Fostering a Culture of Safe Work Practices
Do you have to remind employees to engage in safe work practices at the worksite? Employees can tend to feel like they are exempt from practicing a strong sense of safety.
They feel like they are the exception or that they’re smart enough to never let anything happen, and start taking shortcuts.
And inevitably, this is where accidents start to happen.
If the severity of an accident is small enough, the employee returns to normal with a better understanding of what happens when safety is ignored. In other cases, there will be no returning to normal.
And that’s what implementing safe work practices is about – making sure employees return home to their families in the same condition they left in.
It Doesn’t Take Much
According to ReliablePlant, some small, simple changes can make all the difference. These include Visual Aids, Safety Quizzes, and asking the employees themselves how you can help them be more safety conscious.
Once some small steps have been taken, now it’s time to up the ante by strengthening your safety culture as a whole. As discussed in the linked article, implementing changes on this front will have long lasting, positive effects on the well-being of your employees.
You might want to look at performing a safety audit to see where improvements can be made.
Having toolbox talks at the start of the day can set the tone for a more safety conscious day.
And investigating your PPE, making sure it’s doing its job, or seeing how you might be able to improve upon it can also be worth looking at.
The important thing about safety is that it only takes one accident for the point to be driven home on its importance, and it’s often too late by the time that happens.
Another effective strategy is Optimizing Your Behaviour-Based Safety Program, where your employees can fill out cards (anonymously if you wish), where they identify any potential safety risks on the job.
This puts the power in their hands, and gives you tangible data to work from to further improve the safety work practices at the workplace.
There are numerous strategies and resources available to you to improve the safety of your workers. Some simple, some more involved.
And as technology continues to improve, safety transparency and safe work practices will continue to improve ensuring the safety of your workers.
A safe workplace never occurs by accident!
