A company may have a prevention plan, defined procedures, training, and signage in its facilities. All of this is necessary. But it does not automatically mean that safety is part of its culture.
The difference appears when occupational risk prevention stops being solely in documents and begins to be recognized in the way of working. In how managers act, how risks are communicated, what happens when someone detects a problem, what information the staff finds in their environment, and what decisions are made when safety conflicts with other priorities.
That is where the preventive culture begins to relate to the company's own identity. And also where visibility becomes important. Because a value may be written in a corporate policy, but it gains credibility when people can see it in everyday decisions and behaviors.
Of course, making prevention visible does not replace prevention. A panel, a message, or a counter can remind and communicate a priority, but they never replace risk assessment, technical and organizational measures, training, information, worker participation, or action on detected problems.
How do we know if a company truly has a preventive culture?
The answer is not solely in checking if it has a prevention plan or if it complies with established procedures. Compliance is essential, but culture is also observed in the way people interpret and apply safety during their work.
Evolution can be understood as a journey.
In a first phase, prevention is mainly reactive. Action is taken after an accident has occurred or a problem has manifested. The objective is closely related to correcting what happened and preventing it from happening again.
Later, prevention may become more dependent on rules, supervision, and control. The organization establishes procedures, responsibilities, and measures, but the worker may continue to perceive safety as something external: an obligation to be fulfilled because the company demands it.
The next change occurs when the person understands the risk and assumes prevention as their own responsibility. They no longer use a safety measure solely because a rule exists, but because they understand its purpose.
And one more step can still be taken: moving from individual care to collective care.
“I comply because I'm forced to” → “I take care of myself because I understand the risk” → “We take care of each other because it's part of how we work”.
That last transition is especially important.
A mature preventive culture does not turn the worker into a mere recipient of instructions. It allows them to participate, detect improvable situations, communicate risks, and contribute to finding solutions. At the same time, it forces those in charge to demonstrate with their own decisions how much safety truly matters.
The Vision Zero idea fits within this evolution by proposing prevention from a continuous aspiration to avoid harm and continue improving. Safety-II also broadens the perspective by paying attention not only to what fails, but to how people and systems manage to work correctly in changing circumstances.
The goal is not to achieve OSH (Occupational Safety and Health) disappearing because it is no longer necessary. It is to achieve it no longer being perceived as an activity separate from work.
Preventive culture appears when safety stops being something the company simply “does” and starts becoming part of how it works, how it organizes, and how it makes decisions.
A company can state that people come first. It can include safety among its corporate values and mention it in meetings, documents, or internal communications.
But the worker does not determine the real importance the company gives to prevention solely based on these statements.
They discover it by observing what happens every day.
One of the clearest ways to do this is through visible leadership. Managers can get close to the actual work through safety walks, conversations with teams, and direct observation of the difficulties that arise during a task.
The goal should not be simply to find non-compliance.
A conversation can be much more useful if you try to understand what makes a procedure difficult to follow, what situations generate uncertainty, what problems are repeated, or what risks have become normalized over time.
But listening is not enough.
Visibility of commitment appears when what is detected receives a response. If a worker points out a problem and later observes a measure, a modification, or an explanation, the company is demonstrating that preventive communication has real consequences.
There are also small rituals that help keep safety present.
Pre-task meetings allow a few minutes to review the specific conditions of the work about to begin. They don't have to become an automatic repetition of instructions. They can be used to analyze changes, interferences with other work, incidents, or circumstances that modify the usual risk.
Another particularly significant example is the ability to stop a job in the face of an unsafe situation.
That this possibility exists on paper is important. But the real cultural test occurs when someone uses it.
What happens if stopping an activity delays an order? What if it affects production? Is the person who made the decision supported, or are they told they have created a problem?
A company demonstrates its priorities when they come into conflict.
If a preventive decision continues to be supported even when it has an operational cost, safety ceases to be merely a statement and begins to become a recognizable characteristic of the organization.
There is also a third fundamental element: the feedback.
A preventive culture needs to complete the cycle:
detect, communicate, analyze, act, and explain what has been done.
When that cycle works, participation makes sense. When notices disappear without a response, the message the template receives is precisely the opposite.
Prevention is not only manifested in decisions. It is also present in the company's physical environment.
