Making Safety Stick
How to change safety behavior for more effective engagement with your risk management system
Even well-designed risk management plans can fall short when day-to-day behavior doesn’t align. At an international school in Southeast Asia, that gap became clear in how teachers approached risk assessment.
Like many schools, this school runs many off-campus and global trips in the spring, just before the end of the year. This school had a good risk management plan and a clear risk assessment policy: assessments are supposed to be completed before each trip. They had a templated form, and teachers were using the right one.
But something was off about how teachers were engaging with the policy. Most of the assessments were copied from other trips or completed at the last minute, after the window for implementing changes had already passed.
“It’s not meaningful,” the Trips Director said. “And it’s not helping us manage risk.”
That kind of behavior points to something broader. When staff perform a safety task without genuine engagement, it usually indicates perceived relevance to their daily goals and priorities. These aren’t isolated choices. They’re shaped by what the system makes easy, what it rewards, and what feels useful.
This post looks at how safety behavior is shaped by context, and how small adjustments can help make safety practices easier to follow and more aligned with how work is actually done.
What Is Safety Behavior?
Safety behavior refers to shared patterns in how individuals act concerning the requirements or expectations of a safety management plan. It’s not about one person falling short; it’s about what a group tends to do, avoid, or ignore.
There are two broad types (Griffin & Neal, 2000):
Safety compliance – Required actions, often linked to policy or regulation. Examples include filling out a risk assessment, wearing PPE, or reporting an incident.
Safety participation – Voluntary actions that support a culture of safety. These include asking clarifying questions, sharing concerns, or reflecting on a near miss in a group debrief.
Whether required or voluntary, safety behaviors can either reinforce or erode an organization’s safety management system (Christian et al., 2009). If your goal is to have a more relevant and effective risk management program, then being able to identify the safety behaviors practiced and accepted by a team, is necessary.
What Makes a Safety Behavior Change Stick
Not every behavior change effort leads to lasting impact. Some changes fade quickly, while others become part of the way work gets done. What makes the difference?
In my experience, three conditions matter most:
1. It aligns with how people already see their job
At a national nonprofit, the business development team didn’t see safety vetting as part of their role. Their focus was on partner relationships and financial risk. They saw safety as someone else’s job.
To shift that, we had to identify how their work contributed to safety and reframe those key tasks. In this case, we integrated safety into the business vetting process and worked to ensure it wasn’t perceived as an additional step or compliance task. Instead, we emphasized that safety vetting is part of the trust-building process with business partners. Rather than allowing safety vetting get in the way of their normal goals, we incorporated safety as one of their primary objectives. That shift in meaning facilitated easier adoption of the behavior and increased the likelihood of it sticking.
2. It’s supported by the surrounding work norms and routines
At the international school, risk assessments were treated as individual tasks. A single teacher completed the form, saved it privately, and moved on. There was no shared process, conversation, or connection to overall trip planning.
We revised the template so it supported trip planning, not just documentation. We created space in team meetings to discuss risk assessments and moved to a shared folder system. The process became more visible, more useful, and better integrated into the work that the staff were already doing. That’s when behavior started to shift.
3. It’s reinforced through everyday interactions
Formal incentives can be helpful, but aren’t always necessary. Often, small moments, like a public shout-out in a meeting or a thoughtful check-in from a supervisor, is enough to show that a safety behavior change matters.
When the business development team started sharing reflections about their new vetting process during monthly check-ins, and when leadership asked about it in one-on-ones, participation spread. It became a normal topic of discussion, alongside other operational updates. Over time, people understood that it mattered and that it was part of doing the job well.
Why Behavior Change Efforts Fall Flat
When leaders try to enhance their staff's safety engagement, they often implement superficial changes too quickly. For example, they introduce a new form, send out a reminder, or add a new training session to the calendar. While these actions can be helpful, they rarely lead to lasting change on their own.
A common misstep is focusing too narrowly on the tool. A better form won’t shift safety behavior if the task still feels disconnected from how the work is actually done. If completing the form still feels rushed or competes with other day-to-day goals, or if the form is unclear and is too difficult to complete, people won’t do the form. Or, they’ll check the boxes just enough to get it out of the way, without fully considering the prompts it is asking.
How the tool is designed matters, and it should support staff’s daily goals and be incorporated into their regular workflow.
Another trap is treating limited participation as a performance issue. When multiple people aren’t using a process the way it was intended, it’s easy to assume they need more accountability or motivation. However, in many cases, the problem lies with how the task is structured. Even experienced staff will struggle to do a new task well if it is confusing, complex, or siloed from their other work.
Some organizations heavily rely on messaging to drive engagement. Posters, slogans, and strong safety language can help clarify values, but these tactics don’t change behavior on their own. People are less likely to trust a new safety message or take it seriously if it doesn't match the reality of their actual work pressures or how work is actually done.
In all three cases, the underlying issue is the same: the overall work system hasn't been designed to support the behavior leaders are asking for. Behavior change efforts fall flat when they overlook how organizational systems shape what people actually do.
How to Start Making Safety Stick
You don’t need to redesign your entire system to improve safety engagement. Start by focusing on one behavior that feels fragile, frustrating, or disconnected from its intended purpose. This might be how a procedure is followed, how a form is completed, or how vetting conversations happen with new partners. The key is to choose something shared across a team or department, not a one-off issue tied to a single person.
Once you’ve identified the behavior, look closely at the environment around it. Consider where and how the behavior happens. Is it shaped by a tool, a routine, or a team norm? Does it happen in a meeting, in a shared workspace, or during informal conversations? Is the behavior consistent, or does it shift depending on who is involved? What messages, assumptions, or time pressures influence it? And when someone does it well, does anyone notice?
From there, make one small but meaningful change. Focus on the conditions that surround the behavior, rather than the behavior itself. You might reframe why the task matters by linking it to something the team already cares about, such as student experience or professional credibility. You might revise a tool to better match how the work is actually done. Or you might add the behavior to an existing workflow so it becomes part of how people already share updates or plan together.
The goal is to adjust the context in which the behavior occurs. The desired behavior should fit more naturally into how people already do their work, and require less effort to carry out.
Safety engagement improves when the surrounding systems make participation easier to sustain. It doesn’t require a full redesign. It starts with noticing one behavior, examining how the work is set up around it, and making small, thoughtful changes that help that behavior take hold.
Start by understanding the behavior. Then, to improve it, change the conditions around it.
References
Christian, M. S., Bradley, J. C., Wallace, J. C., & Burke, M. J. (2009). Workplace safety: A meta-analysis of the roles of person and situation factors. Journal of Applied Psychology, 94(5), 1103–1127. https://doi.org/10.1037/a0016172
Griffin, M.A., Neal, A., 2000. Perceptions of safety at work: a framework for linking safety climate to safety performance, knowledge, and motivation. Journal of Occupational Health Psychology. 5, 347–358.
Neal, A., & Griffin, M. A. (2002). Safety Climate and Safety Behaviour. Australian Journal of Management, 27(1_suppl), 67–75. https://doi.org/10.1177/031289620202701S08
