Decoding the safety culture ladder (Part 3): The evolution of safety as a value

While many organisations claim that “safety is our top priority”, their actions and decisions often tell a different story. Understanding how safety truly becomes a core value, rather than just a priority or slogan, provides crucial insights for organisations in energy transition sectors seeking to mature their safety cultures.

This article is the third of a three-part series that introduces the safety culture ladder and discusses its application in the energy transition.

Introduction

Commercial success and operational excellence are fundamental business priorities – companies exist in the energy transition to generate shareholder value through efficient production, maximised sales, and sustainable growth. Safety, however, transcends the realm of shifting priorities to exist as a core value that shapes how these business objectives are achieved. When organisations position safety as their “top priority”, they create a credibility gap that turns off workers who witness daily business decisions that necessarily balance multiple demands.

A more authentic approach acknowledges that while operational and financial goals drive business decisions, safety serves as the foundational value that determines how these goals are pursued. This distinction is crucial for developing genuine safety cultures where workers trust leadership’s commitment to their well-being, even as the organisation navigates competing business pressures.

Values are fundamental beliefs that guide decision-making and behaviour regardless of circumstances. The more evolved the safety culture, the deeper the organisation embodies safety as a core value. Understanding how safety evolves from a priority-based consideration to a genuine organisational value provides important insights for cultural development of organisations supporting the energy transition.

BELIEFS AND VALUES

Beliefs are ideas that individuals accept as truth, deriving from diverse sources such as empirical evidence (like mathematical proofs), personal experiences, societal and cultural norms, or the influence of trusted figures like parents, peers, and teachers. When someone embraces a belief, they become emotionally invested in defending its validity.

Values represent deeply rooted, enduring core beliefs about what matters most to an individual. They serve as an internal compass, reflecting a person’s moral framework and fundamental understanding of right and wrong. More than abstract concepts, values are the fundamental principles that define our identity, motivate our actions, and shape our decision-making processes. A belief transforms into a value through deepening personal commitment and recognition of its significance. These core values give rise to individual attitudes, which ultimately direct and inform our behaviours.

Unlike fluid priorities that can shift with circumstances, values are remarkably stable and resistant to compromise. This fundamental characteristic makes them a more meaningful lens through which to examine organisational principles, such as safety. When leaders frame safety as a value rather than a mere priority, they tap into a more profound motivational mechanism. Because values are intrinsically linked to personal identity, individuals are naturally inclined to align their actions with their core beliefs. Even a simple acknowledgment of inconsistency between one’s actions and values can spark meaningful behavioural change.

The SAFETY CULTURE LADDER

The safety culture ladder – conceptualised by Hudson and Parker – was introduced in the first article of this series (Ref. 1). It offers a comprehensive framework for understanding organisational safety maturity. This model provides a strategic lens through which companies can assess their current safety culture and map a trajectory towards more advanced performance levels, graphically illustrated in Figure 1.

Figure 1 – The safety culture ladder (from Ref. 2)

The safety culture ladder spans five levels of maturity. At the pathological level, safety is viewed as a worker-driven problem focused on avoiding regulatory scrutiny. The reactive stage prioritises safety only after accidents, while the calculative level introduces systematic data-driven management. Proactive organisations anticipate potential issues, and at the generative level, safety is fully integrated, with every member empowered to address concerns.

As organisations progress up the ladder, they demonstrate an increasing commitment to safety as a core organisational value, as summarised in Figure 2.

Figure 2 – Safety as a value: A comparative view across the safety culture ladder

PATHOLOGICAL LEVEL: “SAFETY HAS NO VALUE”

At this lowest level of safety culture, safety is not a value, but a regulatory inconvenience to be avoided.

Organisational characteristics: Production is the only real value, with safety seen as a cost burden. Compliance is avoided where possible. The focus is on short-term profit and risk-taking is encouraged.

Decision making: Cost drives all decisions and safety investment is non-existent. Shortcuts are encouraged, risks accepted readily, and safety compliance ignored.

