Safety culture is strategic, says study with 320,000 interviews

In a survey of 1,161 security leaders, 94% said security culture is the most important element in their strategy to protect companies. The information is in the fourth edition of the “Security Culture Report 2021” survey, carried out by KnowBe4, a company that works mainly on raising people’s awareness to improve their attitude towards information security. The survey has the largest sample ever surveyed for this purpose: a total of 328,173 employees from 2,093 organizations. After cleaning up these data, the final sample consisted of 321,609 employees from 1,872 organizations in 49 countries. No people were interviewed in Brazil.

The leaders’ responses are reflected in the growing number of organizations that are assessing their security culture. The research indicates that although this culture has stagnated or declined in some sectors during the pandemic, in others the pandemic era was used precisely as an opportunity to improve the culture.

The results of this year’s report revealed a big difference between the best and the worst in security culture: “As expected, the best performances were from Financial Services and Banks – sectors with a long tradition of risk management. However, having ‘better performance’ does not necessarily mean performing at a desirable level (…) For example, a score of 76, as seen by Banking and Financial Services, is well below a good safety culture ”. According to the survey, this indicator is in the “Moderate” category. Moving to the “Good” category will benefit, for example, an eight-fold reduction in the number of employees who share credentials, says the document.

The average and median of the total safety culture score was 73. The detailed analysis shows that most of the organizations analyzed were able to develop a mediocre or moderate safety culture, while only a small part of the organizations have a good safety culture. What is worrying, says the document, is that some organizations are scoring in the Weak category and none have achieved an Excellent safety culture score so far.

With international news agencies