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.

♪ [music] ♪ - [Mary] My name is Mary Conquest. I'm your host for "Safety Labs by Slice," the podcast where we explore the human side of safety to support safety professionals. We move past regulations and reportables to talk about the core skills of safety leadership, empathy, influence, trust, rapport, in other words, the soft skills that help you do the hard stuff.

♪ [music] ♪ Hi, there. Welcome to "Safety Labs by Slice." The term safety culture is so ubiquitous that we all kind of know what it means, right? As it turns out, a lot of academic research that informs practice in the safety profession doesn't agree on what specifically safety culture means.

How does terminology affect safety professionals in the field? And how do we move from mixed messages and a confusing body of research into better safety in our workplaces? My guest today studies these questions and is here to share his views on safety culture. What it means, what it doesn't mean, and how to make it a more useful concept for practitioners.

Dr. Tristan Casey specializes in safety leadership and organizational culture, and is a seasoned scientist-practitioner who understands how to generate research with practical impact. With a career in workplace health and safety spanning over 15 years, he has consulted nationally and internationally across a diverse range of industries such as law enforcement, local government, utilities, offshore oil and gas, construction, and manufacturing.

Dr. Casey is an organizational psychologist with two doctoral degrees, including a PhD that involved development and validation of the award-winning LEAD model. His passion is translating abstract and theoretical concepts into practical tools that have measurable impact. Most of our discussion today is inspired by a chapter that he co-authored in the upcoming book, "Handbook of Research Methods for Organizational Culture."

So, the chapter is entitled, "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." Tristan joins us from Sydney. Welcome.

- [Dr. Casey] Thanks so much for having me. Really delighted to be here and talk a little bit about safety culture. What a great topic.

- Yeah. Okay. So, let's start with the confusion and move towards clarity. The chapter I referred to was a literature survey of safety research that highlighted the intersecting, inconsistent, and poorly defined use of the term safety culture across a number of research papers. Why do you think that this confusion exists, and why is it important to address?

- Yeah. Great question. I think the confusion is because the original mainstream definition of safety culture, which emerged following the Chernobyl incident, was really a catchall phrase. It sort of included behaviors, beliefs, attitudes, values, priorities. It was just a very broad term.

And so I think from that early beginning, everything that's been done since has either tried to narrowly, like, try and get through that ambiguity and sort of cloudy murkiness of what the definition is, sort of that direction, or they've just run with that definition and perpetuated some of that murkiness. It's important to clarify because otherwise, we don't have consistency in measurement.

We have different concepts of the same, what we call a construct, sort of an imaginary sort of intangible thing that in psychology we try to measure. And so that means that we don't really get progress. If we start to measure concepts using different types of measures, then it's very difficult to move the field forward because everyone has a different view on how to operationalize it.

- Yeah, it's apples and oranges, as they say.

- Yeah, definitely.

- As far as predominant different meanings of safety culture, you've talked about safety culture understood as a mirror, a measure, or a map. Can you walk me through what those perspectives mean?

- Yeah, definitely. So, the challenge we have is because those definitions of safety culture are so broad and they're so established, we can't necessarily just wipe the slate clean and start fresh. So, it's helpful to use little analogies or metaphor more precisely to try and convey the meaning of what perspective we're taking on the safety culture.

So, a mirror, the first analogy or metaphor is really about holding up a mirror to show the organization in a deep way, to encourage it to reflect on the way it thinks. The way the assumptions, the beliefs, the very deep core aspects of what we might call a descriptive approach to the organizational culture. The second approach, which is the measure, is a little more tangible and really feeds into another branch of culture research, which refers to safety climate, more of a tangible kind of quantifiable part of safety culture, which refers to the priority of safety as inferred from perceptions of policies and procedures and practices in the organization.

So, the measure is more like a, you know, if we could take out a tape measure and assess something, that's what we would do. And the last one, the map, is really about maturity models and this more pragmatic practitioner-oriented approach to safety culture. So, charting a landscape of different levels of maturity, showing the organization the future of where it could potentially go, helping it on its journey to improvement.

