Workplace Safety: Does Your Company Have a Positive Safety Culture?

Safety is a lifestyle. To lower the chances of accidents, safe procedures should become part of everybody’s everyday routine. This means building a positive safety culture.

Getting to that place takes some work. It’s not enough to create the right safety policies. You need more. Specifically, you need buy in from every level of the company.

Here are some tips to make sure your company has a positive safety culture:

Put Safety First

Managers need to juggle many goals at once. Minimizing expenses. Optimizing output. Maximizing profit. A positive safety culture puts everyone’s physical wellbeing above these other concerns.

Done right, these seemingly separate objectives don’t have to work in opposition to each other. Safety isn’t the enemy of productivity. In fact, having a safe workplace guarantees the highest possible long-term output.

Think about it. A positive safety culture actually feeds a healthy production schedule. You minimize the risk that an accident will cause a prolonged shutdown. At the same time, your workers have the confidence they need to operate at the highest possible speed.

Follow Words with Action

An incomplete safety culture will produce a lot of correspondence. Emails. Memos. Posted signs. A large number of words will be dedicated to the topic of safety. But then, when it comes to action, operations will fall short of the stated safety goals.

Don’t stumble into this trap. Don’t mistake conversation for accomplishment. To cultivate a positive safety culture, directives should serve to create actionable procedures. Make sure your workers comply with protocols and follow up your decisions with real-world measures.

Emphasize Training Rather Than Punishment

You need to ensure compliance to build a positive safety culture. However, that shouldn’t take the form of a “gotcha” philosophy. Instead, encourage the right kinds of behaviors rather than seeking to punish the occasional missteps.

In other words, don’t look to penalize workers who accidently step outside the protocols. Instead, teach them the proper way to manage their daily tasks in a safe environment. Your emphasis should be on continual training.

You want to make your employees safer over time, not create an atmosphere of fear. When you dwell on punishment, you encourage employees to cover up infractions. Ultimately, this undermines your overall goal of maximum compliance.

Encourage Constant Improvement

Your safety procedures shouldn’t stay static. Instead, you should constantly review them. At the same time, seek out more obscure dangers and eliminate them as much as possible.

Meanwhile, new technologies, new techniques, and new products can come along to alter your operations. Safety conversations should accompany every step of your evolving business.

Build Strong Lines of Communication

Strong safety habits require a conversation. You need to communicate policies and points of emphasis. At the same time, your workers should let you know about any potential safety hazards they discover in their day-to-day operations.

After all, your employees live the safety procedures on a routine basis. They provide the best source of feedback about the effectiveness of your protocols. In addition, they hold the ultimate responsibility for maintaining compliance over time. As such, include them in the process at every stage.

A positive safety culture begins with the right employees. A strong recruiting firm, like SmartTalent, can locate the kind of conscientious workers you need to guarantee the highest level of compliance.

Contact SmartTalent today to find the team members you need to take your business to the next level.