If culture is built by leadership, participation, systems and training together, why single out training as the starting point?
Because training is the mechanism that creates shared language. It’s what gives everyone in the organisation — from the newest hire to the most senior manager — a common vocabulary for talking about threats, risk and response. Without that shared language, everything else stalls. Leaders can’t communicate priorities if staff don’t understand the concepts. Workers can’t participate in risk assessment if they can’t recognise what a risk looks like. Incident reports are meaningless if people don’t know what constitutes a reportable event.
Theory is useful. But safety culture is built in the specifics — in how a hotel chain responds to an aggressive guest, how a municipality equips its social workers, or how a school handles a threatening parent. That’s why Tesus experts Alexander Tilly (licensed psychologist) and Erik Jönsson (security advisor and former police officer) devoted an entire webinar to this topic: “Building a Safety Culture with Real-World Cases” — drawing on pedagogical experience from workshops and seminars with tens of thousands of participants across sectors.
Their core argument: organisations build resilience by systematically analysing their own real incidents. Not just to learn what went wrong, but to identify what went right, capture tacit knowledge, and develop shared decision-making frameworks. Here are some examples of what that looks like across different sectors:
When Scandic decided to address threats and violence across its hotel chain, they didn’t start with a generic module. They began with surveys capturing the situations their staff actually faced — aggressive guests, confrontations at reception, uncertainty about what to do. The result was a custom-built digital training using filmed scenarios with Scandic’s own staff, analysed by Tesus experts and reinforced through interactive exercises.
Nathalie Brantfalk, Safety & Security Manager at Scandic Sweden, described the result: the training was received overwhelmingly well because it reflected staff’s real experiences. As she put it, it was a perfect match for the organisation and hit the mark precisely. The training became mandatory for all employees, and the recognition factor — seeing their own situations reflected back — was what made it stick.
That’s safety culture in action: not a policy on a shelf, but a shared understanding that permeates the organisation, from reception to management.
Stockholm’s Sports Administration wanted to shift from responding to incidents to preventing them. They worked with Tesus to develop two tailored e-learning courses on service, approach and threats and violence. The result? Eric dos Santos, security coordinator, reported that they had no sick leave attributable to insecurity or incidents involving threats or violence. Staff felt more confident, and the organisation developed a shared understanding that extended beyond frontline workers.
Lina Wickberg, safety coordinator for Hägersten-Älvsjö stadsdelsförvaltning, described one of the clearest markers of cultural change: before the training, she was typically contacted after incidents had already occurred. After training reached the organisation’s roughly 3,000 staff, people started reaching out before — because they could now recognise warning signs and knew that early intervention was expected. That behavioural shift — from reactive reporting to proactive prevention — is precisely what defines a maturing safety culture.
When Malmö’s social services department wanted to build a shared safety foundation, their challenge was scale: 2,500 employees across multiple units. A single in-person workshop couldn’t reach everyone, and inconsistent knowledge meant inconsistent culture. Digital training solved the reach problem, and the sector-adapted content — built specifically for social services scenarios — ensured relevance. The result was a consistent knowledge base that gave the entire department a shared language for discussing and managing risk.
One of the most evocative descriptions of what training does for safety culture came from Örebro’s Riksgymnasiet. After implementing a customised training for residential support workers, a staff member described the training as functioning like an airbag — it cushions the anxiety when a storm blows up. That metaphor captures something important: safety culture isn’t about eliminating every incident. It’s about giving people the confidence and competence to handle them when they arise.
These cases illustrate what the research confirms: safety culture is built through the combination of relevant training, leadership commitment, clear routines, and an organisation-wide approach that reaches every role. In a Tesus webinar dedicated to this topic (“Building a Safety Culture with Real-World Cases”, May 2024), Tilly and Jönsson emphasise two practical principles: use real cases from your own organisation to develop decision-making and conflict understanding, and focus on strengthening agency and autonomy — because staff who feel empowered to act are staff who actually prevent incidents.
