This paper reviews safety safety measures and safety culture and uses them as the basis for a new and more practical construction named 'safety orientation'. Factors and items from the scale reviewed are related to factor names and importance, reliability, and validity. The analysis shows that researchers have found it difficult to move from the exploratory stage to the confirmation and causal stage which allows agreement on industry standards that can be used as benchmarks. Safety orientation is safety as an operational construct of safety culture and as a first step towards more practical instruments for safety benchmarking, so that strategy improvements can be implemented.