Culture Determines Whether People Click or Not—Not Just Training

Training Teaches. Culture Decides.

Security awareness training matters. But if your program stops at telling people what to do and hopes they'll remember it under pressure, you're addressing symptoms—not causes. At the core of most digital behaviors lie deeper forces: values, norms, social cues, and the ambient culture of how risk is talked about (or ignored).

People don’t operate in a vacuum. They act within systems—systems shaped by team dynamics, leadership signals, psychological safety, and local norms around hierarchy, decision-making, and trust. Culture isn’t a backdrop; it’s a behavioral operating system. And research backs this up: a 2023 Gartner study found that organizations with mature risk-aware cultures experienced 45% fewer human-error related incidents than those focused solely on training.

So ask yourself:

• Do your people feel empowered to question strange requests?

• Is caution celebrated, or seen as slowing things down?

• Are risky behaviors corrected, understood—or simply punished?

When someone clicks, it might not be because they weren’t trained—it could be because the culture trained them to act otherwise. Understanding that difference is the starting point for real change.

Want to reduce click rates, improve secure behaviors, and increase organizational resilience? Start by looking beneath the surface.

In human risk management and cybersecurity culture, norms refer to the unwritten rules that guide behavior—what’s expected, what’s acceptable, and what’s rewarded or punished. At work, norms influence how decisions are made, how risk is discussed, and how individuals behave under pressure. These cultural currents are powerful. If your cyber safety efforts don’t take them into account, they’re likely to drift off course.

Some of the most overlooked—but critical—normative factors include:

• Norms & Values: What behaviors are seen as “normal” or admirable? Are people rewarded for caution or speed?

• Information Processing: Do employees prefer to skim or engage? Do they trust peer signals over formal messages?

• Hierarchy & Decision-Making: Are employees encouraged to challenge authority or defer to it—even when something seems off?

• Risk Tolerance & Rule Respect: Is going around a policy considered resourceful or reckless? Do people see cybersecurity as part of their job or someone else’s responsibility?

These factors vary across teams, departments, and countries. For global or hybrid organizations, this makes designing one-size-fits-all programs risky—and often ineffective.

To build a strong digital risk culture, you must ask: What are the norms at play? Are they helping or hurting secure behavior?

From a practical perspective, this lens can shift your search strategy too. Leaders are increasingly seeking solutions to questions like “how to measure security culture,” “what influences phishing click rates,” and “how to align human risk management with behavior.” Programs rooted in these deeper cultural insights not only last longer—they create less friction and fatigue over time.

Behavior Has a Why—And Culture Holds the Map

Clicking isn’t always about training gaps. It can be about:

• Fatigue

• Disengagement

• Interface overload

• Fear of breaking the workflow

• Confusion about what counts as risky

But underneath all of that is the cultural layer:

• Do we talk about risk?

• Do we reward caution?

• Do we expect people to figure it out alone?

Culture determines what sticks. If your security behaviors are only held together by reminders, rules, and restrictions, they’ll fail under pressure.

If they’re embedded in shared values, they’ll become habits.

Stop Fighting Behavior—Start Shaping Culture

Too many cybersecurity awareness programs respond to unsafe behavior with blunt instruments: more training, tighter controls, or stricter policies. But without understanding the cultural environment that produced the behavior in the first place, these interventions risk being reactive and short-lived. What makes human risk management effective is not repetition—it’s relevance. And relevance only comes when programs are rooted in behavioral context, cultural insight, and practical empathy for the environments people are working in.

When was the last time your team mapped the risk culture of your organization? Do you know which departments have high-risk tolerance, or where norms reward speed over scrutiny? Are your interventions designed with these differences in mind—or applied as a blanket fix? Effective cyber safety culture requires context-aware response. By observing behaviors in context, mapping cultural drivers, and shaping support around team-level dynamics, organizations can shift from compliance policing to culture-building.

This is how lasting change takes root. Not through punishment or repetition—but through alignment, reinforcement, and shared meaning. Human risk is a cultural issue. It's time we started treating it that way.

Final Thought: Look Beyond the Click

The click rate is just a symptom. The real question is: what does it say about your culture?

We help organizations move from surface metrics to deep insight—through assessments, behavior analysis, and human-centric program design.

If you want to stop chasing clicks and start shaping culture, let’s talk.