Safety Culture and Psychology: Safe Behaviour Beyond the Rules

Workplace safety culture is not built with rules and equipment alone. Read about the psychology of safe behaviour, the role of leaders and steps for factories.

In many factories the walls are full of warning signs, hard hats and gloves have been handed out, and training records have been signed. Even so, accidents continue. Because safe behaviour is shaped not only by rules and equipment but by what people learn from one another every day. Safety culture is the answer to the question "how do things really work around here?": Does the foreman take the guard off when he is in a hurry? Does the supervisor bend the rules when production falls behind? Is a young employee listened to when they point out a hazard? In this article, for employers, factory managers, HR and occupational health and safety (OHS) specialists, I look at the psychological foundations of safety culture, the factors that weaken it, the legislative framework and the concrete steps that can be taken in an organisation.

What Is Safety Culture and Why Does It Matter?

Safety culture is the sum of the shared values, beliefs and everyday habits about safety in an organisation. Written procedures say what the organisation should do; culture determines what people do when no one is watching. This is why two factories can have the same instructions, the same machines and the same hours of training, and yet very different accident records.

Turkey's data clearly shows how serious the subject is. According to the SGK (Social Security Institution) Statistical Yearbook, in 2025 766,039 workplace accidents and 1,931 deaths resulting from workplace accidents were recorded under coverage 4-1/a (insured employees); about 41% of the accidents took place in the manufacturing sector (SGK, 2026). In the same year, workplace accidents caused a total of 4,639,930 days of temporary incapacity for work. In Çorum, 3,821 workplace accidents and 12 deaths were recorded in 2025 (SGK, 2026). Each of these figures is an event that changed the life of a family, a team and a production line.

The importance of safety culture comes from this: most accidents are related to a person not applying a rule they know under the conditions of that moment. A lack of knowledge can be closed by training; but thoughts like "everybody does it this way", "if I stop, we miss the target" or "if I say something, no one will listen" only change through culture.

The Psychology of Safe Behaviour: Why Do People Take Risks?

Risky behaviour most often comes not from carelessness or indifference but from the ordinary workings of the human mind. The psychological processes frequently observed in factories are:

• Habituation and the dulling of risk perception: A foreman who has worked on the same machine for years without an accident no longer "sees" the danger. Because each risky shortcut results not in an unrewarded punishment but in a time saving, the behaviour is reinforced.
• Immediate gain, distant loss: Putting on the guard takes a few minutes every time; the chance of an accident seems distant and abstract. The human mind tends to prefer a near and certain gain over a distant and possible loss.
• Social norms: A new employee takes the behaviour of senior colleagues as a model more than the instruction. If their foreman works without gloves, that is the "right behaviour" for the young employee.
• Production pressure: In a shift that is behind target, safety steps are the first to be sacrificed. This usually happens not through an explicit instruction but through an implicit expectation.
• Fatigue and stress: The attention of a sleep-deprived, anxious or burnt-out employee narrows and their reaction time lengthens. I covered the role of sleep in workplace safety in detail in the article on shift work and fatigue.

The general stress level of working life in Turkey makes this picture worse. According to Gallup's 2026 report, 66% of employees in Turkey say they experienced a great deal of stress the previous day; the global average is 40% (Gallup, 2026). The cost of living, second jobs, long commutes and family responsibilities have already filled the mind of the employee who arrives at the factory in the morning. A mind under stress is more prone to choosing the shortcut, acting automatically and missing warnings.

Burnout is not only a problem for white-collar workers either. In a systematic review bringing together prospective studies, burnout was found to be associated with later serious injuries, absenteeism and presenteeism (Salvagioni et al., 2017). This finding clearly shows that an employee's mental load is an occupational safety issue.

This picture points to an important reality: safe behaviour cannot be secured only with a "be careful" warning. The environment, rewards and social norms of the behaviour need to be changed.

