How do you get people to take the culture seriously?
Make sure rules and regulations are clearly defined, enforced and reinforced with rewards for those who meet/exceed expectations. Also, there must be consequences for breaking procedures or taking shortcuts. Whether it’s getting written up, or disciplined another way, there must be some skin in the game for not following procedure.
Employees who own their workplace safety tend to take training more seriously. When you understand where it fits in the big picture and why it matters, safety training is a huge part of that bigger picture.
From the standpoint of training, you have to make sure that your most seasoned employees are doing it correctly. Then invite them to help with training. Those employee trainers will take things more seriously, which will communicate to new employees that the safety culture is important. It tends to feed on itself.
By integrating experienced employees in that way, new hires start from the ground up doing things the way they should be done.
How can you improve your safety culture?
One thing good safety cultures do is take a lot of time looking at near-misses, things that could have been accidents. Record them. Talk about them. Even though nothing happened and nobody was hurt, what could have happened would have been catastrophic.
Learn from those near-misses. First, take note of what could have happened and what really happened. A good safety culture allows you to talk about those things.
When near-misses happen in a closed safety culture, employees want to hide them. They are concerned about something bad happening to them, so they don’t have those proactive discussions.
When learning from accidents or near-misses, it’s important to look at why the systems failed instead of finding one person to blame. We have a tendency to assign blame when things aren’t right instead of taking an objective look at the system. It happened, so determine how you can prevent it from ever happening again. When employees see how you conduct these accident investigations as part of a good safety culture, they will want to integrate themselves into the process because they don’t see it as a fault-finding mission where someone is going to be fired.
Another aspect of successful safety cultures is their focus on encouragement and reward. It could be as simple as a pat on the back. It could be high marks in a performance appraisal, money or a gift card. Whatever it is, you are recognizing good safety practices.
A good safety culture also helps you identify hidden costs. There are the obvious costs of worker injury, but you also have overtime for other employees, replacing the worker and the cost associated with retraining. There are so many reasons to protect your work force and ingrain that culture.
Jonathan Theders, CPIA, is president of Clark-Theders Insurance Agency Inc. Reach him at (513) 779-2800 or [email protected].
