Organizational culture can be changed in ways that are visible, trackable, and meaningful for the workforce and the people they serve.

Measuring Safety Culture in the Helping Professions:
TeamFirst Assessment of Safety Culture (TASC)

The TeamFirst Assessment of Safety Culture (TASC) was developed to help organizations in the helping professions take a rigorous, structured look at how safety culture is actually experienced by the people doing the work — and to use that understanding as the foundation for sustained change.

This page focuses on four areas:

Approach — the evidence base behind TASC
Process — how a TASC engagement unfolds
TASC — what the survey includes and why
Outcomes — what organizations receive and build over time.

20+

partner organizations in the helping professions

50K+

individual survey responses to date

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Safety Culture is not a fixed property an organization either has or lacks. It lives in how teams talk to each other, how mistakes are handled, how stress gets named or doesn't, and whether people feel safe enough to speak up when something matters.

Organizational culture can be measured reliably and validly over time. Because it can be measured, it can be changed in ways that are visible, trackable, and meaningful for the workforce and the people they serve.

Watch the TASC Video; Download the TASC Toolkit

Transforming Organizational Culture with the TeamFirst Assessment of Safety Culture (TASC)

Building a genuine safety culture requires more than commitment — it requires a clear-eyed look at where your organization actually stands. This video from the Center for the Helping Professions introduces the TeamFirst Assessment of Safety Culture (TASC): what it measures, how it works, and how leadership teams are using it to move from good intentions to meaningful, evidence-based action. Designed for agencies in child welfare, healthcare, and behavioral health, the TASC gives teams a shared language and a concrete starting point for culture change — making it easier to align around priorities and build momentum together.

TeamFirst Assessment of Safety Culture (TASC) Toolkit

The TASC Toolkit is comprised of three resources that walk you through the full TASC process:
• Administering the survey
• Analyzing the results
• Translating the findings into culture change

1. TASC Administration Toolkit

Prepare and launch your survey. This guide covers everything you need from initial planning through survey close: finalizing survey design and logistics, preparing communication strategies, managing participation, and ensuring data integrity. Includes checklists, communication templates, and implementation timelines.

> DOWNLOAD THE TASC ADMINSTRATION TOOLKIT

2. TASC Data Analysis Guide

Analyze results and plan action. Walk through interpreting your data, navigating the interactive dashboard, understanding statistical relationships between scales, and identifying focus areas. Includes guidance on reading data responsibly and connecting findings to your organizational priorities.

> DOWNLOAD THE TASC DATA ANALYSIS GUIDE

3. Talking About and Debriefing the TASC

Turn data into culture change. Facilitate meaningful conversations across your organization, from leadership briefings to team-level debriefs. Includes facilitation scripts, discussion prompts, PDSA cycle design, and strategies for connecting survey findings to evidence-based improvement efforts.

> DOWNLOAD THE DEBRIEFING THE TASC GUIDE

Safety Culture refers to the shared beliefs, norms, and practices that shape how teams anticipate and respond to risk, communicate concerns, learn from mistakes, and support one another in carrying out complex and high-stakes work.

In helping professions, where uncertainty is inherent and the consequences of decisions are profound, safety culture is a critical driver of both workforce sustainability and the quality of care and services provided. Research across healthcare, child welfare, and related fields has established consistent associations between stronger safety culture and better outcomes at every level: fewer errors, lower staff turnover, reduced burnout, and more adaptive, resilient teams.

Vogus, Sutcliffe & Weick (2010) | Singer & Vogus (2013) | Cull et al. (2016)

APPROACH

Evidence-Based, Adapted for the Helping Professions

The TeamFirst Assessment of Safety Culture (TASC) draws on a well-developed body of safety science research, much of it originating in healthcare and refined over decades of empirical study. CHP has spent years adapting those frameworks to the particular demands of helping profession work: relational complexity, chronic and cumulative stress, and the ways that organizational culture either supports or undermines the people doing the work.

Culture lives at the team level

Safety culture is not something that exists in policy documents or organizational mission statements. It exists in teams: in whether a worker feels comfortable telling her supervisor she is overwhelmed, in whether a team discusses what went wrong after a difficult case, in whether asking for help is treated as a professional strength or a personal failing. The TASC is designed to measure culture where it actually operates — at the level of the team and the people within it.
— Edmondson (1999); Vogus & Sutcliffe (2007)

Naming something changes it

The constructs are theoretically related

The TASC measures core dimensions of safety culture that are related to one another in ways the research literature has traced carefully. Workplace connectedness builds the conditions for psychological safety, which enables the kind of honest, adaptive teamwork that mindful organizing describes. Teams that organize mindfully show lower rates of emotional exhaustion and higher intent to remain employed. Understanding these relationships is what allows organizations to use their data strategically.
— Vogus & Sutcliffe (2011); Epstein et al. (2020)

Administering the assessment is itself an intervention

When an organization conducts a serious, well-communicated culture assessment and shares results transparently with its workforce, that process communicates something substantive about what leadership believes matters. Research consistently demonstrates that this organizational signal begins shifting culture before any specific action plan has been developed. The TASC is a measurement tool, and it is also a mechanism for communication about priorities.
— Singer & Vogus (2013)

FROM THE RESEARCH

Studies across helping professions have established that when staff experience psychological safety, shared accountability, and supportive supervision, organizations are better positioned to identify emerging risks, adapt to changing conditions, and prevent harm.

