What Does Safety Culture Mean?

In this episode, Mary Conquest speaks with Dr Tristan Casey, an organizational psychologist specializing in safety leadership and organizational culture, who understands how to generate research with practical impact.

Safety culture is a very broad and all-encompassing term - which causes much confusion. Tristan reveals the origins of this lack of clarity and shares three theoretical perspectives on what safety culture means. It can be a mirror, a map, and a measure, but Dr Casey outlines how these different approaches can form a coherent, sequential and practical framework to systematically improve workplace safety.

Tristan recognizes criticism that safety culture is no different from organizational culture but believes the distinction is useful because it makes workplace safety more tangible and allows organizations to move forward with a shared understanding of what safety and culture mean together.

He shares the practical dos and don’ts of safety culture, explains why clear definitions and feedback loops are so important, and considers the future of safety culture research.

Finally, he addresses a key challenge of how to make safety research more useful for practitioners, stressing the importance of closer partnerships between industry and academia.

Tristan’s deep dive into safety culture brings much-needed clarity and makes it a far more useful concept for safety professionals.

You can learn about Dr Casey’s safety culture research findings in chapter 19 (“Rolling up our sleeves and pulling up our socks: a critical review of safety culture definitions and measures, and innovative ways to move the field forward”) of the Handbook of Research Methods for Organisational Culture:

https://www.google.co.uk/books/edition/Handbook_of_Research_Methods_for_Organis/

Dr Tristan Casey on LinkedIn:

Dr. Tristan Casey | LinkedIn

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