- Safety culture is a significant element of a safety management system that must be monitored and evaluated to continually improve safety performance.
- The evaluation of safety culture in the aviation industry has been challenging in the absence of clear guidelines on what to measure and how to measure it.
- Safety culture can be assessed through a combination of qualitative and quantitative tools.
- Common features of safety culture across industries allow lessons learned from the aviation industry to be benchmarked for effective safety culture assessment.
Safety culture has been a topic of debate in academia as much as it has been in the practice of various industries (Zohar, 2010). Although the concept and definition of safety culture and what it entails have consumed much of the debate, the assessment of safety culture has been the most controversial. Yet, on the academic level, the topic of monitoring and measuring safety culture has seen limited research that offers reliable and valid assessment tools (Goodheart & Smith, 2014), especially when compared to the importance of safety culture as a component of a safety management system (SMS).
