It’s well-known that organizations with best-in-class safety records have “safety cultures” that encourage safety.

By “safety culture,” we mean that everyone—management at all levels, front-line employees, contractors you regularly use, etc.—not only understands the personal and business imperative to be safe at work but has internalized that appreciation in such a way that it positively affects their safety behaviour.

In safety cultures, safety is always top of mind, and the thought of taking safety shortcuts is readily dismissed because to do so would be to violate the cultural “norms” of the organization. That’s what companies with genuine safety cultures have achieved—being unsafe is “uncool” in their organizations.

You don’t need an organizational (i.e., industrial, occupational) psychologist to create such a culture. Much of it is common sense—you train people right and reinforce the right behaviour.

Here are three basic but vital steps you can take that will get you a long way along the road toward having a genuine safety culture that results in less incidents and costs.

1. Train…and then train some more.

Before employees begin work, they should of course be adequately trained on the policies and procedures they must follow to adhere to internal standards and external regulations. However, the training should be much more than that—it should educate employees on concepts such as:

• The role of unsafe behaviour in workplace incidents. The majority of occupational accidents involve some element of human mistake. Everyone in your organization should realize that it only takes one weak link in safety for a disaster to occur, and that any one person could be that weak link. They should leave initial safety training with the motivation to do everything possible not to be that person.
• The reality that one individual’s unsafe behaviour puts co-workers and the pubic in danger. Ask personnel: How would you feel if your mistake cost someone else severely? Livelihoods—not to mention actual lives—are at stake. The goal is to get personnel to see that unsafe behaviour for the sake of expediency is actually selfish behaviour.
• How to proactively identify and report hazards. It should be clear to personnel that their safety responsibilities include more than “following the book” and achieving compliance with internal and regulatory requirements. Everyone in your organization should think of themselves as safety “stewards,” and they should be encouraged to keep their eyes open for hazards and unsafe practices, no matter what they are or where they occur, and to report them for correction.

This initial training should be followed up with regular reinforcement training to keep safety at the forefront of everyone's minds.

2.  Provide the tools and channels for safety monitoring and reporting.

Instilling the right attitude in personnel is only the beginning. There have to be organizational systems in place to consistently facilitate and encourage safety. Otherwise, their best intentions will be hindered. Getting personnel to truly buy-in to being safe and then not giving them the safety tools and processes they need to be safe  is a fundamental undermining of any safety training you’ve done.

An example of a safety tool is The Checker inspection system. Equipment and vehicle inspections, facility safety audits, worksite hazard assessments, etc. are unarguably a vital element of safety, and The Checker checklist books and/or software can ensure accountability and accuracy in inspections, while guiding users through the process and streamlining the process of reporting safety issues.

3. Consistently reward safe behaviour and penalize unsafe behaviour.

A common-sense “psychological” observation is that people are motivated by their own self-interest. Even with the best safety training, the right tools, and an organization-wide appreciation of safety’s importance, safe behaviour must be recognized and rewarded.

Conversely, unsafe behaviour must be addressed with clear consequences.

Takeaway

These steps will help create a culture where personnel:

• Want to be safe.
• Understand the personal diligence necessary to be safe.
• Have the means to be safe.
• Know safe behaviour is valued by the organization.
• Know unsafe behaviour won’t be tolerated.

This culture in turn will lead to reductions in a host of costs and risks, while also increasing productivity.

For more about the relationship between safety and profitability, please download our free whitepaper, “The Cost of Unsafe Business.”

Image courtesy of b3d, Creative Commons.