Signage, panels, indicators, campaigns, screens, messages, QR codes, and counters can help remind of certain safety priorities during the workday.
But there is an important difference between making prevention visible and filling the facilities with messages.
A preventive communication element needs to overcome at least three steps:
If no one looks at it, it loses its usefulness. If it is looked at but not understood, it also fails to achieve its objective. And if it is understood but it is not clear what should be done, its ability to influence behavior will be limited.
This is especially important in signage.
The understanding of pictograms can vary depending on factors such as familiarity, design, color, experience, or context. In a study conducted with board industry workers, the average understanding of the analyzed signs was 66.6%, while some symbols fell below 40%.
The data helps to remember something simple: placing a sign does not automatically guarantee that all people have understood its meaning.
There is also the risk of visual fatigue.
A message can be perfectly placed and yet lose its ability to attract attention over time. When it remains for months or years without changes, it ends up becoming just another part of the landscape.
That is why it can be useful to combine permanent elements with content that is renewed.
A days-without-accidents counter, for example, can be kept as a stable visual point while the messages accompanying it change periodically to talk about risks, campaigns, participation, or specific situations.
It is also essential to differentiate between regulatory signage and corporate preventive communication.
Law 31/1995 on Occupational Risk Prevention establishes permanent preventive action that includes risk assessment, information, consultation, and training.
Meanwhile, Royal Decree 485/1997 regulates safety and health signage at work. This signage has specific functions and cannot replace technical and organizational measures or training. In addition, an accumulation of signs that could reduce their effectiveness must be avoided.
A counter, an information panel, or a corporate campaign has a different function. They can complement preventive communication, but they cannot replace, hide, or compete with mandatory safety signage.
The wall communicates too.
But more signs do not necessarily mean more prevention.
A counter of days without accidents turns safety into immediately visible information. Anyone can understand what the number represents and observe how it evolves.
Precisely for this reason, one must be careful with the interpretation built around it.
The main risk appears when it stops being a communication element and transforms into a competition.
If the goal becomes protecting the record, an incident can be perceived as something that harms the team. And if there are also prizes, penalties, or peer pressure linked exclusively to the number, some people may have less incentive to report what happened.
In a survey of 1,020 carpentry apprentices, reporting was significantly lower when disciplinary consequences were associated with injuries. Another study of 1,390 workers found greater underreporting in organizations with a poorer safety climate.
The practical conclusion is important:
ZERO ACCIDENTS = ZERO REPORTS
A company needs to know about things that have not yet caused harm.
That's why near misses play a particularly relevant role. A dangerous situation that ultimately does not cause an injury can reveal a weakness before it has more serious consequences.
To ensure that this information reaches the organization, trust is needed.
The Just Culture proposes precisely to differentiate between a human error, an issue stemming from the system itself, and deliberately inappropriate behavior. Reporting a failure or a dangerous situation should not automatically trigger a search for culprits.
The goal is to learn.
And once again, it is essential to close the loop with a response. If a person reports a risk and later sees that it has been studied and acted upon, the credibility of the system increases.
That is why a counter can coexist with messages other than just the number itself:
“Reportar también es prevenir.”
“Cero accidentes no significa cero avisos.”
“Nuestro objetivo no es batir un récord. Es volver a casa seguros cada día.”
The case of BD Fraga shows the potential of making certain objectives visible. The company used milestones for hours without lost-time accidents and annual prevention goals displayed on boards. The maximum period without lost-time accidents went from approximately four months to four years, and in 1993 one million hours without accidents was reached.
This does not mean the boards were the direct cause of that evolution. It does show how visibility can be part of a broader preventive program and how those actions need to be renewed to avoid complacency.
A good counter should not cause us to stop talking about the problems.
It should help precisely to keep that conversation open.
For years, a good part of preventive performance has been explained through reactive indicators.
Accidents, sick leaves, frequency rates, severity rates, or lost days make it possible to know what has happened and its consequences. They continue to be important data.
But they mainly look backward.
A company can go months without accidents and, at the same time, accumulate risks that have not yet caused harm. It may have few recorded incidents because there are few problems or because people have stopped reporting them.
There appears the safety mirage: confusing a temporary absence of accidents with the existence of a safe system.
