Improving your company’s safety culture can be a long and difficult journey but it is an important one for the sake of your company’s growth and development. Having worker’s compensation insurance from a site like https://www.icwgroup.com/workers-compensation/ to make sure everyone is covered should anything go wrong is a great start, but we can be doing more. Having a smart safety culture implemented in your business strategy will help you achieve your goals more effectively. Improper safety procedures can lead to big issues down the line for any company in any market. This is why today we are going to talk about how to strengthen the safety culture in the workplace.
Communication
Communication is at the heart of any business; efficient communication will be important in any action you take with your company and safety culture is no different. A great way to improve safety communication positively is to hold weekly or monthly safety talks. Let your employees air out how they feel safety procedures are being used or how they might be improved. Our employees often best understand the safety issues because they are on the front lines every day and could notice somethings you might miss.
In addition, make sure you are keeping all your staff updated with the current regulations in engaging ways. Safety regulations can end up being a bit dry to talk about in abstraction so setting up situations your employees can engage in might improve retention of the issues the regulations are trying to address. Also, make it easy for workers to access safety policies if they are unsure about any of them going forward. This will improve compliance because the information will be easy to access.
Training
Providing dedicated training is critical to help employees understand what is expected of them when carrying out their work duties, regarding health and safety. Trained employees are more likely to embrace a safety culture because they have been trained to be aware of the hazards that the workplace poses. This training can improve your employee’s ability to self-regulate be because of the increased levels of conscientiousness among a team that understands the risks.
During training, if you want to enforce better health and safety regulations then you need to lead by example. Most workers will not see the benefit of improved safety if you are not demonstrating the benefits yourself.
Some businesses are legally required to have certain types of health and safety training in place. For example, retirement home staff who carry and move residents must be trained in manual handling. Meanwhile, a swimming instructor may have to take Cpr Training courses located in North York. It is important that you understand what training is required of your business and make sure it is implemented.
Make sure that at every avenue you are echoing the sentiments of your safety regulations. This will promote a positive culture of compliance with safety regulations.
Develop Positive Reporting Processes
Rewarding employees who report safety hazards is a great idea. Nothing motivates a team than tangible rewards give for hard work. An intelligent safety culture will be propelled by rewards for going out of their way to improve the current processes that your company employs for the safety of their workers. Their reports could also be used to help inform future regulation development because they will have keen insight into the potential harm that weak health and safety regulations could bring about.
Ensuring that you have a trained and active JHSC will help regulate your company’s safety culture. Some companies have been guilty of training JHSCs and not allowing them to focus on their duties to improve safety culture, so do not be like them because there only needs to be one serious fault and your safety culture collapses quickly.
Bring in Health and Safety Improvements
You cannot leave all of the stress of health and safety onto the employees there must be constant change in a workplace to ensure that safe practices are being used within the building. These changes can be to use better technology to detect errors in equipment, putting up signs, having training sessions for the staff. Anything is better than leaving their safety all to chance. You could contact a health and safety audit if you’re having trouble deciding what to do or if you want someone to notice the hazards for you. They may be able to advise you without the hassle of an enforcement action.
Some businesses have recognized that they need to put more focus on the health of employees, for example, the spread of viruses within the building. This is not only bad for the employees but also for the business because you will be working with substantially fewer people in a given period, and if it is something like the flu that is spreading this can put some members of staff out for weeks. Therefore, utilizing things like temperature screening clock in stations (https://kiosk.com/market-solutions/temperature-screening/), which scans their face instead of them having to physically scan in from a fingerprint, card, or anything else. It also, logs that they are in the building creating an extra level of safety that is needed to strengthen a workforce.
In summary, building a positive safety culture can be challenging when you are working from the ground up. But if you employ the correct strategies and value your employee’s input you will make positive strides in keeping everyone happy and healthy. Communication, training, and safety are critical to supporting workers when they are meeting new kinds of threats in their working environment each day. So as business owners and managers we owe them to do our best.
