Making the complicated simple? The case of construction safety culture

The construction industry has yet to find a comfortable home for safety culture within wider safety management operations. With myriad definitions, proprietary assessment tools, and maturity models available, practical application can be confusing and challenging. Yet regulators in the USA have begun to demand formal reporting of safety culture as part of licensing procedures, repositioning it as a top priority for firms to operationalize. Thus, whilst academic safety culture is developing ever-more complex conceptualizations and frameworks, industry is seeking a simpler, more utilizable version for practice. To take a meaningful step forward in this space, a focus group of industry safety professionals (n=28) participated in a Q-Methodology workshop to unpack the current extensional definitions of safety culture, prioritizing, and evaluating the various elements therein. Findings show that the most important components are those that are also the hardest to measure, such as commitment and leadership. Suggestions for alternative metrics, such as financial commitment could reveal alternative routes for evidence-based rather than opinion-based determinations of culture in the future.