Co-host Kathryn Harvey steps into the guest chair to explore one of aviation safety's most misunderstood topics — what safety culture actually is, why it takes years to build, and the practical steps leaders can take right now to get started.
Safety culture is more than a poster on the wall or a box to tick. It is the foundation that makes a Safety Management System (SMS) work in practice. Without it, even the most detailed SMS is just a document sitting on a shelf.
In this episode, host Grenville Hudson turns the microphone on co-host Kathryn Harvey, who brings a background in safety management, safety culture, and human factors. Kathryn unpacks what safety culture really means, how organisations can assess where they sit on the culture maturity spectrum, and what leaders need to do to move the needle. She draws on research from Cox and Flynn (1998) and the safety culture maturity model developed by Professor Patrick Hudson to frame the discussion.
The episode is practical and direct. Kathryn covers values, trust, recruitment, investigations, and feedback loops and gives a realistic timeframe for how long genuine culture change actually takes.
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Upcoming Training: Making Your Safety Management System Operational
The SMS compliance deadline is 1 September 2026. Operators who are not ready risk serious regulatory consequences. Here are the course details:
Book your seat at aviationsafetycommunity.com.au
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Kathryn Harvey is co-host of the Aviation Safety Community podcast and a specialist in safety management, safety culture, and human factors and runs her own business, Safety Science. She brings hands-on experience across aviation organisations and is a regular contributor to the Aviation Safety Community's training and forum programs.
Times are approximate, based on the conversation flow.
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Don't forget: Making Your Safety Management System Operational
The SMS compliance deadline is 1 September 2026. Operators who are not ready risk serious regulatory consequences. If you have not booked your place yet, head to aviationsafetycommunity.com.au
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Hello, and welcome to the Aviation Safety Community podcast. I'm Grenville Hudson, and my co-host and our guest for the day is Kathryn Harvey. Kathryn comes from a background in safety management and, in particular, safety culture, human factors and fatigue management.
And today, we're going to talk specifically about safety culture and developing safety culture. So let's get right into it. Kathryn, how are you today? Hello, Grenville.
Thank you. I'm very well. I've been continuing to look into safety culture, which is just such a massive area, always learning something new.
It is quite a broad subject. But what would you say is a good definition of safety culture? In other words, what is safety culture? Everyone's sort of understanding of safety culture evolves. So as you sort of learn more about it, your willingness to expand on your definition happens.
But there's some very basic definitions like, you know, the way we do things around here or the best way we do things around here. People might talk about the values of their organisation. But I found a nice little definition that I'd like to use for today, which comes from Cox and Flynn in 1998.
They say, the safety culture of an organisation is the product of individual and group values, attitudes, perceptions, competencies, and patterns of behavior that determine the commitment to and the style and proficiency of an organization's safety management. So that's the one I'm leaning into today. But interestingly, a lot of research, in fact, and there's some stats on it about the research that's done in this area that doesn't actually clearly define what they are researching about.
So they will talk about safety culture without actually defining what that is. So it does create a little bit of a hole in, I guess, the safety science and the practice of safety culture, because if we don't have a standard definition, and I know I'm sort of harping on this now, but it is really important to define what you are trying to achieve. And as part of that, it will then impact on how you measure it and how you plan for it and how you build and develop it, et cetera.
Why do we need safety culture? Good question. So I really think it's fundamental in safety management. I used to describe it as the glue to the safety management system.
So without safety culture, you really just have, you know, a piece of paper telling you what you're doing. So it's how you make that safety management system come alive and perform the way you want it to. I mean, very closely it is integrated with organisational culture as well.
So I just want to put that out there early because I think, you know, we can think about it in broader terms. So the benefits of it, obviously, within safety management, things like risk management, investigations, audit. So if you're integrating safety culture positively, your investigation outcomes, the processes that are behind your investigations and audits and those outcomes will be positively influenced.
You'll get perhaps better communications and consultation outputs as well. Of course, there's a safety benefit if people, and as we'll see, you know, how they implement the culture will then impact the safety outcomes. Engagement is also another area.
Productivity, people with or companies with a stronger safety culture are said to have better industrial relations. So, yeah, a whole lot of things can benefit a company and society from having good safety culture. Just going back to organisational culture and how do you see that safety culture actually sits within it? Is it something that's going to change the organisational culture? Is it a subset of the organisational culture? Yeah, I don't like to think of it as a subset.
I think if you start to do that, it becomes a bolt-on rather than an integration. So I think it's really the more mature a company becomes, the more it's seen as just part of the culture. So the organisational culture will be the safety culture.
It's one and the same thing. So there might be other elements that aren't necessarily safety specific, but I would say the more you get into it, the more you realise that everything has an impact on everything. So it's all very integrated.
Would you say that just in terms of organisational culture, that a lot of organisations already have, you know, traits of safety culture in them? Yeah, yeah. I think some of the sort of high-level ideas of safety culture, things like accountability and integrity, I mean, these are common organisational values that are built into the culture. You know, the way that people provide a service, that can also, you know, be tied to safety.
