The rally cry of being your sister’s and brother’s keeper is an old saw in the workplace safety world. We need to have each other’s back. Need to be interdependent, not independent. Go beyond the call of duty and actively care for one another. This is how you build trust, teamwork, engagement, empathy, values, culture and superior safety performance on the job.
The changing face of the U.S. workforce will challenge and test these long-held job safety beliefs. You can’t ignore 53.5 million workers, and that’s the number of so-called millennials (age 18 to 35) that were in the workforce in the first quarter of 2015. With the baby boomers (age 51 to 70) retiring, millennials now make up the largest percentage of the American workforce – 34 percent compared to the boomers’ 29 percent.