The inverse pattern is equally well-documented: environments in which errors are concealed, voices are silenced, or punitive responses to mistakes consistently outweigh learning create conditions that undermine both the quality of services and the sustainability of the workforce. The TASC helps organizations understand which conditions are present in their setting, and where the most significant opportunities for change exist.

— Cull, Epstein et al. (2013); Grailey et al. (2021)

PROCESS

A Structured Process, Built Around Your Organization

The Center for Helping Professions (CHP) partners with organizations through each phase of the TASC process. The work unfolds collaboratively, shaped at each stage by what the organization is trying to learn and what the data is actually showing.

PHASE 1

Design

Before any survey goes out, we spend time with organizational leadership understanding what you most want to learn. That conversation shapes the survey itself: which scales to include, what organization-specific questions to add, and how to structure the demographic variables so the resulting data can be used.

Identify learning goals and priorities
Select core and supplemental scales
Develop organization-specific questions
Finalize demographic variables Build and test the survey in REDCap

PHASE 2

Administration

CHP manages the logistics of survey distribution and tracks participation throughout the administration window. We provide communication templates, weekly participation updates, and support for reaching areas of the organization with lower response rates.

Communication scripting and messaging support
Secure distribution via REDCap
Weekly participation updates by division
Targeted outreach to low-response areas
Individual responses held by CHP throughout

PHASE 3

Data Reporting

After the survey closes, CHP conducts a full analysis and prepares an interactive data dashboard. We then meet with leadership to walk through the findings, provide context for interpreting them, and begin identifying where the organization wants to focus.

Executive report with organization-wide findings
Interactive data dashboard with filter capability
Division and team-level breakdowns
Leadership briefing and data orientation
Dissemination planning support

PHASE 4

Turning Data to Action

Data dissemination and action planning are where the work of culture change begins in earnest. CHP supports organizations in sharing results with staff at every level, facilitating team conversations, identifying focus areas, and designing small-scale tests of change.

Staff and team debriefing facilitation
Focus selection and priority-setting
PDSA cycle design and coaching
Connection to evidence-based strategies
Planning for the next administration

TYPICAL TIMELINE

First implementations span 3–6 months, from initial preparation through culture coaching and data dissemination. Organizations that have administered the TASC across multiple cycles are building something durable over time: a shared language, a learning infrastructure, and a longitudinal data record that makes progress visible in ways that single-point-in-time assessments cannot.

THE TEAMFIRST ASSESSMENT OF SAFETY CULTURE

What the Survey Includes and Why

The TeamFirst Assessment of Safety Culture (TASC) is administered through REDCap, a HIPAA-compliant survey platform, and takes most respondents under 15 minutes to complete. It is organized into three sections, each serving a distinct purpose in building a complete picture of safety culture in your organization.

SECTION 1 Workforce and Demographic Questions

This section collects professional variables including job type, organizational tenure, program area, and geography, alongside identity demographics. These variables make the data analytically useful: they allow organizations to examine whether safety culture is experienced equitably across the workforce and identify where patterns are most pronounced. Every item can be customized to reflect the structure and language of your organization.

SECTION 2 Core Safety Culture Scales

Seven validated scales measuring the dimensions of safety culture most relevant to helping profession workforces. These scales were drawn from peer-reviewed research literature and adapted for this context. Because they have been validated and are used consistently across our partner organizations, we generally recommend keeping them intact, though language can be adjusted for organizational context.

SECTION 3 Organization-Specific Questions

Many organizations add questions or short scales that speak to particular practices or priorities they want to understand. Past partners have included questions about huddle use and effectiveness, supervision experiences, critical incident response protocols, the organizational impact of media coverage, and staff experiences of remote or hybrid work. This section is developed collaboratively and tailored to your specific goals.

Scales

TEAM SCALES

Psychological Safety

Whether team members feel accepted, respected, and free to speak up and take interpersonal risks. Originally developed by Amy Edmondson and identified in her research as the single most important team-level predictor of learning and performance, the scale has been adapted here for use in helping profession settings and is foundational to the other team-level constructs the TASC measures.

Edmondson (1999); Clark, Riley et al. (2025)

Mindful Organizing

The habits and practices teams use to monitor, plan, innovate, learn, and support each other. Drawn from Karl Weick and Kathleen Sutcliffe’s research on High Reliability Organizations, mindful organizing captures the degree to which teams are collectively attentive to what could go wrong and actively working to prevent it. In helping profession settings, it is strongly associated with better decision-making and lower rates of emotional exhaustion.

