How Recognition Supports Physical and Psychological Safety at Work

Across Australia, WHS laws are placing increased emphasis on psychosocial risk, due diligence, and preventative safety management. As a result, organisations are investing heavily in strengthening their safety systems, policies, procedures, and reporting. However, many leaders struggle to translate these commitments into actively enabling safety in day-to-day work.

The solution? Recognition. Not just typical rewards and celebrations, but a fully integrated practice that reinforces what safe and healthy performance looks like.

Timely, meaningful recognition helps create a focus on safety behaviours and supports the creation of a safe workplace over time. It helps organisations balance care and performance while reinforcing accountability across teams.

Safety climate vs. safety culture

While related, safety climate and safety culture are different, and improving organisational outcomes requires focusing on both. Otherwise, organisations risk measuring sentiment without addressing the underlying systems and behaviours that influence safety over time.

• Safety climate: Short term situation that refers to employees’ current perceptions of how safe they feel right now. This is influenced by daily leadership behaviour, peer interactions, and responses to mistakes or uncertainty.
• Safety culture: Long term state that refers to the deeply embedded beliefs, norms, and behaviours about what matters, what is rewarded, and what is punished or ignored within an organisation.

Safety climate can be used as a diagnostic tool, while a safety culture is your long-term outcome. Recognition is one of the few levers that affects both, immediately and over time.

Why safety still breaks down

Many organisations genuinely care about employee safety and wellbeing. However, they may rely on systems that unintentionally send mixed signals.

For example, sometimes safety success is measured primarily through lagging indicators such as injury rates, time without incidents, and compliance outcomes. In this scenario, recognition for safety is often done annually, leader-controlled, and tied to incident-free streaks (e.g., “zero harm” milestones).

The unintended consequences of this approach include:

• People learn what gets rewarded, not what’s written in policy
• Speaking up, stopping work, or raising concerns can feel risky
• Psychosocial and interpersonal safety behaviours go unnoticed

This weakens the safety climate (the lived experience of safety at work) long before incidents show up in data.

“What organisations choose to recognise sends a clear signal about what truly matters and shapes the culture that follows.”
—Nadia Beedeison, Senior Client Strategist at O.C. Tanner

Lagging vs. leading indicators

Safety can be measured in two ways:

• Lagging indicators: Measure the results or outcomes of past actions, such as injury rates, workers’ compensation claims, absenteeism due to injury, psychological injury claims, and turnover linked to burnout or unsafe environments.
• Leading indicators: Proactive measures that prevent safety incidents. These might include hazards identified, frequency of safety conversations, reporting near misses, participation in safety initiatives, workload design, psychological safety scores, level of trust in leadership, and the regular, meaningful recognition of key safety moments in the workplace.

Together, they offer an overview of an organisation's safety performance. Organisations can easily over-focus on lagging indicators because they are easier to measure, however leading indicators are an equally strong measure of a safe workplace.

Recognition as a risk mitigator

While recognition is often seen mainly as a morale booster, it’s also a powerful way to help manage risk in safety-critical environments.

When recognition consistently reinforces behaviours such as speaking up or verifying controls, it acts as a leading indicator of safety performance.

Effective recognition reinforces behaviours that prevent harm, including:

• Speaking up about hazards or near-misses
• Exercising stop-work authority in uncertain circumstances
• Verifying critical controls
• Calling out unsafe behaviours respectfully
• Supporting others under pressure

These behaviours help reduce risk before an incident occurs. When they are noticed and encouraged, people repeat them.

“Positive attention is 30x more powerful than negative attention... People don’t need feedback; they need attention to what they do best.”
—Marcus Buckingham, HBR

Recognition is a behavioural reinforcement infrastructure that underpins safety by:

1. Reinforcing leading behaviours: When you recognise reporting hazards or near misses, speaking up, supporting teammates, and following safety processes, this shifts the focus from not making mistakes to consistently engaging in the right behaviours.
2. Building psychological safety: Recognition amplifies employee voices, reduces interpersonal risk, and encourages contribution. Publicly recognising an employee for raising a concern sends a stronger signal of safety than just relying on a safety policy.
3. Strengthening a culture of learning: Recognising continuous improvement and teams that adapt after incidents moves organisations away from a culture of blame towards a more productive environment.

