In collaboration with Mannaz, a Swedish forest industry company embarked on a cultural journey to make safety a natural part of everyday behaviours, leadership, and decision-making. Rather than adding more rules, the focus was on care, responsibility, and open dialogue in daily work. A behavioural shift across multiple sites has strengthened ownership, reduced risk, and embedded safety as a shared value throughout the organisation.
The company, operating within the Swedish forest industry with several sawmills across the country, had long maintained a strong foundation in physical safety. However, it recognized the need to take the next step – from routines and rules to behaviours and norms.
The real shift was not about increasing control, but about strengthening everyday care, responsibility, and dialogue.
Together with Mannaz, the company initiated a cultural journey aimed at making safety a natural part of how people work, collaborate, and lead. The work began with a joint analysis and a series of workshops across the organization.
The focus was on understanding how culture and norms are formed, how leadership influences behaviour, and how safety and efficiency reinforce rather than oppose each other.
A central insight emerged: true safety grows from care. Encouraging conversations about mistakes, looking out for one another, and giving reminders in day-to-day situations became the core of the change.
Each production site worked from its own context and conditions, but with a shared direction and structure. Managers and leaders were invited and facilitated in open dialogue, identifying behaviour patterns, and using tools that help analyze direction, capability, opportunity, and motivation.
An important component was the work with so-called hot spots – situations with elevated risk. Here, teams collaborated to identify risk factors, define safe behaviours, and measure and follow up on progress.
The project has led to a behavioural shift across production sites. Safety is now more deeply integrated into everyday conversations and decision-making. The number of risk observations has increased significantly and is now aligned with the company’s targets.
More employees are taking greater responsibility, and risks are mitigated more quickly at the operational level. Leaders have taken stronger ownership, and incident investigations now also consider behaviours and norms as potential root causes – enabling more sustainable actions and deeper understanding of the human elements in the system. The work has also created a stronger shared understanding of what safety truly means.
A key goal was to ensure local ownership so that the work could continue without external guidance – and today the initiative is driven forward by managers, HR, safety engineers, and communications teams, both locally and centrally.
The cultural shift is ongoing – and evolving.
– Head Safety Engineer, the Company
