Safety culture has improved around the world in the last period

The global security culture has generally improved over the past period. This is according to the KnowBe4 Safety Culture Report 2022, which was prepared by the research arm of KnowBe4 Research. This research maps global trends in safety culture.

Security culture refers to the ideas, habits, and social behaviors of an organization that influence its cybersecurity. The KnowBe4 Safety Culture Report 2022 examined the seven different dimensions of safety culture (attitude, behavior, cognition, communication, compliance, standards and responsibilities) in different regions and industries around the world.

The main conclusions of the report are as follows:

• In Africa, there is a lot of interest in safety culture, especially in South Africa, where a higher level of safety culture has been achieved.
• In Asia, safety culture scores vary widely from country to country. While Japan is doing reasonably well, countries like Malaysia and Indonesia have alarming safety culture index scores.
• In Europe, Sweden and Ireland are often considered technologically advanced. In addition to these two countries, Italy and Bulgaria also have a higher safety culture.
• In the United States, there are differences in security culture depending on the size of the organization, with smaller organizations generally outperforming larger organizations.
• In Oceania, the safety culture of Australia and New Zealand is very different. Neither country is doing particularly well.
• Central and South America are now beginning to measure safety culture, and more countries in these regions are being added to it every year.

“Safety culture is about how people think about a safer environment and how they manage it. This report focuses on those key elements,” said Perry Carpenter, Chief Evangelist and Head of Strategy at KnowBe4. “In new data on safety culture trends over the past two to three years, safety culture has improved at all levels across all regions and industries. This is the most promising finding of our research and underscores that safety culture should be viewed as a critical asset used to reduce risk and improve safety. Additionally, KnowBe4’s simulated phishing assessments, measures such as the Security Culture Survey, and recommendations for ongoing security awareness training help create an improved security culture worldwide.

The 2022 Safety Culture Report includes responses from KnowBe4 customers – over 257,000 employees in 1,456 organizations worldwide – who also completed the Safety Culture Survey. The report is here available.