Top Tips to Build a Safety Culture
To reduce the risk of workplace injuries, employers must implement a comprehensive safety program. This involves implementing policies and procedures, training employees, and providing safe equipment and tools. However, a positive safety culture in the workplace is crucial to the success and effectiveness of any health and safety program.
In this article, we’ll discuss what is a safety culture, why promote a safety culture and provide tips on building a safety culture.
What Is a Safety Culture?
The term “safety culture” is often misunderstood. Safety culture goes beyond legislative compliance. A safety culture encompasses the entire mindset of employees, management, and owners towards focussing on workplace safety.
Safety culture is a set of behaviours and attitudes. An organisation’s safety culture is its organisational culture that places high levels of importance on safety beliefs and attitudes. These beliefs and attitudes are shared by most employees within the organisation. It can be described as ‘it’s the way things are done around here’. A positive safety culture may result in better workplace health and safety and ultimately organisational performance.
Why Promote a Safety Culture?
There are many reasons why employers implement a workplace health and safety programme that promotes a safe culture. They include:
- comply with workplace health and safety regulations
- reduce injuries
- increase productivity
- improve workplace morale
- prevent incidents
- protect employees
- save money
- avoid legal action
- meet customer expectations
- attract and retain good employees.
Ultimately, workplace health and safety provide benefits to both management and employees. Management gains improved employee performance and satisfaction while employees receive job security and a safe work environment.
Tips to Build a Safety Culture
Communication
A great way to increase safety communication while building a positive culture in your workplace is to hold weekly or month-long safety talks. This helps build awareness and understanding among employees about what constitutes safe behaviour and how to handle unsafe situations.
Further, have employees lead the safety talks as this will gain greater employee buy-in. Employees will feel like they’re part of the process and understand why it’s important to follow safe work procedures. Employees will become advocates for safety and help spread the message.
Install a safety noticeboard that clearly communicates the latest safety information, or produce newsletters or brochures that communicate safety procedures and highlight positive safety performances of the organisation or individuals.
Training
Training employees demonstrate an organisation’s commitment to workplace safety. Employees are trained in their employment, to recognise hazardous conditions and how to prevent accidents. They are taught about the potential consequences of unsafe practices and how to avoid them. When employees understand the risks associated with work activities and know what to do to protect themselves and others, they become safer workers.
Lead by Example
Leading by example is one of the most important ways to foster a safe work environment. Employees will follow a manager’s or supervisor’s lead if they consistently display good safety practices. When a supervisor shows an employee how to behave safely, employees will understand that it’s OK to ask questions, make suggestions, or even suggest changes to improve workplace safety. This will help build trust among managers, supervisors and employees, which is key to creating a strong team spirit.
Have a Positive Reporting Process
Safety Culture is about creating a workplace where people are free to speak up without fear of reprisal. If you want to make sure that your organization is safe, it starts with making sure that everyone feels like speaking out is OK. To do this, you must establish a positive reporting process. This includes training employees on how to identify safety risks, how to report those risks, and what action(s) will be taken based on the reports. You can use our guide to help develop a positive reporting process.
Involve Employees
Safety culture isn’t just about policies and procedures; it’s also about people. And one way to start building a stronger culture is to include employees in the process. A good place to begin is with a safety committee comprised of representatives from all parts of the business. This group makes decisions on safety and about how and where health and safety budgets are allocated.
Another way to build strong employee support is to involve them in decision-making. This is often called consultation. When consultation takes place, you’re showing that employees’ input is valued. Further, you’re giving the employees a stake in the outcome.
DIGI CLIP mobile forms – What We Do?
DIGI CLIP mobile forms is an easy-to-use inexpensive safety checklist app and cloud-based software. DIGI CLIP is used across different industries to capture safety data and other information to help improve safety, compliance and operational efficiencies.
DIGI CLIP will allow you to remove paper reporting from your business – no more lost, late missing or illegible checklists. The DIGI CLIP mobile app allows for images, comments and digital signatures to be added to checklists from a phone or tablet.
Follow this link if you want to know more about what we do and how we can help or send us a message?
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