trivial part of your working day, but social health is as real and important as physical and mental health. A culture of being sociable at work has a positive effect on the ‘informal’ onboarding of new employees by their colleagues, and this is by far the quickest way of influencing the workplace safety culture.

Values Your organisational and safety culture don't work in isolation, with the best results shown through holistic methods. Values are formed based on collective experiences, which despite being relatively unspoken, creates a ‘knowing’ about the way things really are. The key to changing values is to know which experiences need to be changed in order to change the collective mindset.

Looking for more information about our safety culture categories and how you can help transform them? Why not check out your insights on the Dashboard, or explore how our behavioural science backed Leadership Development Hub can help you.  

Still have questions? We're here to help - drop an email to [e-mail], or start a chat with our team via the blue bubble 😊