If a workplace is to be successful at preventing accidents and injuries, it is often necessary to change an organization’s culture. Changing an organization’s attitude toward safety can be challenging, and effective, lasting change generally only happens when senior management makes an absolute commitment to adopting safety as a top priority. Unfortunately, many companies only commit to a safety culture when compelling evidence is presented that the accident rate is costing the company a large sum of money.

It’s best to change the workplace culture to one of safety before the numbers get out of hand. Instead of wasting company money paying for unnecessary accidents, it’s possible to spend far less in the short run and save far more in the long run by creating a safety culture. Change will come about only when managers, departments, employees whose behavior contributes to safety goals are trained properly and rewarded for their efforts. Likewise, there should also be immediate and meaningful consequences applied when careless behavior or negligence causes accident or injury. In other words, the best way to create a safety culture is to make it clear that workers and others will be rewarded for good deeds and punished for carelessness.

Every workplace has its own unique “culture,” so there is no specific set of standards for a proper safety culture. However, there are some characteristics that identify a safety culture, and all workplaces can aspire to these.

In a safety culture:

• Workers observe and correct hazards. Once a worker identifies a hazard, the correction is made and reported. This documentation, of course, serves to facilitate the company’s ongoing safety program by identifying potential or actual hazards and allowing for their correction.

• Workers always wear all appropriate protective equipment. They know which PPE to use for which task, how to use the appropriate equipment to do the task, how to maintain their PPE, and when to dispose of it safely.
  

• Workers have an active safety committee, and committee meetings are regularly scheduled and well-attended. The committee’s agenda is clear, with goals and performance expectations presented on at least an annual basis. The committee offers regular training in basic safety methods, and also specialized in-service training to deal with safety issues specific to the entity, a department or a program.

• Differing motivations require that the process of introducing a safety culture to a workplace will require that everyone address an array of motivations. Management motivation will be to see a reduction in the cost of insurance, while workers will want to feel safer and less likely to be injured, as well as to feel valued for their contributions when they identify and correct hazards.

Two of the best and most successful ways to embed safety into the workplace culture are to have a lead person for safety (safety coordinator) with authority to enforce safety standards and to have an active safety committee to conduct periodic reviews and training.

To effectively establish a safety culture at your workplace, it is necessary for all workers and supervisors to be involved and feel like a valuable cog in the safety machine.

Tags: Safety, safety culture, Worker Training, workplace safety

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This entry was posted on Friday, June 5th, 2009 at 6:44 am and is filed under Due Diligence, OHS, Safety. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.