Strengthening Safety Culture in a US Energy Utility
- John R Childress
- Jan 16
- 3 min read
Updated: Jan 30
A US energy utility, operating complex infrastructure across multiple sites, wanted to strengthen their safety culture and reduce risks.
While safety policies and reporting processes were in place, senior leaders wanted to identify and address the underlying causes of safety risk across the organisation.
Safety performance was a standing concern at executive and board level — not because leaders were disengaged, but because incidents continued to occur despite sustained investment in safety programmes.
The challenge
The organisation’s safety team faced a familiar problem: they could see outcomes (incidents, near misses, audit findings), but they could not clearly see the systemic drivers behind them.
Specifically:
Safety data focused on lagging indicators rather than leading ones
Cultural issues were discussed, but not defined or measured in a consistent way
Leadership struggled to prioritise interventions with confidence
Improvement initiatives competed with operational and production pressures
As a result, safety conversations often became reactive — focused on incidents after the fact — rather than preventative.
Why traditional safety approaches aren’t enough
Many electric utilities invest heavily in:
Safety training
Procedures and compliance frameworks
Incident investigation and reporting
These were necessary foundations, but they didn’t explain why unsafe conditions and behaviours persist, or which organisational factors contain hidden risks.
The safety team recognised that without a clearer understanding of how leadership practices, work processes, policies and day-to-day pressures interacted, they were treating symptoms rather than causes.
The approach
PYXIS worked with the safety organisation to shift the focus from incidents alone to the safety culture ecosystem of causal factors and hidden risks.
The engagement centred on:
Mapping the organisational factors influencing safety across people, policies and work processes
Using company data and metrics to analyze how these factors interacted to create safety risk
Identifying which causal factors had the greatest impact on outcomes
Engaging leaders in structured, evidence-based discussions about trade-offs and priorities
Rather than relying on generic culture surveys or awareness metrics, the organisation gained a data-driven view of its safety ecosystem — showing where risk was being created and where intervention would matter most.
What changed
The work produced both practical and strategic benefits.
Operationally, the safety team gained:
Clearer visibility into previously hidden drivers of safety risk
A prioritised set of interventions grounded in evidence, not intuition
Leading indicators that could be tracked over time
At leadership level, the impact was equally significant:
Safety discussions shifted from incident review to systemic improvement
Executives and board members could see how leadership behaviour and organisational design influenced outcomes
Decisions about safety investment became more focused and defensible
Over time, this enabled the organisation to move from reactive safety management to a more predictive and preventative approach, strengthening confidence that safety efforts were addressing root causes rather than surface symptoms.
Key insight for leaders
This case illustrates a common challenge in high-risk industries:
Safety performance rarely fails because people don’t care — it falters through lack visibility into the ecosystem of hidden risks shaping everyday work.
By treating culture as a measurable business ecosystem, rather than an abstract concept, organisations can better understand risk, prioritise action, and sustain improvement.
Key Topics Covered in This Case Study
Safety culture and systemic risk
Leading vs lagging indicators in safety performance
Leadership visibility and decision-making
Identifying root causes of safety incidents
Turning culture insight into practical action
About PYXIS Culture Technologies
PYXIS Culture Technologies helps organizations understand and improve the cultural drivers of conduct risk, safety, and cyber resilience.
By combining research, operational experience, and advanced culture analytics, we help organizations close the gap between culture and business outcomes.
Our approach is effective:
We treat culture as a systemic business issue, not an HR initiative.
We identify key internal business practices that create risk and provide effective solutions you can immediately implement.
We link culture to business and financial metrics, showing a clear ROI for strengthening organisational performance.
Connecting the dots
For more information or to request a demo on how mapping culture drivers can improve business results, contact us here.