Now, I think, you know, with all that in mind, one of the things to consider with safety culture is I consider it as a perspective or a point of view on which to look at the broader organizational culture. There's a lot of criticism to say we should do away with this term called safety culture, that it's too confusing. It takes away attention from the broader issues in the organization and really narrowly defines things. But I would argue that, you know, implicitly, we're always evaluating our cultures.

We're always looking at it from a point of view. And if we make that safety part tangible and define it and discuss it and say to each other, well, this is what I think safety means to me, that at least surfaces that bias and allows us to move forward with a common understanding of what safety and culture mean together.

- So, instead of getting rid of the term, just using it to foster this kind of discussion, which will kind of unearth what's behind it. And it sort of sounds like what you're saying is everyone has projected their own meaning, depending on where they're coming from, what's going on in their heads.

- Yeah. Well, yeah, I think that's true. And I don't dismiss their concerns that if we do focus on organizational culture rather than safety culture, we're going to have a broader perspective of what's going on in the workplace. You know, we might otherwise miss things that could be important for safety. So, for example, you know, our HR practices or the way that people think about performance management and appraisal, that would play a role in shaping the culture.

But if we narrowly define it as a safety culture, sometimes we can miss that. I think though it's sort of a little play on words. You know, we are still talking about the broader organizational culture, but we're saying, how do these things, these artifacts, these beliefs, these manifestations shape the way safety is practiced? So, it's still that broad approach, but we're just focusing on how does this affect the safety performance or management techniques in the organization.

- Okay. So, you advocate for a more holistic view that kind of comprises all three of these perspectives, the mirror, the map, and the...

- Measure.

- The mirror, the measure, and the map. How would that look in theory and in practice?

- So, the theoretical perspectives are sometimes considered antagonistic or too different to really integrate, but I would argue that they're actually quite...they quite fit well together, like a puzzle coming together with the individual pieces. So, we can start our journey by using the mirror approach and really doing a deep dive to understand the way people think, their cognitions about safety.

You know, what is a hazard? What is not in this organization? What's an acceptable way to speak up or not about these dangers that we experience in the workplace? A really kind of, you know, a very deep dive to understand what's going on. Then we can utilize the measure aspect to say, well, are these themes, are these qualitative descriptions accurate across the entire organization?

So, it's sort of a more efficient way of utilizing different measures and different approaches or methods to come up with an answer. So, we start with the qualitative and move into the quantitative, which is the measurement approach, and then we finish with the map, which is our roadmap or our journey planning to say, well, given all this data we have, where would we plot ourselves on the maturity ladder, and where do we want to go to as our next stage or step?

So, I see them all as sort of a sequential, you know, independent, but mutually, you know, related set of approaches to understand our safety culture.

- In this chapter, you and your colleagues outline what you call a safety culture research manifesto. Who doesn't like a good manifesto? And you've structured it into dos and don'ts recommendations. So, I'd like to...first of all, I want to make a quick distinction between safety culture researchers and safety practitioners.

And the manifesto is directed at researchers, and we will come back to its implication for practitioners later. And, of course, some people are both researchers and practitioners, but in this case, let's look at your suggestions for researchers. I'm going to read out sort of the do not side of things, and I'm hoping that you can briefly expand on each point.

- Yeah, sounds great.

- Okay. So, the first one is avoid the temptation to exclusively quantify safety culture.

- Yeah, that goes to my previous point, I think, where we might be a little bit tempted to just deploy a standard off-the-shelf safety climate survey and say, well, now we understand our culture. In reality, we've just taken a little slice off the top and really just got a very generic kind of water-down version of what's going on.

So, it's really just saying think more broadly, use the mirror, the measure, and the map in conjunction.

- Would you say that the qualitative, the mirror is almost ethnographic research that you identified as the first step. Would that narrow the focus of the quantitative, like, would it inform the questions that you would...the measures that you'd be looking at in the quantitative?

- Yeah, definitely. That's approach that I use quite often is rather than using off-the-shelf tools, I will say, well, here's the themes that have emerged. And because I've got that organizational psychology training, I'm able to develop and validate new measures and scales. So, it's a big effort to do that. And so it's not an easy undertaking. But a halfway point or a compromise could be, well, let's review all those off-the-shelf tools and pick the questions or the modules that actually align the closest with some of the things that we're seeing in our organization.

