Compliance & Risk Assessment
CHANGE CULTURE TO CHANGE COMPLIANCE
Malcolm Mearns, SHEQ director at ground engineering and subsidence specialist Geobear, looks at how mature safety cultures save lives and billions of pounds.
The UK construction industry remains at a health and safety standstill. Alarming statistics show a 12% increase in accidental worker deaths since 2021/22. The total number of workplace injuries reached 60,000 in 2023/24, mirroring the previous year. These injuries come at a staggering economic cost of £1.3bn annually. At Geobear we believe that the sector is overlooking a critical factor: culture.
Around 2.6m working days are lost in construction each year from workplace injuries and work-related illness. While the industry advances in technology, health and safety still lags behind. Applying maturity models that develop interdependent work cultures can help reduce accidents across the sector.
MATURITY MODELS THAT WORK
The connection between occupational safety and company culture maturity is not new. One of the earliest and most well-known models to address this was the Bradley Curve, introduced in 1995 by Berlin Bradley at DuPont. The model outlines four distinct phases of safety culture development: reactive, dependent, independent, and interdependent.
At the reactive stage, organisations typically experience frequent accidents, low safety awareness, and limited engagement. Here, compliance is often driven by fear of disciplinary consequences rather than genuine concern for colleagues.
The interdependent stage, however, paints a different picture: a workforce actively focused on safety. They share
values, build trust, and collectively own the responsibility for everyone’s wellbeing. During this phase, safety becomes a natural part of the company’s culture, with motivation springing from a place of mutual concern, not just from outside mandates. A shift in culture that produced a low incident rate.
Other models, such as Hudson’s Safety Culture Ladder and the HSE Maturity Model, echo similar principles, emphasising that improvements in safety outcomes are best achieved by elevating company culture.
The question is, how can this be done? Since integrating a tailored safety, health, environment and quality (SHEQ) training program that aligns with its specific company values, Geobear has seen a 45% decrease in workplace accidents when comparing quarterly figures from 2024 to 2025.
It combined external safety protocols with internal values-based education, helping staff develop not just knowledge, but awareness, ownership, and pride in safe practices. Employees began to internalise safety as a shared goal, transitioning from rule-followers to proactive participants in risk mitigation.
Evidence of such can be shown by an increase in hazard reporting. The Bird Triangle, a predictive safety model that suggests that for every major injury or fatality, there are thousands of near misses and unsafe acts leading up to it. Specifically, it suggests for every serious incident, there are 300,000 unsafe behaviours contributing to the risk.
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