What is a safety culture anyway? For most safety professionals, a safety culture is the value each employee has toward safety. I recall in DuPont safety culture being occasionally defined as “what employees do when no one is watching.” Too often we are caught defining an organization’s safety culture as being either good or bad based on the incidence of safety infractions coupled with total recordable injuries.

As safety professionals, we have promulgated for decades the notion of the so-called safety culture within organizations. I believe it is time to STOP fostering this charade. In my opinion, there has not been, nor has there ever been, a so-called safety culture. In fact, perpetuating this farce has shielded management to narcissistically hide in the fog of a perceived safety culture failure when safety takes a nosedive, especially when fatalities are involved.