Wandelwerker - Der erste deutsche Arbeitsschutz Podcast · WandelWerker Consulting GmbH

#428 Sicherheitskultur im Realitätscheck: Warum Regeln allein nicht reichen

·32 min·2 clips

Why do 67.8% of companies think their safety culture is strong when 45% say rules aren't accepted?

1. Wandelwerker Podcast episode 428 features Stefan and Anna Ganske, co-managing directors of Wandelwerke GmbH, discussing findings from a TÜV Rheinland workplace safety culture survey. 2. Stefan has been running Wandelwerke with approximately 30 staff, working with more than 170 clients across German and European mid-sized companies and corporations on safety culture development. 3. The episode's central question is whether the survey results match what the hosts observe in their client work, and what the gaps reveal about the state of German workplace safety culture. 4. The TÜV Rheinland survey was conducted in February of the publication year, published in March, and surveyed approximately 1,000 respondents described as safety officers (Fachkräfte für Arbeitssicherheit). 5. The top challenge identified by 45% of respondents is lack of acceptance of safety rules — a finding Anna and Stefan describe as unsurprising given what they see across client companies. 6. Anna highlights the central paradox: 67.8% of the same respondents rate their company's safety culture as 'very pronounced' or 'rather pronounced', yet 45% simultaneously say rule non-compliance is their biggest problem. 7. Stefan argues this reflects a widespread misidentification of compliance infrastructure — documented rules, trained managers, completed Gefährdungsbeurteilungen — with having a developed safety culture. 8. He positions this on the Bradley Curve (Dupont safety culture model), arguing most German companies sit around Level 2 (dependent/managed), where rules exist but are followed mainly due to supervision rather than internalised values. 9. Stefan identifies three common causes of rule non-acceptance: rules created at a desk without worker input, rules that impede rather than enable work, and no follow-through when rules are broken. 10. He argues against disciplinary action as a first response to non-compliance, instead advocating systemic dialogue ('systemische Fragen') and leadership that makes safety personally important rather than bureaucratically enforced. 11. Anna describes a pattern from long-term client engagements: companies starting at Level 2 rate themselves highly, but after three years of genuine improvement they rate themselves lower, because they have developed a calibrated sense of what a strong culture requires. 12. Stefan uses a dentist analogy: a patient with only one dentist thinks that dentist is the best, until switching and experiencing a genuinely higher standard. 13. Stefan recounts a client BBS implementation failure: the company ran management safety walks where only positive feedback was permitted, praising workers for wearing safety shoes while walking past real hazards without comment. 14. Workers responded with visible discomfort; the CEO told the story to Stefan while describing feeling embarrassed during the walks. Stefan told the client to stop the practice immediately and called it 'Pseudo-Aktionen'. 15. The survey's second major challenge is lack of leadership role-modelling, cited by 24% of respondents, which Stefan connects directly to the compliance gap: leaders who do not visibly follow rules themselves undermine any cultural expectation. 16. Psychological stress at work is cited by 44.6% of respondents as a challenge; Stefan attributes part of this to Germany's continuous crisis mode since 2020 — COVID, energy crisis, and economic uncertainty — which employees cannot leave at the factory gate. 17. Only 15.8% of respondents say insufficient budget is a challenge, which the hosts read as positive: companies are spending on safety, but the question is whether the spending targets the right interventions. 18. Stefan criticises 25.7% of respondents who want more regulations as the solution, arguing Germany already has overregulation and that more rules will not solve an acceptance problem; he prefers sector-specific solutions via industry associations. 19. Contractor safety culture is flagged by only 8.9% as a concern, which both hosts consider too low given the pattern they observe of contractors lagging the host company's culture — partly because safety officers rarely interact directly with contractors. 20. Safety professionals, occupational health managers, and company executives looking to move beyond compliance checklists toward behavioural and cultural change in German workplaces will find the episode practical and data-grounded.

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