Things like collaboration and communication- these are all things that have a safety impact, but they also have other impacts as well. Catherine, how do you see for a company that has no further safety culture within it, how do you see that they would go about building or developing it? Well, first of all, I think safety culture is a constant. So, you know, everyone will have a safety culture; all organisations will have a safety culture.
What the sort of measure of that or level of safety culture, whether it be or, in fact, you know, just to step back before I answer that question, there's been some research around levels of safety culture. So the most basic of those started out with three levels, pathological, bureaucratic and generative, and then Patrick Hudson, who did a lot of research in this area and is a well-known person in safety culture, built on that. But just to look at it in those three areas.
So pathological, really there's a lack of responsibility and accountability there. There's really, you know, any new ideas are really squashed down. Information is hidden.
And so that's sort of a dangerous level of safety culture. The bureaucratic one is a little better. So this is where processes are in place.
Messages from safety-related messages or, you know, hazards about hazards and risks are tolerated, but they're not sort of welcomed and embraced and used for learning in the way that, say, a generative culture would use them. So bureaucratic, still very siloed in responsibilities, you know, you do this, you do that, a less integrated approach, whereas generative is really that safety sort of messengers and leaders are embraced, they're trained really well. Responsibility is seen as a clear shared issue, so shared responsibility, and they're really open to learning.
Their investigations will focus on learning and not blame, and new ideas and innovation are really welcomed. So that's sort of a way that we can shape. So, you know, perhaps organisations, if you like that way of thinking, are sitting somewhere across that sort of spectrum of between, you know, pathological and generative culture.
So, first of all, you need to sort of determine where you are and also then where you want to be. So looking at obviously defining your own culture and what does safety culture mean to your business, how does it fit in with the organisational culture, making sure that the very top leaders are involved in building a strategy for this, and linking it back to values. So understanding what are the values that you want to promote and how are those values going to affect safety culture.
So, you know, values is sort of at the centre of this. If you really see safety culture playing out, it's your values playing out. People are acting on, yeah, the fundamental of their values.
So things like just to throw some values ideas out there so that people can start thinking, you know, do you value innovation? Do you value safety? Do you value wellbeing, psychological safety? Do you value people's health? Do you value accountability, communication, resilience? So all of these things are things that we can start to then put a lens on safety culture through our values. So defining it, as I said, then ideally you want to involve people that have an understanding on safety culture and get some advice around perhaps what tools and techniques you can use. You can use really simple tools like surveys and then there's more complex things you can do like focus groups and really, you know, getting deeper into the organisation with questions and workshops and things like that.
What about training? Where does that sort of sit in the development? Yeah, so that was one thing I did want to flag as well. I think people do need to have training on what is safety culture and how does the business want people to understand it and what their, you know, safety culture is. I think you have to train people to understand that because that's the very start of sort of embedding that culture.
So don't let it just happen by chance. It actually needs work and it needs focus and it needs clear messaging. You don't want to have a safety culture by chance.
You need it to be very directed to get the outcomes that you want. Just talk about values again and how would you establish, how would an organisation establish what its values are? What would be a process that they could use? I've done this in different ways but, you know, brainstorming with executives could be one thing. Just, you know, a really open, vulnerable conversation.
I mean, you know, values can be quite a personal thing. So I think, you know, you might have your own personal values and then you've got your organisational values and I guess some type of calibration or general understanding needs to be made. You know, starting with just a list of values.
You can easily get these and now with AI, I'm sure AI could generate a whole list of values for you. So, you know, you could start with a sheet of paper that lists 100 values and you could have everyone sort of circle their values and also like what they think the organisation values are. And, you know, unfortunately I guess, you know, some of these values might be, well, it's on-time service for the customer over safety or it's money or it's, you know, and so you've probably just got to have a look at what is actually driving the business and is that going to support safety and do you want it to support safety? You know, obviously that's sort of the moral question of it all.
But yeah, I guess that's an idea to start. Yeah, that's very, very, very good. In terms of building it, that might be how you develop it, but if you're going to build it over time, and that's really another question, how long is it going to take to build a safety culture at the end of the day? Might depend on a few things, especially size of an organisation.
So, you know, smaller organisations are more nimble. You've probably got a little bit more control on things like recruitment, who you're bringing in, how deeply you know people. In a smaller organisation, there might be sort of closer connections there.
But if you're, I think as a general sort of piece, if you're starting from, you know, from the start almost, I think five years to ten years is sort of a realistic. These things don't happen very quickly and it's also, and one thing we perhaps haven't discussed is around trust, which is very critical in safety culture building. So you want the trust of your workers and the workers want the trust of their leaders as well, so it works both ways.
And building trust is the thing that probably takes the most time and, you know, you've all heard around, you know, how long it takes to build trust and how quickly it takes, you know, to destroy trust. So I think, yeah, you're probably looking at years and I think that that's just a realistic timeframe. Are there certain things that you want to see established pretty quickly? I think leadership commitment and resources to this.