Organisational Factors That Weaken Safety Culture

Safety culture is shaped by management's behaviour as well as employees'. The organisational factors that quietly erode culture are usually these:

• A gap between talk and practice: Under a banner saying "Safety first", minor injuries not being recorded so that the accident-free days count is not broken.
• A blame reflex: The first question in every incident being "who did it?" This reflex leads to incidents and near misses being hidden.
• Inconsistent leadership: When a manager walks onto the shop floor without a hard hat, or turns a blind eye to a faulty machine being run so that a shipment can be completed, employees learn the real priority.
• Training on paper: Training held for the signature, leaving no room for questions and disconnected from the shop floor.
• A divide between subcontractor and temporary workers: Employees of different firms living with the same risks under different rules.
• Ignoring psychosocial risks: Workload, time pressure, mobbing and poor communication turn directly into accident risk through attention and decision-making.

In the ESENER 2024 survey carried out with 41,458 workplaces in Europe, the workplaces that reported none of the psychosocial risk factors were most numerous in the manufacturing and agriculture sectors; the researchers assessed this as a finding that may point to a lack of awareness (EU-OSHA, 2025). In other words, psychosocial risks in factories are not absent; they often go unseen.

Safety culture is learned not from what a manager says but from what they do when production gets tight.

Psychological Safety: The Invisible Foundation of Safety Culture

If people in a team can speak freely about mistakes, doubts and hazards, problems become visible before they become accidents. Amy Edmondson's foundational study, in which she introduced the concept of psychological safety, was carried out in a manufacturing company, in 51 work teams; psychological safety was found to be linked to the teams' learning behaviour (Edmondson, 1999). Here, learning behaviour means asking questions, seeking feedback, talking about mistakes and experimenting.

For a factory the equivalent is clear: an employee who can say "This mould doesn't sit properly", "The ventilation on this welding line isn't working" or "I haven't had enough training on this machine" is the person who prevents the accident. An employee who hesitates to say so quietly carries the risk. I covered the subject more broadly in the article on psychological safety.

In workplaces in Europe, the biggest difficulty in managing psychosocial risks was reported, at 59%, to be "reluctance to openly discuss these issues" (EU-OSHA, 2025). Silence is the most insidious enemy of safety culture.

The Legislative and Standards Framework for Safety Culture

In Turkey, safety culture is not defined as an obligation under that name; but the legislation places the cornerstones of this culture on the employer:

• OHS Law No. 6331, Art. 4: The employer is obliged to ensure employees' health and safety in relation to work; they take every kind of measure, including prevention of occupational risks and the provision of training and information, and carry out or commission risk assessments.
• 6331, Art. 5(f): The employer develops a coherent and general prevention policy covering the effects of factors related to technology, work organisation, working conditions, social relationships and the working environment. The phrase "social relationships" is the concept closest to culture in the law.
• 6331, Art. 17: Training is renewed in line with changing and emerging new risks; additional training is given to an employee who has had a workplace accident before they start work again.
• Risk Assessment Regulation, Art. 8: Alongside physical, chemical and ergonomic hazards, psychosocial sources of hazard are also identified and recorded. Art. 12: The risk assessment is also renewed after a workplace accident, occupational disease or near miss.
• ISO 45003:2021: A guideline for managing psychosocial risks within an ISO 45001-based management system; it is not a certification standard but contains recommendations. It addresses the headings of work organisation, social factors and the work environment.

This framework takes safety culture out of being a "goodwill project" and makes it part of the employer's prevention policy.

What Can Employers and Managers Do?

Culture changes not with a campaign but with consistent, repeated behaviour. The concrete steps organisations can apply are:

1. Visible participation by top management: The factory manager making regular walks of the shop floor, using personal protective equipment without exception and personally attending safety meetings.
2. Authority to stop work: Every employee being explicitly given the authority to stop work when they see a hazard, and the person who uses it not being criticised for lost production but thanked.
3. No-blame incident investigation: Asking "what happened, and which conditions allowed it?" rather than "who?" Assessing deliberate violations and system failures separately.
4. Making near-miss reports easier: Short reporting routes with an anonymous option, and visible feedback on every report.
5. Empowering supervisors and foremen: They are the carriers of safety culture on the shop floor. They need to be given the skills to give safety talks, give positive feedback and notice an employee who is struggling.
6. Aligning production targets with safety: Setting targets in a way that does not require skipping safety steps. Bonuses that reward only quantity reward shortcuts.
7. Including fatigue and psychosocial risks in the risk assessment: Recording consecutive night shifts, overtime, workload, mobbing and poor communication.
8. Changing the method of training: Instead of reading slides, discussion based on real incidents, demonstrations on the shop floor and experience sharing by senior employees.

