The significant role that safety culture plays in preventing mishaps and Safety Management Systems (SMS) has led to a myriad of definitions and terms, especially as they apply to high-risk environments like aviation. There have been attempts to examine the definitions of safety culture and methods commonly used to assess safety culture within organizations. Interestingly, the term safety climate is often used in conjunction with safety culture with little, if any, differentiation between the two.

Although different definitions of safety culture can be found, most of them have common elements such as:

1. Safety culture is a concept defined at a group level or higher, which refers to the shared values among all the group or organization members.

2. Safety culture is concerned with formal safety issues in an organization and is closely related to, but not restricted to, the management and supervisory systems.

3. Safety culture emphasizes the contribution from everyone at every level of an organization.

4. The safety culture of an organization has an impact on its employees' behavior at work.

5. Safety culture is usually reflected in the contingency between reward system and safety performance.

6. Safety culture is reflected in an organization's willingness to develop and learn from errors, incidents and accidents.

7. Safety culture is relatively enduring, stable and resistant to change.

Some definitions of safety climate are almost identical to the definitions of safety culture. However, the majority of definitions differ from safety culture in common ways. In general, the commonalities of safety climate definitions include:

1. Safety climate is a psychological phenomenon, which is usually defined as the perceptions of the state of safety at a particular time.

2. Safety climate is closely concerned with intangible issues such as situational and environmental factors.

3. Safety climate is a temporary phenomenon, a "snapshot" of safety culture, relatively unstable and subject to change.

The following definitions are put forward in an attempt to capture the essence of safety culture and safety climate.

Safety culture: The enduring value and priority placed on worker and public safety by everyone in every group at every level of an organization. It refers to the extent to which individuals and groups will commit to personal responsibility for safety; act to preserve, enhance and communicate safety concerns; strive to actively learn, adapt and modify (both individual and organizational) behavior based on lessons learned from mistakes and, be rewarded in a manner consistent with these values.

Safety climate: The temporary measure of safety culture, which is subject to commonalities among individual perceptions of the organization. Safety climate is situational and refers to the perceived state of safety at a particular place and time, is relatively unstable, and is subject to change depending on the features of the current environment or prevailing conditions.

If you have strong and vibrant safety culture then the safety climate of an organization should be equally strong.