What Is Safety Culture? A Practical Guide for High-Risk Workplaces
If you’ve ever asked what is safety culture, and why some workplaces stay safe while others keep having the same incidents, you’re asking the right question. Safety culture is the shared set of values, beliefs and behaviours that shape how people approach safety every day, especially when no one’s watching. It’s the difference between following […]
Why Pre-Start Meetings Are So Influential in Safety Culture
Pre-starts, toolbox talks and pre-shift meetings are routine across many industries. They bring teams together before work begins, creating a moment to focus attention, align expectations and discuss safety and performance. For leaders, these conversations happen in busy, high-pressure environments. Time is limited, production demands are high, and teams are often distracted while leaders juggle […]
Making Pre-Starts Land: Practical Insights from the Field
Pre-starts — often called toolbox talks, pre-shift meetings or daily safety briefings — are part of everyday work across many industries. When they’re done well, they help teams feel prepared, focused and aligned before the day begins. They set the tone for how people think about risk, how they communicate with one another, and how […]
Leadership style crucial to tackling the great workforce divide in utilities
An ‘us versus them’ environment fuels a negative safety culture Utilities are an essential service in the community. Neighbourhoods across the country rely on them to keep switching their lights on, run water from a tap and dispose of their rubbish. Proud of their contribution, workers across this sector are dedicated to a ‘job well […]
A Simple Model for Understanding Your Safety Culture
Safety culture is an organisations’ shared perceptions, attitudes, values and beliefs about safety in the workplace—essentially, ‘the way things are done around here’. And a strong safety culture doesn’t happen by chance. Your organisation’s safety culture also influences safety performance and is a significant factor in predicting the likelihood of safety incidents. Safety culture reflects […]
The State of Safety In New Zealand
An Insight into Our Neighbouring Nation As an Australian-owned company, we share a strong bond with our partners in New Zealand. With so many cultural and geographical similarities between us, you wouldn’t be mistaken for assuming that our statistics and trajectories around safety were similar too. However, when you take a look into the safety […]
Encouraging a Culture of Safe Production
A healthy dose of performance pressure is crucial for maintaining optimal levels of production. It motivates teams meet their KPIs, deliver on production targets and stay on-task. Problems arise when levels of production pressure increase to the point that the focus on production starts to overshadow the importance of safe behaviours. Especially if your leaders […]
From Policing to Partnering: The Power of Coaching Conversations
Many safety leaders dream of a workplace where individuals are willing to go above and beyond the base expectation to achieve exemplary safe work performance. But how do we make that dream a reality when so many of us are struggling just to gain compliance with safety policies and procedures? Research at Sentis has revealed that 86% […]
Building Trust in Teams: 4 Tips for Effective Safety Leadership
When thinking about how to develop a strong safety culture, it’ll come as no surprise that it’s heavily reliant on the relationships between your workers and your leaders. Even if leaders are actively striving to promote safe behaviours, one aspect of effective safety leadership is often overlooked—the importance of building trust. Unlike more tangible efforts […]