Imagine that on a press line there have been minor hand injuries for months and the records are being closed as "employee carelessness". When a no-blame investigation is carried out, it may emerge that the die-changeover time was planned far too short against the target, and employees disabled the guard because of this. In that case the solution is not warning the employee but changing the planning. When the team sees this change, it learns that speaking up about the next problem works; a strong safety culture is formed precisely by the accumulation of such small experiences.

How to Start in Your Organisation

A three-stage path can be followed to begin working on safety culture:

1. Needs analysis: A snapshot of the current culture is needed. Anonymous employee surveys, focus group discussions with employees from different shifts and levels of seniority, and a review of incident and near-miss records are the tools of this stage. Questions such as "What happens when you report a hazard?" and "Are safety steps skipped when production falls behind?" bring out the reality that procedures do not show. Including psychosocial hazards in this analysis can be planned together with a psychosocial risk assessment.

2. Programme: Priorities are set according to the analysis result. This usually covers manager and supervisor training, setting up a no-blame incident investigation process, redesigning the reporting system, and stress, sleep and fatigue training for employees. In the WHO's guidelines on mental health at work, the recommendation with the strongest evidence is mental health training for managers (a strong recommendation, moderate-certainty evidence) (WHO, 2022). Programmes that include reinforcement sessions and reach the shop floor should be preferred to one-off seminars. You can look at corporate training and consultancy options on the corporate services page.

3. Measurement: Cultural change is not measured by accident numbers alone; the accident count is a lagging indicator. The number of near-miss reports, how often the authority to stop work is used, change in survey results, and absenteeism and turnover rates should be monitored together. The ILO also recommends absenteeism, turnover, reports of violence and harassment, use of support services and employee surveys as monitoring indicators (ILO, 2026). An increase in the number of reports in the first months is often a positive sign: people have started to speak.

It is also important to avoid a few common mistakes in this process. Group rewards tied to the accident-free days count can encourage small incidents to be hidden. Sharing survey results and then taking no steps lowers participation and honesty in the next survey. It is also wrong to regard culture work as the job of the OHS unit alone; unless production, planning, purchasing and HR are at the same table, the contradictions on the shop floor will not be resolved.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is the difference between safety culture and OHS procedures?

Procedures define what should be done and how; safety culture determines what people really do when unsupervised and under pressure. Good procedures are necessary but not enough on their own; when culture does not support them, they are bent in practice.

How long does it take for safety culture to change?

It is not possible to give an exact time. Change comes from managers' consistent behaviour and employees seeing this consistency many times over. The first signs are usually seen as an increase in reports and conversations on the shop floor opening up.

How does a psychologist contribute to safety culture work?

A clinical psychologist addresses the psychological dimensions of behaviour such as risk perception, habit, stress, fatigue and communication within the team. Manager and supervisor training, assessment of psychosocial risks and psychological support after accidents are the main areas of this contribution. Working together with the OHS specialist and the workplace physician is the most effective way.

Can safety culture work be done in a small business too?

Yes. In small businesses communication is shorter and more direct, so change often spreads faster. The employer's attitude on the shop floor, regular short safety talks and even a simple reporting route are an important start.

• #safety culture
• #occupational health and safety
• #psychological safety
• #factory management

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Eda Erkan Alapala

Klinik Psikolog. İstanbul Kent Üniversitesi Klinik Psikoloji Tezli Yüksek Lisans mezunu; bilişsel davranışçı terapi, çocuk merkezli oyun terapisi ve çocuk-ergen psikoterapisi alanlarında eğitimlerini tamamlamıştır.

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