Leadership behaviour: Leaders disregard safety, always prioritising production. Safety concerns are dismissed, safety investment avoided, and workers blamed for accidents.

REACTIVE LEVEL: “SAFETY AS A TEMPORARY VALUE”

The reactive approach acknowledges safety only after incidents, with minimal commitment to prevention.

Organisational characteristics: Safety is valued after incidents but fluctuates with events. The focus remains on the short-term, with competing priorities unclear. Value statements begin to emerge.

Decision making: Safety investments are reactive, often driven by crises. Solutions are quick and temporary fixes, and application is inconsistent.

Leadership behaviour: Attention is reactive, and crisis management common. Commitment is temporary, messages mixed, and example setting is inconsistent.

CALCULATIVE LEVEL: “SAFETY AS MEASURED VALUE”

At the calculative level, safety is systematically managed through processes and metrics, but not yet deeply internalised.

Organisational characteristics: Safety is formally valued and a systematic, metric-driven approach applied. A balance between safety and cost is attempted. Value statements are formalised.

Decision making: Choices are data driven. The approach is system-based, supported by risk assessment and cost-benefit analysis. The focus is on procedural compliance.

Leadership behaviour: Leaders engage in performance monitoring and regular safety reviews. Resources are allocated, and communication formal.

PROACTIVE LEVEL: “SAFETY AS A GENUINE VALUE”

At the proactive level, safety is actively pursued and anticipated, showing emerging genuine organisational commitment.

Organisational characteristics: Safety is truly valued. A long-term perspective is taken with an emphasis on cultural enhancement. Alignment of actions with safety as a value is sought.

Decision making: Choices are value-based, involving input from stakeholders and a focus on prevention. Thinking is long-term, systems based.

Leadership behaviour: Leaders actively engage, visibly demonstrating commitment. Their actions align with the values, and messaging is consistent.

GENERATIVE LEVEL: “SAFETY AS A CORE VALUE”

At the generative level, safety is fully integrated as a fundamental, non-negotiable value that defines organisational culture and behaviour. Without leaders and influential employees who genuinely internalise safety as a value and demonstrate generative safety behaviours, an organisation cannot authentically claim to operate at this level.

Organisational characteristics: Safety is fully integrated into operations. Values are fully embodied in the safety culture. The approach is sustainable, and excellence is expected.

Decision making: Values drive decisions. A holistic, inclusive approach is applied. Balance is sought, with a focus on the future.

Leadership behaviour: Commitment is authentic, with a continuous emphasis on living the values. Leaders lead by personal example.

FROM INDIVIDUAL VALUES TO ORGANISATIONAL DNA

The relationship between individual values and organisational culture is inherently symbiotic, but the journey to a generative safety culture invariably begins with people. Organisations can establish systems, processes, and frameworks, but these are merely enablers. The true catalyst for cultural transformation lies in key individuals – notably the leadership team – who consistently demonstrate their commitment to safety through their decisions, especially during value testing moments.

When leaders embody generative safety principles, their influence permeates throughout the organisation, inspiring others and creating a self-reinforcing cycle of positive safety behaviours. Conversely, without this personal foundation, attempts to impose generative safety practices at an organisational level will likely result in superficial compliance rather than genuine cultural change.

SKIPPING A RUNG ON THE LADDER

A leader’s perspective on safety can transform in an instant. A profound “aha” moment can internalise the understanding that safety is not merely a compliance requirement, but a fundamental personal and organisational value. In this transformative instant, a leader can become fully committed to protecting and caring for every individual within the organisation, recognising that their role extends beyond productivity to preserving human life and well-being.

However, organisational cultural evolution is rarely a sudden leap. While individual enlightenment can be instantaneous, systemic change is a gradual process. Most organisations cannot abruptly skip entire levels of safety maturity – such as transitioning directly from reactive to proactive, or from calculative to generative – because sustainable cultural transformation requires time. Each level of the safety culture ladder provides critical lessons and builds essential infrastructure. Systems need to mature, processes must be refined, and – most importantly – new behaviours must be repeated until they become ingrained habits. Attempting to force advancement, without consolidating learning from previous stages, creates only superficial changes that lack genuine depth and resilience.