So, it's about customizing your approach, I think, and being flexible.

- Okay. Avoid the use, speaking of methodology, of generic safety culture surveys.

- Yeah, that's probably, again, a bit of a dependency on what we've just discussed, but it's the idea that you should be trying to contextualize your measures to your organization, or at least your industry. So, in another bit of research that I did recently, we looked at developing industry-specific safety climate surveys, and we found that they perform so much better than the generic off-the-shelf tools.

They were stronger predictors of safety behavior within those settings. So, there is a lot of benefits, I think, to thinking from a customized lens. You know, try and tweak the wording, or at least change the terminology to make it make sense to workers in your organization or in your industry. But the very nature of what safety is, of course, is quite different from a manufacturing setting, which is quite standardized and proceduralized versus, you know, an emergency service organization where risk is dynamic and things...you have to be adaptable and improvised quite often.

So, there's something to be said about customizing your tools.

- And that's also potentially sort of not a halfway step, but if there's not the capacity to fully customize, at least filtering by industry essentially, gets you there...gets you closer.

- Yeah. There's a lot of industry tools out there. And even the work that we've done has been published by a regulator in New South Wales in Australia. So, there's lots of free tools out there, you just got to know where to look. And so if people are wondering, I'd encourage them to reach out to me and I can give them some advice after the session.

No problem.

- Great. Okay. The next one you touched on in the beginning, but avoid defining safety culture using all-encompassing and catchall terms.

- Yeah. It's a temptation, I think, to sort of say, look, safety culture is comprised of everything from beliefs and assumptions, so these fundamental, you know, ways of how the world works in our heads, all the way up to documentation behaviors, you know, things that we might see, signs and symbols in the organization. The problem with those more tangible aspects of culture, which Edgar Shein talks about is, you know, they can be interpreted in multiple different ways.

We could look on the wall and see a poster that says something about, you know, behavioral-based safety or stop and think or something like that, but is that really reflective of the broader culture? It could just be something that was put there, you know, by an individual, but doesn't necessarily represent the broader...the sharedness of those perceptions and beliefs in the organization.

So, we have to be careful over-interpreting the artifacts or the tangible signs of safety culture. We have to do so in conjunction with some of those deeper, more meaningful units of many in the organization.

- I'm curious about this one, avoid the use of cliches when describing the nature of safety culture. Can you give me an example of a cliche that you'd be referring to?

- Yeah. I think it might be a little bit of the clumsy wording there, but it means basically like saying the safety culture is kind of good or positive or helpful. Like, these are generic terms that might be overused and don't really tell us much about the culture at all. So, I think when we're trying to describe the culture, what I'm trying to say is do not just go with the easy descriptive, sort of like a very simplified...oversimplified, in fact, phrase that sort of summarizes everything.

It is much richer than that. So, try not to go down that pathway. It really just dilutes the whole process.

- Yeah. I mean, the word good could mean so many things. Okay. And the last one is avoid using safety culture and safety climate interchangeably. You touched on this a little bit earlier.

- Yeah. It's something that, unfortunately, still happens today despite so many different articles and journals saying, do not do this. They are different concepts, as I said. The best way to think about it is that the culture is the sort of the overarching umbrella concept, which includes safety climate within it. Climate is probably more representing the middle layer. If we think about culture as a big onion, the middle section are the beliefs, the descriptive ethnographic approach, the middle layer is the climate or the perception and the values and the priorities, and the outer layer is all the manifestations and tangible signs of what people do in the organization.

So, we confuse the two with sort of not really being accurate in what we're saying.

- And then we're just creating two confusing terms.

- Yeah, exactly.

- Okay. So, I'm going to move on to the dos, the things that you and your colleagues suggest. The first one is reflect on and explicitly state how the researcher's own definition of safety might influence the path of research and the conceptualization of safety culture.

- Yeah. Very, very wordy sentence there, isn't it? But what I'm trying to say in plain English is, you know, consider your definition of what you think safety is because you've got two little words there, safety and culture. But kind of, I think, today agreed on what culture is that it's comprised of beliefs and assumptions, values, priorities, and behaviors all together in one mix.

