From Systems to Practice

What a New Zealand Safety Culture Pilot Reveals About Worker Knowledge, Management Understanding and the Future of Safety

Abstract

For more than three decades, health and safety improvement has focused on building increasingly sophisticated management systems. These systems have delivered significant benefits by creating structure, accountability, governance, worker participation and consistency across workplaces. Yet many organisations continue to experience uncertainty about whether critical risks are effectively controlled in practice.

This paper draws on findings from the 2025 Safety Culture Pilot (“the Pilot”) by the Employers and Manufacturer’s Association (EMA). It assessed twelve organisations across Auckland, Northland and Waikato using the Safe365 ten-module safety culture framework. The pilot found that most participating organisations operated at a Systematic level of maturity; with formal processes, management reporting, worker knowledge and worker engagement generally well established. However, consistent weaknesses were evident in management knowledge, verification and audit activities, health and safety data collection and assurance. No participating organisation achieved all selected maturity goals at initial assessment.

The findings suggest that the issue facing many organisations is no longer the absence of systems. Rather, it is whether organisations can learn from how work is actually performed. In particular, the pilot revealed a recurring disconnect between worker knowledge and management understanding. Workers often appeared to hold important operational knowledge about risks, pressures, adaptations and control effectiveness; while organisational decision-makers were less consistently able to verify, interpret and act on that knowledge.

Drawing on contemporary safety culture, work-as-imagined and work-as-done, Safety-II, resilience engineering, organisational learning and assurance literature, this paper argues that New Zealand’s next safety challenge may be less about building additional systems and more about strengthening the capability to translate worker knowledge into organisational understanding. The paper proposes a practical shift in the role of health and safety professionals: from system custodians toward interpreters of work, helping organisations verify assumptions, identify control drift, strengthen leadership sense-making and build justified confidence that controls remain effective in practice.

Keywords: Safety culture; Work-as-done; Organisational learning; Assurance; Leadership capability; Health and safety management.