How to Rebuild a Safety Culture from Scratch

Key Highlights

This article offers a grounded, experience-driven perspective on what it takes to rebuild safety culture from scratch.

It walks through how to prioritize when everything feels urgent, how to earn employee trust in disengaged environments, and how to show leadership the real value of safety, even without immediate metrics.

Learn how to stabilize, simplify and lead with purpose in the midst of organizational disorder.

No training. No handover. No binder. Just a title and a desk—and sometimes, not even that!

For many EHS professionals, the job doesn’t start with a smooth onboarding plan or a detailed turnover binder. It starts with a mess.

You walk into a site with outdated procedures, expired training records, missing hazard assessments, and a workforce that’s either indifferent or hostile to anything labeled “safety.” Worse, sometimes you don’t even know what’s broken, because no one has been paying attention long enough to document it.

Many of us have been there.

This article is not a checklist or a polished framework. It’s a field guide for EHS professionals who’ve been dropped into chaos, whether that’s post-OSHA inspection, following leadership turnover, or stepping into a site where EHS was never a priority to begin with.

It’s a guide to help you stabilize, rebuild and lead with confidence, even when you have nothing but grit to go on.

Start with Stability, Not Strategy

The first instinct many new EHS leaders have is to start designing programs, updating policies, or launching training campaigns. Resist that urge. Your first job is to stabilize the system, not overhaul it.

Spend your first week on the floor. Listen more than you speak. Learn how things are actually done, not how they’re supposed to be done. Ask questions like:

What parts of the job feel most dangerous?

What issues have people stopped reporting because nothing gets fixed?

When was the last time someone actually used this emergency shower?

The reality is, every site has skeletons in the closet. You can’t fix what you don’t see. So, before you bring in new rules, fix what’s “visibly broken”—missing signage, unlabeled chemicals, frayed cords, expired eyewash stations. Sometimes the boldest move is doing the basics, and doing them well.

Prioritize Ruthlessly. And Communicate “Why”

In a site where everything looks broken, you need a system to decide what to fix first.

I recommend using a risk-based triage approach. Plot every known issue on a simple risk matrix, likelihood vs. severity. Then tackle the red zones first: life safety, regulatory violations and high-frequency injuries.

This might mean pausing a non-critical initiative so you can resolve a fire egress issue, or fixing a chemical storage violation before launching a safety campaign.

Equally important: communicate your “why.” When employees see you prioritizing transparently, even if their concern isn’t first in line - they’re more likely to trust your judgment.

Build Trust One Win at a Time

In sites where EHS has been neglected or punitive, trust is often at zero. So start small. Don’t just walk the floor—solve a problem someone shows you. Fix the leaky roof over the PPE cabinet. Replace the cracked face shields. Celebrate the person who first spoke up.

People are always watching to see whether safety is just another program or whether it’s finally going to matter. Your actions set that tone faster than any speech.

Cut the Noise—Streamline and Simplify

Many chaotic safety systems suffer not from a lack of policies, but from too many. You’ll find bloated training modules that nobody retains, overlapping inspection checklists, or third-party consultants delivering generic reports that go unread. And yet, employees are still getting injured.

Here’s the uncomfortable truth: A lot of what’s in place may be performative. Safety theater. Your job is to eliminate what’s not working and focus on what actually prevents harm.

In one case, I replaced a vendor-run behavior-based safety program with peer-led, five-minute micro-trainings tailored to actual floor tasks. The engagement level skyrocketed, not because the material was complex, but because it finally felt relevant.

Safety isn’t about volume. It’s about clarity, ownership and action.

Document Everything—Not for the Audit, but for Your People

You might feel pressure to produce formal reports, and you should keep good records. But don’t let your only audience be auditors. Create visible wins. A monthly bulletin could show:

• How many hazards were resolved.

• What suggestions were implemented.

• A spotlight on an employee who made a great catch.

It’s not about perfection; it’s about momentum. People need to see that reporting hazards works, that their voice is heard, and that the EHS program is alive and evolving.

You’ll also build credibility with leadership by tracking cost avoidance: reduced injury rates, fewer OSHA citations, even productivity improvements linked to safer workspaces.

Make Safety Visible in the Right Places

Culture change happens where attention goes. If you want people to care about safety, they have to see it—not just in posters or compliance signs, but in decision-making, leadership behavior and resource allocation.

When leadership talks about safety during town halls, when team leads bring up near misses during stand-ups, and when action items from incident investigations are followed through publicly—that’s when people realize safety is more than paperwork.

Even something as simple as tracking safety actions on a visible board, or giving “safety shoutouts” during meetings, can start to normalize safety as part of the job, not just a program run by one person.

Making safety visible in the right places isn’t about flashy campaigns. It’s about embedding it where people already pay attention.

Engage the People Who “Don’t Do Safety”

Your biggest safety breakthrough may come from the department that rolls their eyes at you today: Plant managers. Shift supervisors. Line leads. These folks may feel burned out on past programs or feel like EHS just slows them down. Don’t fight them; recruit them.

Start by understanding what they care about: uptime, productivity, retention. Then show how safety actually helps meet those goals.

For example, ergonomic improvements that reduce repetitive strain can lower turnover. Better labeling and storage can reduce inventory loss and speed up tool access. When you show that EHS is not a roadblock but a support function, you start turning skeptics into allies.

Show the ROI of Prevention—Loudly and Often

Executives don’t wake up thinking about safety, they think about cost, reputation, efficiency. It’s your job to translate safety work into language that gets funded and respected. That means:

• Showing how resolving a repeated strain injury pattern saved thousands in workers’ comp.

• Explaining how fixing ventilation issues avoided a regulatory fine.

• Sharing how better incident investigation practices led to process improvements across shifts.

Tie everything you do to one of the three things leadership values: money, people, or risk. When they see EHS driving business value, they’ll listen longer, and fund more.

Care for Yourself While Leading Through Chaos

This part doesn’t get talked about enough. Leading EHS in a broken environment is exhausting. You’re often the only one pushing back when timelines ignore safety, when budgets undercut your plan, when people are skeptical or hostile.

So build your own support system. Join professional groups. Lean on mentors. Celebrate small wins. Remind yourself: if it feels hard, it’s because it is, not because you’re doing it wrong.

And take real breaks. Safety leaders need safety too.

Final Thoughts

When you’re handed a chaotic EHS program, you’re not just cleaning up a mess, you’re building trust, restoring structure, and proving that safety is more than a checklist.

You won’t fix it all in a quarter. You may not be thanked right away. But if you lead with clarity, consistency and care, you will see the culture shift.

And when that happens—when an operator stops you on the floor to share a near miss, or a manager asks how to make their area safer—you’ll know that your work is making a difference.

You don’t need a playbook to lead safety. You just need courage, focus and the willingness to start where others gave up.

One win at a time.