That is why it is useful to complement reactive results with proactive indicators.
For example:
These indicators make it possible to change the question.
Not only "how many accidents have we had?", but also "what are we doing before an accident happens?".
This distinction even modifies the interpretation of certain data.
An increase in reported risks or near misses does not necessarily mean that the organization has become less safe. It may indicate that more problems exist, but it can also reflect that people are better at detecting situations and have more confidence to report them.
The case of Gonvauto Iberia helps to observe this issue. Between 2021 and 2024, its frequency rate dropped from 17.1 to 5.4 and its severity rate from 0.43 to 0.08. During that same period, reported risk conditions increased by 70% and occupational health and safety actions grew by more than 250%.
The experience included different actions, such as digital tools, workshops, participation, and communication at the actual workplaces. These figures do not allow attributing the evolution to a single tool.
The interesting part is that they show how the interpretation of preventive performance changes when we look at multiple indicators at once.
The same happens with a counter of Accident-Free.
The days elapsed since the last accident can be a visible and easy-to-understand piece of data, but they should not explain the company's preventive situation on their own.
The number can start the conversation.
How many risks have we communicated? How many actions have been closed? How long do we take to respond? Are we detecting near misses? Do workers participate?
The counter can be the beginning of the conversation, not the end.
Companies where prevention acquires a cultural dimension usually combine several elements: coherent leadership, participation, trust to communicate, learning, training, visibility, feedback, action on risks, and indicators that make it possible to know both the results and the preventive activity.
But there is something that connects all of the above: coherence.
An especially well-known example is Alcoa. When Paul O’Neill took over the company's management in 1987, he made safety a central priority. Among the measures adopted, it was established that accidents resulting in sick leave had to reach top management in less than 24 hours, accompanied by an analysis and the planned actions.
Beyond the company's subsequent figures, the interest of the case lies in observing how a preventive priority could force a review of communication systems, processes, and response capacity.
There are also examples much more closely tied to visual communication.
The experience of Aceros Inoxidables OLARRA has served to analyze resources such as green crosses, accident rate panels, electronic counters, entry and exit messages, or the visualization of worker suggestions.
The value does not lie in using many supports, but in ensuring that they are related to a real preventive action.
At YIT Latvia, for example, digitalization makes it possible to link certain safety observations with their location on the construction site. The information gains usefulness because it appears directly connected to the place where an action might occur.
The cases are different, but they point toward the same idea: visibility works when it leads to action.
And here it is convenient to differentiate two dimensions of identity.
The Visual identity is expressed through colors, logos, typographies, signage, and spaces.
The organizational identity it is built with the priorities the company demonstrates, the behaviors it supports, the decisions it makes, and the way it responds to problems.
Both can meet.
A corporate value gains more strength when, in addition to being stated, it can be seen in the space. But a space full of messages about safety loses credibility if there are no coherent decisions behind it.
It is in this context that fits Accident-Free.
A counter can function as a permanent point of preventive communication. It can show the days elapsed since the last accident and the record achieved, and incorporate colors, logos, typographies, and messages consistent with the organization's visual identity.
It can also serve as a support for campaigns, reminders, and calls to participation.
But its function must be understood correctly.
It does not assess risks. It does not replace technical measures. It does not replace training. It does not organize prevention. It does not correct detected problems.
The accountant does not create the preventive culture. They can help make it visible.
A company can have a logo, corporate colors, and a specific way of communicating. But its identity is also built upon what it chooses to repeat every day.
When protecting people shapes how work is planned, produced, managed, communicated, and how problems are addressed, prevention ceases to exist solely in the OHS manual.
It becomes part of the company's identity.
Prevention becomes part of a company's identity when it stops being limited to rules, procedures, or posters and begins to reflect in the way of working, deciding, communicating, and responding to risks. Leadership, participation, learning, feedback, and indicators form part of the same preventive culture when there is coherence between what the organization says and what it actually does.
Making prevention visible helps keep it present, but it never replaces preventive management. A counter like Accident-Free can reinforce that visibility, support communication, and serve as a starting point for new conversations about safety. Because, ultimately, a true preventive culture is measured not only by the days without accidents, but by a company's ability to protect people every day.
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