Sutcliffe (2011); Vogus & Sutcliffe (2007); Epstein et al. (2020)

Workplace Connectedness

How connected employees feel to their coworkers within the organization. Connectedness reflects shared purpose, mutual support, and the quality of trust that makes it possible for workers to lean on each other during demanding and emotionally taxing work. Research indicates that higher workplace connectedness is associated with higher psychological safety and lower rates of secondary traumatic stress.

Bandura (1997); Quinn (2017)

INDIVIDUAL SCALES

Emotional Exhaustion

A measure of emotional reserves and burnout, derived from the Maslach Burnout Inventory. CHP treats emotional exhaustion as an outcome rather than a target for direct intervention: when team culture strengthens, exhaustion typically decreases. Efforts to address exhaustion without attending to its cultural and systemic conditions tend to have limited and short-lived effects.

Maslach & Jackson (1981)

Stress Recognition

Whether individuals can identify how stress and fatigue are affecting their attention, judgment, and decision-making. Adapted from the Safety Attitudes Questionnaire used in healthcare settings, this scale captures the ability to recognize one’s own limitations under pressure and engage team support before risk to clients increases.

Sexton et al. (2006)

Physical Safety

How safe staff feel in their work environment, both in office settings and in the field. Physical safety is often an accessible entry point for organizational conversations about safety more broadly, and organizations that score higher on physical safety tend to report stronger psychological safety as well, suggesting shared underlying conditions.

Intent to Remain

A widely-used measure of turnover intent, adapted from the Intent to Remain Employed in Child Welfare scale. Like emotional exhaustion, retention is treated as an outcome in the TASC framework. Research consistently shows that retention improves when psychological safety, connectedness, and mindful organizing improve — focusing on retention in isolation misses the root causes of turnover.

CONFIDENTIALITY

Individual responses are held by CHP and are never released to the partner organization. When results are reported, data is aggregated into groups following CDC and AHRQ data reporting guidelines: group results are shared only for groups of 10 or more respondents, and this threshold is built directly into the dashboard so that suppressed data cannot inadvertently identify individuals. CHP staff have access to individual responses for the purpose of managing survey administration and sending participation reminders. Those responses are never shared with organizational leadership or supervisors.

SURVEY SPECIFICATIONS

The TASC is administered via REDCap, a HIPAA-compliant web-based survey platform. The survey is completed in under 15 minutes, uses a 7-point Likert agreement scale throughout, and draws from scales validated in peer-reviewed research. The instrument is fully configurable to organizational context and is available in English, with translation support available on request.

OUTCOMES

What Organizations Receive, and What They Build Over Time

The TeamFirst Assessment of Safety Culture produces concrete deliverables at each phase of the work. Over time, organizations that engage seriously with the process also build something less immediately tangible: a shared language for talking about culture, a data infrastructure that grows more informative with each administration, and a workforce that has been asked to weigh in and has seen that participation lead somewhere.

Interactive Data Dashboard

A password-protected, self-service dashboard that allows organizational leaders, managers, and supervisors to filter results by division, geography, job type, tenure, and other demographic variables. Users can explore findings at both the scale level and the individual item level, generate reports, and export visualizations for presentations. Data suppression rules are built in throughout so that confidentiality is maintained regardless of how results are filtered.

Coaching and Education

CHP provides direct coaching support throughout data dissemination and action planning. This includes leadership briefings, facilitation support for staff debriefs and team conversations, and the TASC Skills Lab — a structured training designed to build data literacy and help organizational teams understand how to read and discuss results constructively. CHP also supports organizations in connecting findings to the TeamFirst Field Guide, which links each scale to evidence-based strategies and tactics for improvement.

A Platform for Sustained Learning

Organizations that administer the TASC across multiple cycles are building a longitudinal record of their safety culture — one that tracks what is shifting and what is not, and allows leadership to make more informed decisions about where to invest organizational energy. The dashboard includes a Change Over Time tab that makes trend data visible, and CHP supports organizations in using that data to evaluate the effects of specific initiatives and adjust strategies accordingly.

What We See

Organizations in the National Partnership for Child Safety that engage seriously with both the assessment and the subsequent dissemination and action-planning process show measurable shifts in safety culture over time. Across participating child welfare agencies, we have documented increases in psychological safety, mindful organizing, and workplace connectedness, alongside decreases in emotional exhaustion and turnover intent, in settings where the TASC is treated as part of a sustained learning effort. These shifts do not occur quickly, and they do not occur through survey administration alone. They occur when data generates conversation, conversation produces focus, and focus enables the kind of small, intentional tests of change that accumulate into durable cultural improvement.

Learn More about Working with Us

We begin every partnership with a conversation about what your organization is hoping to understand and whether the TeamFirst Assessment of Safety Culture is the right tool for that work. There is no commitment involved in reaching out.

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