The best safety cultures come when everyone involved takes ownership and is empowered to develop, communicate and use the safest work practices. The proverbial “winning hearts and minds” is a concept that is supposed to make team members want to be safe. But, how does someone win hearts and minds?
Mobile EHS software is improving workplace health and safety programs by disseminating critical tasks – like incident reporting – and making EHS a part of everyone’s job. Now every employee has the ability to feed real-time information on workplace risks directly into a centralized location.
Most all of us have been around a boss or supervisor who isn’t very likeable or open to feedback. He or she is often avoided, and people may even fear approaching that boss with a safety-related concern or idea for improvement. Workers who perceive their bosses as open believe their leader really listens to their ideas and acts upon them when appropriate — or at the very least, gives their ideas a fair shake.
Establishing a safe workplace requires more than PPE and policy. Training and performance management are critical, but only go so far, and all the visual cues, scrolling monitors and pithy slogans in the world won’t make your workplace sustainably safe and healthy.
With more experience traveling the real world seeing safety programs in action (or inaction) I realized that words matter. They not only communicate, but they can shape the very approach you take to your safety programming. They can get you stuck or they can liberate your safety culture.
Signage is often posted to make everyone aware of a hazard, but when signage is overwhelming, unclear, vague, improperly placed or poorly maintained it’s true purpose can become minimized or defeated.
Building an organization-wide safety culture is important — making safety a priority for everyone keeps workers safe and spares your organization the consequences of injuries and illnesses. Here are five tips that can help you develop a total safety culture that’s engaging and effective.
Most employees, whatever place they occupy on the org chart, can’t make everyone else do what they want just because they said so. Even if they could, influence works much better than force.
The EPA established a final rule on June 13, 2016 (effective compliance date January 1, 2018) to revise reporting requirements under section 311 and 312 of the Emergency Planning and Community Right-to-Know Act.1
Jill James, Vivid Learning Systems’ resident safety consultant and former OSHA safety investigator, fills us in on how a positive relationship between supervisors and employees can decrease the number of work-related accidents.
