Culture is difficult to quantify yet remains a crucial aspect of workplace safety. Most facilities understand the need for specific safety rules and protocols, but company culture — the beliefs, values, and attitudes of the workforce — often goes underemphasized. That shouldn’t be the case.

OSHA says that creating a safety culture has the most significant impact on reducing incidents and injuries. A positive safety culture will go beyond health benefits, too. Your company’s safety culture, whether good or bad, will impact your workers in several ways.

In a positive safety culture, workers will prioritize safety in everything they do, instinctively going above and beyond industry standards in everyday tasks. In contrast, in a poor safety culture, safety is an afterthought or another requirement in a list of forgettable steps. Here’s how both cultures impact workers.

Workplace safety

The most obvious impact safety culture has on your employees is their safety itself. When these regulations and protocols take a backseat to considerations like productivity and convenience, injuries are more likely. Various tools and strategies can help prevent safety incidents, but none are as effective as a safety-first company culture.

For example, artificial intelligence (AI) can alert staff to potential hazards, but it doesn’t prevent them by itself. No matter how much information workers have, avoiding risks requires conscious, decisive action. If employees only address these hazards as they arise, they’ll keep appearing.

Positive safety culture is proactive, not reactive. When workers understand what they can do to prevent accidents and how it benefits them, they’ll take a more active role in safety. They’ll adjust their behavior and make suggestions to eliminate hazards instead of reacting to them, reducing the likelihood of an accident.

Productivity

Your company’s safety culture will also impact your employees’ productivity. A poor, purely reactive safety culture makes disruptions more likely, either through accidents or near-misses. These disruptions interrupt workflows, making it more challenging to maintain the same level of productivity throughout the workday.

Since accidents are more likely in a poor safety culture, you may encounter injured employees needing time off for medical leave. With workers out on leave, either the others must stretch themselves further to meet demand or you’ll have to hire temporary workers. Temporary hires will still take time to be as productive as experienced employees, so productivity will falter either way.

A strong safety culture, by contrast, will reduce incidents, ensuring a smoother workflow. Smoother operations will translate into increased productivity. When safety becomes second nature to employees, not something they need to stop and think about, their individual productivity will improve too.

Turnover

Finally, your workplace safety culture can affect employee turnover rates. Workers want to feel safe at work, especially in high-risk industries like manufacturing, and that’s precisely what a safety culture changes. A safety-first company culture will make employees feel more comfortable and a reactive one will make them feel less safe, regardless of actual injury rates.

If employees feel unsafe, they won’t likely stay for long. Cases where workers leave a position because of an unsafe environment have increased by almost 1,000% since 2010. Workers today have an increasingly low tolerance for a lack of a strong safety culture.

Given these trends, it’s safe to assume that better safety culture can help prevent worker turnover. Even if your actual injury rates are low, if workers don’t feel safe, you may have trouble retaining them.

A positive safety culture is invaluable

It’s difficult to overstate the importance of a positive safety culture. Safety must be a part of everything your company does, and it must be a primary consideration in every instance.

A safety-first workplace culture will do more than just prevent accidents. It will improve workers’ productivity and reduce employee turnover rates, too. If you can foster such a culture, you can improve your organization on virtually all fronts.