Leadership behaviours

Safety within an organisation is shaped by leadership behaviour. What leaders prioritise, tolerate, and reward is quickly interpreted by employees as what really matters. When these signals are inconsistent, culture erodes. When they are aligned, safety becomes embedded in how work gets done.

Leaders don’t just communicate expectations: they demonstrate them in real time.

Leaders should focus on responding constructively to bad news, recognising effort as well as outcomes, modelling vulnerability, and making safety visible through decisions and messaging. It’s in these everyday moments, particularly when trade-offs are required, that leaders either reinforce or unintentionally undermine a culture of safety.

Over time, these repeated signals shape team-level norms and ultimately determine whether employees feel safe to speak up, report risk, and prioritise safety.

Embedding safety through social identity

Systems, policies, and behaviours are critical to creating a culture inclusive of safety; however, differences within these factors don’t fully explain why safety practices are sustained in some environments and erode in others. Organisations must also consider social identity and how employees see themselves in relation to safety at work.

Behaviour is shaped not just by rules, but by shared beliefs about who we are, what people like us do, and what is valued in the organisation. Cultures that are inclusive of safety are socially constructed and recognition plays a key role in communicating what gets noticed and valued.

Effective cultures that are inclusive of safety can be understood through a social identity-informed lens that links three key areas:

1. Individual Behaviour

At this level, it’s about how a person sees themselves in relation to safety.

Individuals ask:

• Is it safe for me to act?
• Can I speak up without risk?
• Will I be supported if I raise a concern?
• Is it acceptable to prioritise safety over speed or output?

Psychological safety determines whether individuals act or stay silent.

Employee recognition reinforces:

• Permission (this is safe to do)
• Value (this behaviour matters)
• Identity (this is who I am here)

Example: Recognising speaking up, raising risks, or supporting others.

2. Team Norms

Refers to identification with a group, defining what “good” looks like, and is where shared norms are formed.

Teams ask:

• Do we look out for one another?
• Is it safe for us to challenge each other?
• Can we raise concerns openly here?
• Do we recognise and reinforce safe behaviour?

Misalignment at this level can create unhelpful subcultures (e.g. performance over safety, pressure to stay quiet).

The role of recognition: Reinforces team norms, not just expectations.

3. Organisational Signals

At this level, safety becomes part of organisational identity, determining whether it is truly important or just stated in policy.

People within organisations ask:

• Does the organisation really value safety?
• Are safe behaviours recognised and rewarded?
• Do leaders respond consistently when risks are raised?
• Is safety built into systems, policies and priorities?

Inconsistency in this area risks a disconnect between messaging and lived experiences, creating cynicism (“They say safety matters, but…”).

The role of recognition:

• Scales and embeds values
• Connects behaviours to purpose
• Reinforces safety as “how we work”

Recognition and psychological safety

O.C. Tanner’s 2026 State of Employee Recognition report shows that employees are 7x more likely to stay at an organisation when recognition supports strong workplace relationships. These relationships are critical. They foster the trust and confidence employees need to feel comfortable speaking up, intervening early, and acting with care under pressure.

Psychological hazards are increasingly recognised in safety regulations across the world. Organisations need practical ways to demonstrate how risk is addressed in everyday work, not just documented in policy.

When people believe they will be listened to, respected, and appreciated, they are more likely to raise concerns, admit uncertainty or mistakes, and intervene when something doesn’t feel safe.

Recognition helps create this climate by shifting safety from rules to shared responsibility and pride.

Which team owns safety?

Traditionally, safety has often been owned by Safety teams operating separately from HR. However, physical and psychological safety are deeply interconnected. Safety can no longer sit within a single function. It must be enabled across the organisation.

While Safety and HR play critical and complimentary roles, team leaders ultimately shape whether safety is prioritised, practiced, and sustained in day-to-day work.

