Ways professionals can influence positive safety culture.
Positive Safety Culture has now gained more attention in high-hazard industries, as more safety practitioners see the influence that workersâ attitudes and behaviors have on workplace incidents.
A worker’s attitude either positive or negative has a certain balance or unbalanced effect on the organization as a whole.
Safety Professionals can influence the habits and reactions of workers to positive safety culture in every industry.
This then has led to how safety professionals can influence the habits and reactions of workers to positive safety culture in every industry.
Below are ways in which professionals can influence everyone under their jurisdiction of work to respect and follow up with a positive safety culture.
1. No situation is first over safe work.
Every professional who aims towards ensuring his or her employees focus on positive safety culture must have it in their standard that no situation is precedent over a safe working environment. Not after or before work. If your employees are continuing to take safety risks despite your focus on making safety a priority, you may need to evaluate how effective the communication is between your companyâs management and its workforce. Because sometimes, the most innocent comment of urgency may influence workers to speed up, take shortcuts, and neglect existing safety practices.
2. All personnel are responsible for the same safety responsibility.
An organization that aims at keeping safe working must understand that accountability is key.
All personnel (regardless of position, job description, or time spent at the worksite) have an equal responsibility in keeping themselves and each other safe and holding themselves and each other accountable. There is no rank when it comes to obeying and following up to ascertain safety.
3. Safety system is informed by workers.
In a safety industry, the safety system must be informed by the workers, not an organogram that is designed and forced on the workers only by the management. Even if you feel you are an expert at positive safety culture, your workersâ input is critical to ensure it actually works to reduce incidents. Workers are likely to disregard official safe work procedures if they are difficult to understand, use technical vocabulary or jargon, or are in an entirely different language than what your workforce speaks!.
4. Development and improvement of existing safety system
Every organization has its existing safety system and procedure, for a positive safety culture to occur, there must be continuous development and improvement. This can be achieved through communication, trust and accountability, and proactive practices.
5. Every communication concerning safety must be open.
A positive safety culture uses open communication to operate optimally in a singular direction that is clear to all throughout the company. It does not require the workforce to conform to the differing expectations of each supervisor overseeing them on a particular shift. This ensures that employees are not confused due to the chains of communication (one person to another as this could affect the effectiveness of the message to be passed across).
For the above to be achieved, safety professionals must ensure communication, responsibility, and pro-activeness are always intact.