But the safety part, we haven't really unpacked today. And safety can be...you know, everyone can have different models of how safety happens. You know, their definition of safety might be about procedures and compliance. It might be about adaptation and resilience. It might be about leadership and culture and, you know, these more capability type aspects of how we build safety or create it.

So, if we sort of say this loose tone safety culture, but don't stop and think, well, what do I actually consider safety to be? And what does good safety look like? What's sort of my template that I'm judging this culture by, again, we just miss an opportunity to clarify and get a shared understanding with who we're trying to communicate with because they may have a very different concept of safety.

So, if you say, well, the safety culture's great, it's good, but you are operating from that kind of proceduralized and compliance perspective, that other person might say, well, it doesn't look good to me. You know, people are just following the rules and not using their brains. You know, when there's an unexpected surprise, they don't deviate or improvise. They just do what they're told. So, that's, again, an opportunity to just have a conversation and really define clearly where you're coming from.

- Yeah, I mean, we all have biases. The word bias has sort of a negative connotation, but it's just, you know, the amalgamation of all our experiences, of course, we're going to have biases.

- Yeah. It's a mental shortcut. It's something that helps us navigate the complex world, isn't it? And I agree, there's a lot of negativity about bias. There's almost this assumption that we can somehow control them. I think it's more just that we are aware of them and that we stop and think and consider, well, is there an alternative view here?

Is there something that I'm missing? And the way that we can counter that or battle against that is by consultation, diversity of inputs, just getting lots of people to sort of get involved where appropriate in that decision-making, particularly around risk.

- So, for the researcher here, okay, yeah, you do say and explicitly state, yeah, so that at the beginning of any kind of research, if someone else is reading it, they can understand, okay, these are the parameters of what this person is looking at and this is why this methodology or, you know, this type of research makes sense within these parameters.

- Yeah, I mean, if you look at the evolution of safety culture research, which we talk about in the chapter, you'll notice that there's been some threads and changes in how that's been conceptualized. So, we started the journey with...and before Chernobyl, there were some writings about safety culture, but they just didn't call it that, which was really about information flow and information quality and trust.

And just this ability to communicate bad news to the organization in general. Then we moved into this more sort of values and care about safety kind of approach, which dominated, you know, sort of the '90s to early 2000s. And more recent research is saying, well, you know, it's more about the sort of the implicit beliefs that people have. So, this sort of as we move through time and our definitions and understandings of safety change so with our understanding and definition of safety culture, I think, and just be aware of it, there are multiple perspectives that we can consider.

- And maybe depending on when you sort of came of professional age, that might be a bias too because most people would've sort of absorbed the prevailing opinion at the time.

- Yeah, I think so. And safety climate's an example of that. It's very much about, you know, rule-following and procedures and compliance. Most of the measures talk about those things, but more recently, safety's evolved down this avenue of more flexibility, you know, more autonomy for people, more ability to make decisions.

And I'm sure safety climate will start to change how they measure it and how they operationalize it. So, a bit of a tangent there, it's a passionate topic.

- No, no, no. We're all about tangents. Okay. So, the next one is explicitly identify the level or levels of safety culture being investigated.

- Yeah. I believe that...just trying to remember what I meant when I wrote that. I think it's more about the mirror, measure, and map from memory. That's what I was referring to. So, the level means if we think about the onion, if you are going to be measuring the beliefs or the core of the onion, just tell people that's what you're focusing on.

It's not a limitation of your study. It's not a problem. I think though that sometimes researchers will just jump straight to sort of the middle layer or the outer layer and say, this is what safety culture is. And not say, well, there's other perspectives we could have done, but that's not relevant for our research or our objectives at this point.

- And I think to go along with that is align the level or levels of safety culture with corresponding best practice methodology and data gathering techniques.

- Yeah, that's exactly right. So, if you're going to use the measure approach, which is the survey tool, try not to use some surveys that say they're safety culture, but they're so messy. They've got, you know, attitudes or evaluations of how good or bad safety is. They've got safety motivation, safety knowledge, all these things that are separate kind of distinct concepts kind of mashed into one assessment.

I would say for that example, if you're trying to measure safety culture quantitatively, go to a validated safety climate tool. So, it's just making sure you are using the right tool for the right approach.

- And the last one here is use participatory techniques that involve organizational memories in the co-discovery of a safety culture.

