What is Safety Culture?
Safety culture isn't simply organisational compliance with health and safety policies. It's also employee attitudes toward policies. Are your staff invested in workplace safety? Are you?
Safety culture is "the set of core values and behaviours making safety a priority." Post-pandemic, remote working increases, UK lone worker numbers grew, and terror threats increased; organisational duty of care obligations never more critical.
Contract Accreditors CHAS state: "Safety culture demonstrates business-wide safety ownership at all levels, defines health and safety business representation, and workplace attitude toward it."
What is Positive Safety Culture?
Positive safety culture relies on organisational and people mindset. How do values and beliefs influence daily health and safety plan implementation? How can staff at all levels proactively take ownership of their own safety and others'? How focused is your organisation on employee duty of care fulfillment?
"Building beneficial safety culture has immeasurable value to business. Good safety culture and safety performance prevent injury, reduce costs and improve industry reputation."
Six Steps Toward Positive Safety Culture
Creating positive safety culture means changing opinions and ensuring staff feel comfortable protecting their health and safety at work. Organisations must go beyond achieving duty of care to your people. Staff should see protecting their safety as valuable working life parts, whether their environments are high, medium or low risk.
1. Senior Management Should Set Standards
Positive safety culture is top-down. Senior Management should treat safety culture and health and safety procedures seriously, stressing their importance to employee physical and mental wellbeing. Management must be on board; without this, employees won't take policies seriously, and procedures prove ineffective. Management should set standards and lead by example implementing positive safety culture and achieving right duty of care. Health and safety policies should be universal, with everyone equally responsible. Jackie Stewart states: "It takes leadership improving safety."
2. Carry Out Effective Training
Health and safety training makes employees 25% more likely prepared for workplace emergencies. Effective training covers workplace accidents and injuries, workplace violence and cybersecurity threats. Workshops, practice drills and online training are fantastic for engaging people adopting positive safety culture and ensuring people duty of care. Make training fun by incorporating team building activities, quizzes, games and prizes.
3. Review and Gain Feedback on Your Safety Culture
Having employees on board is vital for positive safety culture. Employees should say what your safety culture looks like and determine what duty of care means to them. "The key protecting employees is understanding WHY accidents or injuries happen. Start by examining your processes." Engage teams asking questions: Which policies work? Which don't? What current policy issues exist? How can these improve? How encourage employees toward positive safety culture and duty of care stances? Schedule time continuously reviewing safety policies. This process helps best target positive safety culture development direction and address core policy problems.
4. Make Improvements and Set Goals
Improve health and safety policies based on gathered employee feedback. Set time-framed goals and share improvement plans with employees, celebrating milestone recognition. This keeps everyone motivated achieving positive safety culture and ensuring organisation duty of care obligations are met.
5. Reward Positive Safety Culture Practice
Those failing to follow health and safety policies face discipline. Therefore, safety culture carries negative connotations—something done or facing repercussions.
"Safety processes become something teams are wary of. Teams fear doing something wrong and worry communicating problems to management. This results in more accidents, injuries and sick days. Plus, it negatively impacts the bottom line and productivity."
Why not shift this negative safety culture approach by rewarding employees championing health and safety policy? This helps shed positive light on organisational safety culture. Once you've established positive safety culture and duty of care goals, celebrate employees uplifting policy. Consider giving 'health and safety star of the month' awards, rewarding them with vouchers, company activities or internal newsletter thanks. This sets precedent for others.
"Encourage and reward employees reporting safety issues. Implement effective reporting systems so teams feel confident they've reported accidents rightly and corrective action was taken." Begin surrounding your new safety culture with positive attitudes and mindsets.
6. Let Software Support You
"Do you have effective reporting systems? How does your team communicate about safety?"
A duty of care, communications and operational risk management platform perfectly enables employee training and health and safety policy education. Effective staff workplace health and safety compliance requires communication. Make training easier and ensure all staff have everything needed by hosting policies and plans on one platform using precision document sharing. Use broadcast communications or enterprise messaging sending health and safety updates to your people. Apply location intelligence tailoring messages to suit work site and location. Use critical event management features keeping your people protected and communicated with during crises. "Ongoing health and safety policy education is essential serving as change reminders and importance."
Takeaways
Track24 provides guidance promoting positive organisational safety culture and ensuring duty of care. Positive safety culture results in employee satisfaction, safety and wellbeing, reduces injury and costs and increases industry credibility. Discover how AtlasNXT helps your organisation achieve health and safety and duty of care goals: https://atlasnxt.com