There is, however, an intriguing exception to this incremental progression, which is especially relevant to the energy transition which breeds many new companies. When a new organisation is small and its entire leadership team shares a unified, deeply held commitment to safety as a core value, jumping directly to a more advanced safety culture level becomes possible, as illustrated in Figure 3.

Figure 3 – Jumping in at a more advanced safety culture level

This opportunity extends to joint ventures, which are particularly prevalent in sectors like offshore wind. While technically new entities, these ventures can leverage the established safety cultures of their parent organisations, potentially starting at an advanced level on the safety culture ladder. With strong alignment and shared vision, both startups and joint ventures can establish proactive safety practices from inception, bypassing the more rudimentary stages of cultural development, particularly the calculative level where many technical organisations can become stuck.

Joint ventures have the added advantage of being able to selectively adopt and improve upon the most effective safety practices from their parent organisations, potentially achieving even higher levels of safety culture maturity than their origins.

These scenarios underscore the power of leadership consensus and the potential for creating robust safety cultures when values are authentically shared from the beginning.

FALLING BACK DOWN THE LADDER

Organisations can inadvertently regress on the safety culture ladder, as illustrated in Figure 4, typically triggered by significant leadership transitions or profound organisational changes. A new leadership team might prioritise short-term financial performance over long-standing safety commitments, gradually eroding the safety culture established by previous management. This regression can occur through subtle shifts: reducing safety training budgets, relaxing effective safety protocols, or deprioritising safety investments that do not demonstrate immediate financial returns.

Figure 4 – Safety culture regression

The likelihood of such regression varies with organisational size and complexity. Large, mature organisations often have more robust safety infrastructures, embedded procedures, and institutional memory that can resist sudden cultural backsliding. However, they are not immune. Major disruptions such as mergers, acquisitions, significant financial pressures, or leadership changes can introduce vulnerability.

To prevent cultural regression, organisations must embed safety beyond individual leaders. This involves integrating safety values into core organisational processes, ensuring comprehensive leadership succession planning that explicitly includes safety culture continuity, and creating transparent accountability mechanisms. Regular safety culture assessments, external audits, and creating a reporting culture where all employees can raise safety concerns without fear, can serve as critical safeguards against potential cultural deterioration.

PASSING THE VALUE TEST

Moments will occur when the commitment of leaders and the organisation to safety as a value is critically tested: when time is short, resources are constrained, or business pressures are intense. Whether during a crisis, a period of significant change, or under severe financial stress, an organisation’s authentic values become most visible through its decision-making and actions.

Such moments might manifest during investment choices that could compromise safety standards, resource allocation debates that pit efficiency against protection, incident responses that test true organisational priorities, or change management processes that challenge established safety protocols. In these instances, leaders and teams face profound choices – do they prioritise immediate financial performance, or maintain unwavering commitment to protecting people? The decisions made during these value testing moments are far more revealing than any mission statement or corporate rhetoric.

The most resilient organisations recognise these moments as chances to demonstrate their true commitment to safety as a value, making choices that consistently prioritise human safety, even when doing so appears to conflict with immediate operational or financial objectives.

Conclusion

The evolution of safety as a value represents a fundamental transformation in how organisations think about and manage safety. This progression from safety as a burden to safety as a core value reflects deeper cultural maturity.

For energy transition sectors, building strong safety values is particularly crucial given their rapid growth and evolving risk profiles. Success requires genuine commitment to making safety a true value, not just a priority or slogan. The opportunity for new organisations in the energy transition to commit to safety as a genuine value and quickly develop a proactive safety culture is immense.

Organisations that can effectively develop and maintain safety as a core value will be better positioned for sustainable success in the energy transition landscape. This requires consistent effort, authentic commitment, and effective integration of safety into all aspects of operations.