- Yeah, this has been sort of a more practical reflection throughout my years of looking at safety culture. The way that we can change it is through measurement. And if we make sure that we close out with feedback loops, if we go back to people in the workplace and say, hey, this is what the survey's telling us. What do you think? Tell us more about what this means. Or, you know, engaging in interviews and focus groups and saying to people, what's the aspirations for the future of the safety culture here?

What would you like to see? Just by doing those activities and making sure they result in action, at a management level, you know, at sort of supporting those changes, involving people in that process, you know, co-designing the future of the organization, you can start to really have a tangible sustainable impact.

I think the mistake many organizations make is good intentions, let's run a survey, let's, you know, get some data from people, but it falls into a black hole and nothing changes. So, people become cynical, you know, disenchanted, and nothing changes as a result.

- That might be sort of the some people think of this in terms of consultants. They say, you know, if you are to come in and do your research and make a suggestion without any feedback or consultation or co-discovery, as you mentioned, then it's almost inevitable that it will fall into a black hole because the people in the organization aren't really participating in it.

- That's exactly right. Yeah. I mean, it's a balance, isn't it? Because you don't want to be railroaded or taken off your course. Sometimes as leaders, we have to, you know, use our authority. We have to tell what the vision is and what the organization needs, but, you know, we've got to support the transition to that future state. We have to somehow engage with people and give them the skills, the capabilities, the support to actually get to that future outcome.

So, it's a balancing act, participation versus direction, but, you know, leaning a little bit more to towards the consultation and participation side of the equation.

- Yeah. I think what you're warning against is not balancing and just going in one direction entirely, not having both.

- Yeah.

- The chapter mentions innovative research methods, new data sources, and developing technology that are opening up possibilities for safety culture research. I find this super interesting. So, tell me about those. I guess we can go by three, start with research methods and then data sources and technology.

- Yeah, I mean, in terms of research methodology, something that I use successfully is more of a kind of an open-ended discovery process to safety culture. So, rather than having this really structured, sort of, constrained approach where you've got set questions, you ask the same questions to every single person, we can do a more emergent or what we call convergent interviewing process.

So, you start out with just a broad statement and, you know, something like, tell me about what it's like to work here, or tell me about how safety is done here, or tell me about the future of safety in this organization. And you sort of allow the conversation to evolve and organically grow. And each time you do an interview, you stop, you analyze, you reflect, you plan, and then you might ask a slightly different question or a couple of questions the next time.

So, it's almost like this sort of organic process where you're discovering what's meaningful to everyone as those thoughts emerge from your interview. So, by the time you get to the end of the process, you've got a really rich kind of accurate description of what's going on. I mean, it reminded me of a paper, very old paper, probably 20 years old, which compared different safety culture discovery methods.

And I found that the most effective one was really just this really open-ended sort of, you know, tell me about your culture type method. You know, if you could use five words to describe your culture, I think the method is what words would you use? And they found that just really simple process was enough to generate a lot of rich insight. So, I guess what I'm saying is that don't overcomplicate safety culture discovery.

It can be an organic kind of natural process. It'll emerge as you go through that open-ended approach.

- And new data sources, this is, obviously, driven by new technology.

- Yeah, we can talk about that together. So, I think one of the challenges safety professionals face these days is if we're shifting away from just quantitative measures of have people attended training or not, or have they done, you know, their inspections or not, account data, into more of a qualitative space to say, well, what were the outcomes of that inspection, or what did they apply or learn in that training?

We've got so much rich kind of textual comments data that we just don't know how to analyze and it's too much to do. So, we need to look towards technology. And a particular technology that I use often that really works well is something called topic modeling. And what it does is it looks...I don't know the technical kind of background to it, but really it uses something called natural language processing.

This sort of algorithm that looks at the meaning and associations between different words and it comes up with categories. So, it almost does the thematic analysis for you. There's still some subjectivity there where you have to choose a number of topics and, you know, give it some guidance, but it shortcuts that process of manually looking through these, you know, thousands of rows of data and coming up with really comparable results, you know, between a manual process and an automated process.