If you're going to take it seriously then you're going to want to see the leadership team take it to that level where you're seeing them act, you're seeing them being present and committed and involved in the safety culture, so you are seeing them on things like, you know, leadership walks. You're seeing them present information. You're seeing them integrated into their every day.
You know, a lot of companies do things like a safety share at the start of any meeting. It doesn't have to be a safety meeting. And I've seen this done to various degrees and, in fact, a company I was working for recently, I just thought, wow, this is really well integrated.
They've been doing this for years and it's not a tick and flick. There's genuine safety shares coming through and enough time dedicated to it as well and, you know, not brushing things off and everyone sort of, you know, would listen with respect and all of those things. So, you know, it's about, yeah, building these things.
It takes time. The framework for the introduction of a safety management system under the ICAO model is around two years to three years. But by the sounds of things, from what you're saying, the safety culture itself might take quite a few more years on top of that to develop.
Any practical tips that you might have in terms of implementing safety culture? Taking a good look at your safety management system and how it's integrated in there. If it's not integrated, then, you know, that's a great opportunity for people to see, okay, where do we want to prioritise where we want to integrate this? Investigations is a great one because that's where people, you know, probably someone that is being investigated, you know, that's a tough time for someone. It's a time where you can prove that you are looking at systems and not people failures, so sort of the human factors and the design elements of the system rather than, yeah, the specific individual.
So it's a great opportunity to prove that safety culture works, where if you've got, you know, trained investigators who are sensitive to when they're conducting interviews, doing it in a way that upholds a good safety culture, and at the end of the investigation that it actually provides learnings and that the person doesn't feel like they've been policed or that it's more of a guidance and a coaching tool. So looking at the very specific areas in your SMS that you want to start with, so, yeah, investigation, audit, continuous improvement, those sorts of areas, and obviously the safety policy. Is it in the safety policy? Of course in aviation there's a lot around just culture, but I would also push people to think more broadly than just culture.
So just culture is great, but safety culture is more than only having a just culture. Then consider other processes. So how are you going to integrate it? Are you going to put it into your safety strategy? Is it going to get that high level attention and governance and monitoring? Are you going to put it into things like your recruitment strategy? This was something that I was always a big advocate for, you know, as part of the interview process, talking to people about culture straight up.
Okay, we have a culture that is this. How do you think you can fit into that culture? What are your values? We value this. Do you think that that aligns with your values? How? You know, those sorts of things I think are really important.
Investing in that training, you mentioned the training piece, so making sure that your investigators, your auditors are really well trained to understand their impact, the impact of the work that they do on safety culture. And, of course, providing something more general to people who are coming into the business or, you know, if you've got a new safety culture strategy that you're actually training or providing information about that strategy to people, that it's not left to chance, that it's not left in the, you know, not assigned to anyone in particular. And then, finally, just act on feedback.
So if you receive reports, if you receive any feedback of any type, that you're proactive because that's where you're going to build the trust. So if you say you're going to do something, do it, and just make sure that your attention is on maintaining the trust and continuing to build the trust. In terms of responding to people within the organisation, you know, when they raise safety issues, what sort of timeframe? Is it something you should do immediately or is it acceptable to let it go for a week or is there a timeframe around these things? There is some science around reward and recognition and I guess this could loosely be tied to that.
So, you know, if you are recognising or rewarding someone, to do it as close to the moment as the thing has happened, that whatever you're rewarding, it gives the positive reinforcement. So there's a whole psychological piece around positive reinforcement. So they will get that positive reinforcement the closer it is to the time of whatever's occurred.
So I look at that in terms of providing feedback to reporters. If you can do it as close to that time, even if it's a simple acknowledgement, and yes, a lot of these acknowledgements are now built into systems, so they, you know, if you send an electronic report, you get something back straight away saying thanks, you know, we'll be in touch. You know, even better if someone's there just actually acknowledging their report or if they get a call, you know, hey, thanks for reporting that, we're on to it, we're going to do this.
As I said, make sure you do what you say you're going to do and if it is going to take a little bit more time, let them know. Keep them updated. You know, there's a, you know, worry that, oh, it's taken too long, just keep them updated, keep the communication lines open.
Communication just does wonders for, you know, safety culture in general, I think. Just in terms of, well, we've gone through safety culture, I think, to quite a good degree there. But just wondering what are your thoughts and what would be your takeaway from this discussion? I think leaders in particular need to do a bit of homework on safety culture, have a look at what safety culture is because there's so much literature out there and sort of just deciding what your take on safety culture is.
You know, there's lots of ideas around is it something just that occurs or is it something that's, you know, deliberate action needs to take place. So decide on what you think it is and what your team thinks it is and agree on that and then direct your focus on the values piece. So decide what your company, organisational leaders' values are and how they promote safety culture and then set a strategy, set a deliberate strategy that's got the leadership commitment and the resources that are required to understand where you're at now to build on that and be able to measure and monitor and implement an improvement plan.
Thank you, Kathryn. That's been fantastic. It's been a great discussion.
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