How To Create a Culture of Safety
Feb 20, 2020
How To Create a Culture of Safety.
For many of us, it is a way of life. For safety leadership, a world-class culture consists of the passions we share, beliefs we hold dear and the desire for a safe, inclusive work environment where all can thrive.
Safety leadership lives in integrity by a stand to send each employee back home safely at the end of the day. Together, we can make the impossible possible. A safety culture goes hand in hand with profitability. When a company leads with integrity, the revenues will flow.
You can't always see a world-class safety culture, but you can sure feel it.
In this kind of safety culture, employees feel free to express themselves without fear. Ideas are heard and everyone works for the common goal.
Are you looking to turn your organizational culture into an inclusive culture of safety? First, determine the gap between where your safety training is as a company and where you would like it to be.
Do you have a safety process in place to follow towards success? Use the Five Pillars of Safety as a roadmap.
The Five Pillars of Safety include:
- Management, Leadership, and Commitment
- Employee Involvement and Ownership
- Data-based Decision-Making and System-based Root Cause
- Going Beyond Compliance
- System Integration with Business Functions
Remember, the functions of safety and business must work in tandem. Good safety practice is good business.
Read the source article at EHS Today
Safety culture is the shared beliefs, experiences, attitudes and passions of a group of people. A world-class safety culture in a work environment is a way of life and a belief to send all employees safely back home every day—and in the process, help the company make money, showing to senior executives that safety makes good business sense. It is an outstanding safety culture that proactively manages employee and business safety decision-making. It is an environment that allows management and employees to make decisions based on what is the right thing to do both for safety and running the business. If you do the right thing, money will flow. Business will run profitably.
World-class safety is like beauty. It is difficult to describe but you know it when you see it. At one of the printing plants with which I was associated, the ventilation system broke down in the ink room. Rather than continue to run the ink mixing operation that created a lot of vapors, the GM shut down the printing operation until the ventilation system was fixed. That is a world-class safety culture.
At another plant, the company CEO walked into the manufacturing operation that had a safety shoe requirement in place. An employee came to the CEO and asked if he had safety shoes. He said, “No.” The employee said, “Then you can’t be in the plant until you have safety shoes on.” The CEO was stunned but he went and bought new safety shoes before entering the manufacturing operation. Companies with world-class safety culture empower their employees to do the right thing without fear.
