And Why We Need Both

In high-risk industries like work at height, we often hear the question: “Is compliance more important, or is culture?”
The answer: Neither is more important, both are essential. Compliance gives us the rules, and culture, determines how we live them. Without both, safety becomes inconsistent, where audits may pass, but the real risk remains. In most cases incidents don’t occur because the rules were absent, it’s because the rules weren’t lived.

1. COMPLIANCE: THE FOUNDATION
Compliance is the backbone of any effective
H&S (Health and Safety) Management System.
It ensures that we meet:
• Legal requirements – staying within the law
• Industry standards – meeting best practices
• Customer expectations – delivering what is asked.
Think of compliance as the framework of your safety system. It defines the procedures, controls, and behaviours that must be followed every time, regardless of task, location, or personnel.
Compliance prevents avoidable failures, reduces variation, and ensures that critical safeguards are in place before work begins.

2. CULTURE: THE MINDSET
Culture is how people interpret, prioritize, and act when no one is watching. It values beliefs, expectations, interpersonal norms, shortcuts, conversations, mental models — the invisible glue holding behaviour together. Culture answers the question:
“Am I doing this because I was told to, or because I want it done safely and well?”
It shows in actions like:
• Doing vehicle inspections thoroughly because we care about the safety of ourselves and our team, not just because it is a requirement to start our day.
• Ensuring workers are not only trained for the sake of having a certificate, but ensuring our workers receive high quality training that meet our needs and effectively mitigates the risks.
• Using risk assessments to improve processes, not just fill forms.
• Collecting data and analysing it, to strengthen systems, not just to complete a checkpoint.
Culture drives continuous improvement and shapes real safety behaviour, by getting the buy in from the relevant stakeholders.

3. HOW THEY WORK TOGETHER
• Compliance gets us to the line: the minimum required.
• Culture determines how far beyond it we go: ensuring excellence, not just meeting requirements.
When both are strong, safety becomes proactive, resilient, and part of the daily mindset — not just an obligation.
A worker straps their harness, because it is required by the law, that is compliance. A worker double-checks the anchor point to ensure their safety, that’s culture.

4. KEY DIFFERENCES
A. Compliance focuses on the non-negotiables:
• Legal obligations
• Customer requirements
• Industry standards
B. Culture focuses on shared judgement:
• Worker safety and wellbeing
• Asking “what more can we do?”
• Continuously improving our practices

5. BOTTOM LINE:
In a world where one wrong step can end everything, teams learn that culture is the shared awareness that guides their judgement. They also learn that compliance is the strict set of rules that guide their actions.

6. THE WAY FORWARD
If we want a stronger safety culture, we must start with a simple question:
Why are we doing this?
Culture grows when every person takes ownership of health and safety because they believe in the rules, not just because someone else said so. Avoid selling safety as “the law” or “a customer demand.”
Instead, help each other understand the real benefit behind every control, check, and procedure.