The ‘I’ In Team: How Individual Attitudes To Safety Tech Transform Safety Culture

Safety culture plays a crucial role in preventing or causing incidents. Simply viewed as ‘the way things are typically done around here’, every organization has a safety culture – but some are better than others. Major disasters like the 2010 Deepwater Horizon explosion and the 2023 R.M. Palmer chocolate factory explosion highlight how poor safety cultures can lead to inadequate measures for identifying and responding to hazards. To avoid failings like these, firms can transform their safety cultures through developing people, processes and technology (see Verdantix Best Practices: Building Safety Engagement Through Technology).

However, it would be an oversimplification to view people, processes and technology as separate inputs that simply add up to form an organization’s safety culture. Instead, they are interdependent: constantly shaping and influencing one another.

Attitudes to technology is a major factor in determining how people respond to new initiatives. Individuals with optimistic attitudes towards new technology should be motivated to embrace them, to quicken the pace of adoption and expediate safety culture transformation. The opposite would happen if those individuals had pessimistic attitudes to technology, and this negativity was left unaddressed.

People’s attitudes to technology are largely informed by the impact it has on their efficiency and status. Where technologies can quickly increase individuals’ quality and quantity of work, they tend to be regarded positively. These efficiency gains result in improved individual performance, resulting in higher status, leading to promotion and better renumeration (as long as the firm itself is meritocratic).

Meanwhile, pessimistic attitudes to technology often occur in circumstances when it competes with humans for jobs and dilutes an individual’s status. For example, in the 2025 Verdantix EHS technology roadmap, EHS AI agents were noted specifically for having the potential to directly replace EHS practitioners, especially those with junior responsibilities. Practitioners, therefore, would likely resist the implementation of AI agents as this may threaten their job status, which would slow down the pace of adoption and therefore inhibit safety culture transformation.

So, it is not as simple as new tech = safety culture improvement. Organizations must ensure that their people have a positive attitude towards innovation in order to realize improvements in safety culture from technology adoption. On a broader level, technology adoption is also determined by more defined parameters like safety practitioner skill levels, budgets and implementation issues. If you’d like to discuss aligning people, processes and technology for safety culture improvements in more detail, set up an analyst inquiry call here.