How to Build a Safety Culture That Drives Meaningful Impact

Building a safety culture doesn’t happen by accident.

Building a safety culture doesn’t happen by accident. It isn’t just about compliance or avoiding OSHA fines; it’s about creating a workplace where safety is ingrained in how employees think, act, and work together.

While safety programs provide the policies, procedures and practices to proactively identify, control and eliminate workplace hazards, they run the risk of being treated as a series of rules handed down from leadership, with little employee engagement.

However, coupled with a strong safety culture these programs can shift behaviors, garner buy-in and drive your desired safety outcomes. Great safety cultures are built from within, driven by shared values, empowered employees, and championed by leaders who walk the talk.

Here’s how to create a safety-minded culture that actually sticks.

Step 1: Assess Your Current Safety Culture
Every company has a safety culture, whether it’s strong, weak or somewhere in between. Before you can improve, you need to know where you stand. That starts with a Safety Culture Assessment which evaluates the beliefs, attitudes and perceptions that shape behaviors around safety.

Insights gained in this step provide information about what others are seeing that you may not, and can open your eyes to where you are knocking it out of the park and where you may have work to do to create clarity and specificity for what your safety culture truly is.

Step 2: Establish a Strong Foundation for Your Safety Culture
Safety needs to be more than a policy. It should be built upon a solid foundation that connects people to why safety is important so they connect at a belief level, establishes shared mindsets that guide actions, and creates clarity for what actions employees can, and should take to demonstrate their commitments to making safety a priority at work.

Building that solid foundation begins with leadership defining and committing to a Safety Ethos that defines why safety is important to the organization, what the outcomes are that you hope to achieve, how your values inform your approach to safety, and what actions you need to take to drive the outcomes you desire.

Companies with a deeply embedded safety ethos experience higher employee retention and morale because when workers feel safe, they’re more engaged, productive, and committed (National Safety Council, source).

Step 3: Identify Safety Ambassadors
Culture is shaped by people, not policies. Research shows that 3% of employees shape the perceptions of 90% of their colleagues. This informal network within organizations is often underestimated in their influence on information flow, decision-making and employee engagement. Identifying and using this cohort of employees empowers leaders to have a strong “voice of the people” representation and a two-way feedback loop to source valuable insights that can inform how you launch and refine key safety initiatives.

These key influencers aren’t always in leadership roles. They’re the trusted peers that employees look to for guidance. In fact, influencers are hardly ever who leaders think they are but have a massive impact on their peers and within the organization. Identifying them through formal quantitative surveys or manager nominations allows companies to leverage peer influence to drive safety adoption.

Step 4: Design and Launch a Safety Ambassador Program
Once you’ve identified safety ambassadors, the next step is ensuring they have the training, resources and visibility to activate and drive your desired culture from within.

A successful Safety Ambassador Program is the key to unlocking the full potential of your safety culture, bridging the gap between the vision set forth in your Safety Ethos and everyday employee experiences. While top-down strategies certainly have their place, true cultural adoption and integration also require organic, bottom-up involvement from employees.

Designing the program is critical to ensuring clarity and impact. Ambassadors should have a well-defined role, a cadence for meetings, and measurement for defining and measuring impact. Whether serving as a sounding board for leadership, fostering team-building activities, providing a feedback loop to leadership, and/or acting as role models for the company’s safety ethos, expectations must be clear and an appropriate structure must exist to ensure their success.

Launching the program successfully requires bringing ambassadors together, fostering collaboration, and aligning them with the organization’s safety vision. The program launch should be thoughtfully designed to align them around established intended outcomes, what success looks like and engage them with the tools they have at their disposal to be successful. The launch experience can include an activation exercise and should establish a regular cadence for meetings to keep ambassadors engaged and aligned with the organization’s safety culture. Read more about Safety Ambassador Programs here.

Step 5: Activate Safety Culture Company-wide
A safety culture shift doesn’t happen overnight. To embed safety in daily operations, companies need a structured activation plan that includes ongoing training, communication, activation and reinforcement that goes beyond one-time compliance sessions. Leadership participation is essential, ensuring executives and managers actively demonstrate and discuss safety. Regular internal communications, using real employee stories and safety wins, help keep the message alive. Additionally, recognition programs that celebrate employees who exemplify safety values reinforce the importance of workplace safety throughout the organization.

Step 6: Measure, Adapt and Sustain
A great safety culture isn’t static. It evolves. Your safety program will track incidents and near-misses, but there are other measurements to gauge how your safety culture is working such as building measurements from your desired outcomes defined in your Safety Ethos. Tracking and measuring these types of outcomes helps others see and feel the impact of their efforts and identifies new challenges, whether it’s complacency or gaps in training.

Organizations that actively measure and refine their safety culture report fewer safety violations, lower insurance costs, and stronger employee engagement—a triple win for performance, people, and profitability (National Safety Council).

Final Thoughts on How to Create an Impactful Safety Culture

A high-impact approach to safety isn’t just about avoiding accidents. It’s about building a workplace where employees feel valued, engaged and invested in their own and the company’s well-being.

At Savage, we help organizations move beyond compliance to embed safety into their culture in a way that drives real results. If you’re ready to transform how your organization approaches safety, it starts with understanding where you stand.

Ready to create a safety culture that sticks – one that goes beyond checklists and compliance? Our Safety Culture Assessment helps you evaluate where you stand today, uncover pressure points and blind spots, and gain clarity on how to move forward.

Download the Safety Culture Assessment to get started.