So, I can only see that enriching further with the use of artificial intelligence and machine learning. You know, one day not too far away, I'm sure we'll start to see software products or online services that allow us to upload, you know, our safety assessment tools or our qualitative data and it'll come back with meaningful information for us.

Yeah, so I look forward to that day.

- As you're talking about this, I'm thinking some listeners may think, oh, well, that's a bit of a stretch, but if you've ever been on Google and done a search, that is the same type of information that they use, you know, they crawl websites and then they have this mysterious algorithm that uses natural language analysis to figure out top, like, what are these pages really about?

Which is the best page to answer the question that the person just searched about? So, that's already driven the technology pretty far, and I'm sure as you say, it'll only get better.

- Yeah, definitely. I mean, software products like Qualtrics, the survey platform, already have topic modeling in it. So, you can just basically collect your information on your survey tools and analyze it in the platform. So, you know, it's becoming more mainstream and more user-friendly as the days go on.

- What about wearable tech or like data gathering technology? Are there any movement...or not movements, buT improvements that you know about?

- Yeah. Yeah. I mean, there's something that I pitched an idea to a tech developer a while back, and I'm not sure if they took it up, but it was this idea that, you know, because we've got cultures all about meaning-making and sense-making and, you know, communication and trying to get into people's heads and figure out what are the shared patterns of meaning about safety in this organization.

So, I can see quickly that maybe we could have one day, you know, some sort of virtual assistant that listens to meetings or toolbox talks or pre-start meetings, and can quickly kind of capture the rich interactions that people have about safety and automatically, you know, code them or automatically analyze them. I know of a product already that does listen to what people say and sort of documents risk assessments electronically, so just sort of talk into your phone and it will, you know, allocate the ratings and everything appropriately.

So, I don't see much of a leap to go from that to that kind of virtual, you know, culture diagnostic tool in the future. We just have to figure out how to kind of process that information in a small, portable unit.

- And I think analyze it and sort of check it as well. My hope is that humans won't become totally irrelevant in the analysis part of these things because the tech is only as good as the humans that make it. Okay. So, I want to...I promise to do this, and I'd like to bring it back to the practitioner again.

So, the boots on the ground, as they say. There's sometimes a criticism from safety professionals that academic research and discussion is just too detached from practical applications. So, how would you respond to that...and, you know, or the blunt question, how does better research help people go home safe?

- Yeah, good question. I hope I've done that a bit in the chapter by utilizing the metaphors, you know, the ability to sort of convey a complex concept by referring to something that's already quite well-known to the mirror, the measure, and the map. So, that's sort of an education component, but if we think about what does this mean in practice, how do we apply this stuff?

I think, you know, researchers are often very light in their practical implications sections in their articles. I think because they're not quite sure, how does this work? How does this play out in practice? So, I mean, I get around that by, A, having a rich background myself having been a practitioner, but also in an academic sense as well, but then partnering with practitioners and suggesting, well, let's co-design research together.

Let's do it collectively. And thinking from the outset, how will I communicate the results of this? How will it perhaps be integrated into toolkits or, you know, practical resources that people can use and download? And, you know, the regulators in Australia are very good at that. You know, they have good outreach processes, they communicate the results, they create automated survey, tools of some of the research that I've done.

So, I think it's just having those partnerships and understanding your audience. What do practitioners want? What do they need? And shaping your research to really fit into that requirement. Yeah. Rather than sitting in your, you know, academic office and thinking, well, this is interesting. It's theoretically good and we need that stuff, but that's just one piece of, you know, we have to translate it as well into the real-world application.

- Yeah, I was thinking collaboration with practitioners would be a good way to discover how to translate and how to best educate. Yeah. Like you said, figuring out the language that's being used, whether it's industry-specific or just in general for practitioners.

- Yeah. And just something occurred to me, I think that to determine the effectiveness of those tools, we have to do more intervention research and we just need more organizations that are willing, not necessarily to spend money on that type of thing because there's innovative ways we can get funding, but, you know, more willingness to collect data on whether something works, you know, to determine return on investment, to determine the impact.

And organizations can leverage things like regulator awards or industry recognition to sort of, you know, kill two birds with one stone there. We can evaluate the intervention, then we can also try and get up on, you know, competitions or showcase our organization's innovation through public recognition. So, I think just being aware of the benefits of doing applied research and performing those partnerships with academics is helpful.

