Security culture is one of those things that everyone talks about but very few organizations ever get right. Posters on the wall, emails in your inbox, mandatory training courses, they’re all there. Yet people keep making mistakes. The reason isn’t that employees don’t care. Most do. They don’t want to lose data, cause problems for their team, or get blamed for something going wrong. The tricky part is getting security to fit naturally into day-to-day work.
A lot of attempts fail because organizations treat culture like an awareness campaign. They measure things that are easy to measure: training completion, posters, newsletters. But culture is about what people actually do when no one is watching, what decisions they make under pressure, and whether the environment makes it easy or hard for them to do the right thing.
Here’s a way to think about it that actually works.
Step 1: Be Specific About What “Good Security Behaviour” Looks Like
You can’t build a culture around vague phrases like “be security conscious.” People guess what that means, and guessing leads to mistakes.
You need to spell out:
- Which data and systems are most important
- What each person is expected to do
- What to do if something goes wrong
Make these instructions simple enough that anyone can explain them in their own words. If they can’t, they’re too complicated.
Step 2: Give People Ownership, Not Just Accountability
Security fails when responsibilities are abstract. People need to know:
- What they are responsible for
- What they can influence
- When they need to escalate a problem
This is true at all levels. If only the security team “owns” security, nothing changes. Make ownership visible:
- Risk decisions should be recorded somewhere
- Exceptions should have a named owner
- Incident roles should be defined before anything happens
When people know what they own, they act faster and make better decisions.
Step 3: Make Controls Fit How People Actually Work
Culture doesn’t survive friction. If doing the secure thing is harder than the easy thing, people will take the easy route and that’s just the human nature.
To build culture, controls must:
- Align with existing tools and processes
- Reduce decision fatigue
Examples include single sign-on, clear approval paths, and simple reporting processes.
Step 4: Train for Decisions, Not Knowledge
Most security training is about knowledge: here’s the rule, here’s the policy, remember this. But what matters is how people make decisions when something happens.
People don’t need to know every detail about cyber threats. They need to recognize risk and know what to do next. Training should be:
- Specific to the role
- Based on actual situations that could happen at the organization
This way, people can act instead of just remembering rules.
Step 5: Reinforce Behaviour Through Leadership Actions
Leadership behaviour either strengthens or destroys security culture as employees pay close attention to what leaders do under pressure:
- Do they follow the same rules?
- Do they own risk decisions?
- Do they treat incidents as learning opportunities?
Culture is strengthened when leaders consistently behave in the way they expect others to behave. No newsletter or poster can replace that.
Step 6: Measure What Actually Matters
You can’t improve something you don’t measure but measuring the wrong thing is useless. Checking whether everyone completed training tells you almost nothing. Better measures are things like:
- How quickly are incidents reported?
- Are risks dealt with before they become bigger problems?
These kinds of signals show whether security is actually part of daily work.
Step 7: Focus on Resilience, Not Perfection
No security culture stops every incident. What a good culture does is prepare the organization to respond. In resilient organizations:
- Problems are reported early
- Recovery is faster because everyone knows their role
- Lessons are recorded and applied, not forgotten
Building Culture Takes Time
Security culture is built through repeated actions over time and not fixed by one initiative. Organizations that make progress treat it like any other important part of operations: it is designed, owned, reinforced, and measured.
In 2026, the organisations that will get security culture right are the ones that will treat it like any other part of how they run their business, something they plan, take responsibility for, check on, and make part of everyday work. A strong security culture is about people being able to make the right call when it matters, even in the middle of a busy day, and knowing why it’s the right thing to do.