There are three layers of shared safety ownership within organisations:

1. Technical ownership (Safety teams): Define risks, controls, compliance, systems, conduct incident analysis, and track lagging indicators. If safety is solely managed here, it risks becoming compliance driven.
2. Culture ownership (HR): Build psychological safety, enable recognition, develop leadership capability, and address psychosocial risk while measuring safety climate. If safety sits solely with HR, it risks becoming perception driven.
3. Behavioural ownership (Leaders): Reinforce daily norms, shape team-level climates, respond to incidents and speaking up, and model priorities through everyday decisions.

When these layers operate in alignment and amplify the experience and voice of employees, safety becomes embedded into the flow of work.

Balancing care and performance

Some organisations worry that recognising care-oriented behaviours may reduce accountability, but research from O.C. Tanner’s 2026 Global Culture Report demonstrates that caring for employees is a pathway to a thriving, sustainable workforce. Mental health outcomes improve when organisations provide support, and highly supported employees see lower odds of probable depression (–47%) and burnout (–88%).

Organisations with healthy performance combine high expectations (clarity, standards, and accountability) with high support (care, recognition, trust, and resources). This balance enables sustained performance without burnout. Here, recognition becomes the mechanism that connects effort to meaningful outcomes without diluting standards.

What everyday safety recognition looks like

How can recognition be used to embed safety within culture? Before you can give recognition, you need to clearly define safe behaviours, align your recognition programmes to those behaviours, and track leading indicators alongside outcomes.

From there, you can train employees and leaders to recognise effectively:

• It needs to be timely: Recognition needs to be given soon after the behaviour it reinforces to be most effective.
• It needs to clearly name what was done and why it matters: Linking specific actions to risk reduction encourages learning.
• It needs to be social and visible to peers: This builds shared norms about what safe performance looks like. This includes sharing stories during team meetings or toolbox talks.
• It needs to be inclusive:  Organisations should encourage peer-to-peer recognition, not just leader-to-employee recognition. This also means extending recognition access to frontline teams, contractors, and supervisors.

Middle managers and supervisors play a critical role in this process, translating organisational expectations into daily signals that shape how safe it feels to speak up and act with care.

Example: Treasury Wine Estates

Treasury Wine Estates (TWE) uses recognition to help embed care while also maintaining a focus on safety and performance. As part of their ongoing commitment to care for their people, they:

• Delivered a heartfelt video message, via the CEO, that communicates the genuine care TWE has for its people
• Encourage proactive identification and reporting of hazards to protect frontline workers who face the greatest risk (those operating tractors and harvesting grapes)
• Introduced a set of leadership attributes and expectations
• Empower employees to take action, such as using the 'stop-work' framework when a safety hazard is identified.
• Conduct annual mental health surveys of employees across Australia, France, Italy, New Zealand, and the USA to gauge employee sentiment, then create holistic programmes to address concerns
• Equip local leaders with resources that allow them to implement programmes, and utilise storytelling in ways that resonate with different regions and roles, such as their ‘toolbox talks’ with vineyard workers where they discuss mental health in broader safety conversations
• Reinforce and embed positive behaviours via their recognition programme, aligned to their TWE values

As a result, TWE’s annual engagement and inclusion surveys have shown that safety and care are factors often rated highly. This approach demonstrates how recognition and visible care can shift safety from a compliance obligation to a shared cultural value, ensuring that proactive safety behaviours become part of everyday practice.

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“It’s about creating an environment that supports both the mental and physical health of employees. In a high-performance culture, care often gets overshadowed by execution and delivery. The pandemic, for us, highlighted the need to rebalance – moving towards a culture where psychological safety and accountability coexist. When people feel safe and valued, they’re more willing to challenge the status quo, share ideas, and innovate.”
—Leon Butler, Global Manager, Performance & Reward at Treasury Wine Estates

Organisations don’t build culture through policies alone. Culture is shaped by what is noticed, reinforced, and repeated every day.

When recognition consistently highlights behaviours that protect people, it sends a powerful signal. It tells employees that safety doesn’t compete with performance, it enables it.

In environments where risk is real and pressure is constant, strategic recognition becomes more than encouragement. It becomes infrastructure, quietly embedding care into performance, and performance into care.