- Do you find that there's a lot of resistance to that kind of applied research? Or my other question is, would that resistance go along industry lines? Like, for example, would an industry that is based on innovation be more likely, or a company in that industry, be more likely to be open to this kind of applied research than maybe something more traditional?

- Yeah, it really depends. I mean, the maturity of the organization's a big factor. They can be very large or very small, but their openness to research, their competence with analytics and data does determine, you know, just how sophisticated you can go and even the types of interventions you can test. So, I had this conversation yesterday with a fellow academic and we were talking about we've got this great idea for a new safety leadership program, but, you know, the clients that are interested in safety leadership at this point, they're not ready for that.

You know, they're still at that kind of care and concern and relationship-oriented safety leadership. They're not ready for the sort of more advanced, you know, decision-making complexity theory-inspired safety leadership. So, I think, you know, technical engineering-based organizations usually go to these things, these sort of intervention research very rapidly, but perhaps, you know, organizations like hospitality to some extent, construction, not always, but some of them, maybe the smaller players are a little bit hesitant, basically, where they see it as a destruction or a sort of a drain on their production capacity, you know?

So, just got to be more convincing and influential in how we can add value.

- Well, we're coming up to time, but I have some questions that I ask every guest at the end. So, this one is...we'll call this the University of Tristan. If you were to develop some sort of soft skill training or like core skill, human skill, relationship skill training for tomorrow's safety professionals, where would you focus? What kind of skills do you think are most important for them to develop?

- Yeah, wonderful. It's relevant because I'm doing some work with the International Labour Organization and the intro Organization on this topic. So, we're looking at their global capability framework and where they need to evolve. And some of the trends from our research that are coming out on these projects is industry 4.0 integration of technology, really just this sort of collaboration between robotics and people.

So, if I could think of training or skills that safety professionals will need, it's, you know, how to kind of...it'll be sort of more complex thinking skills, adaptation skills, problem-solving, fault finding, you know, just more advanced ways of thinking about how people and technology come together.

If I hone in on the interpersonal stuff, I think safety professionals eventually will become sort of business enhancement or optimization specialists. Will start to maybe the safety component will become integrated and professionals will be going down this pathway of how do we just make work happen seamlessly and successfully. That's really, you know, the direction that I see things going with some of these new ideas, resilience engineering, safety differently, safety 2, you know, it's all about everyday work and how do practitioners make it better.

- Yeah. When you were saying that, I was thinking, human and organizational performance. That's exactly where that's going, right?

- Exactly. Yeah.

- Okay. How can our listeners learn more about...I realize there were lots of topics in our discussion, but are there any, obviously, the book that's coming out, but are there websites or frameworks or concepts? Is there anywhere that you would direct listeners to learn more?

- Yeah. Trying to think off the top of my head. I couldn't say, like, here's the safety culture website or something.

- Go to this website that will solve everything.

- Yeah. There is nothing really out there like that. Just like the culture portal or something. No. Unfortunately, that doesn't exist. Maybe we can make that one day, but I think, yeah, regulators are good. Particularly in Australia and New Zealand, they've got some great resources on these topics.

And yeah. And just contact your friendly academic. If you're in North America, I can certainly refer you to people that I know in that area that are the gurus on this topic. So, yeah, get in touch and I'm happy to have a chat via email or Zoom.

- Well, and that answers my next question, which is where can our listeners find you on the web?

- Yeah, LinkedIn's always good. I'm always on there. So, if you do find me, Google or look up Tristan Casey, you'll find me, my little smiling photo. And send me direct message and I'm always responsive. I'm always happy to hear from people. So, get in touch.

- That's great. Well, we're at time for today. Thanks to our listeners for downloading and sharing our podcast. And thank you, Tristan, for sharing your vision of better research for safer workplaces.

- Thanks for having me. It's been wonderful to chat. Really enjoyed it. Thank you.

- And lastly, of course, my thanks to the "Safety Labs by Slice" team who find the most interesting guests and care deeply about supporting safety professionals. Bye for now. Safety Labs is created by Slice, the only safety knife on the market with a finger-friendly blade. Find us at sliceproducts.com.

Until next time, stay safe.