3 Steps to Starting a Safety Culture
The 3 steps to safety culture are a keystone in cultural transformation. Safety cultures aren’t easy or obvious to create. However, professionals agree on these three major steps or goals that should be considered before moving forward. Focusing on these should give you a great foundation from which a safe and productive culture can reach your tall goals—sometimes they can garner results in months.
The 3 Steps to Safety Culture Are:
Consistency
A strong safety culture thrives on consistency. From management to entry-level, everyone should be included in the ever-demanding process of building a safety culture. One great way to promote a safer culture is to reward experienced staff when they spread awareness through examples. Another fantastic way is aligning your management’s perspective through leadership training.
If you’re in an industrial or construction setting, daily tailgate meetings or tool talks are a fantastic method of promoting practical discussions and signaling an emphasis on safety. Finding fresh & fascinating ideas every day might be difficult for anyone leading these gatherings. If you’d like tips and help with this process, try this toolbox talk article or this safety moments course for proven professional strategies and software for automated organization and documentation.
It’s also important to hold inclusive gatherings and meetings where employees of all levels can meet and discuss ideas. If your management is safety orientated but seldom speaks to the floor staff, then they may be on different pages when it comes to safety. This leads us to the next totem in a safety culture, relation.
Relation
It’s important that everyone in a company sees different perspectives. There’s a reason many companies hold team-building events and mutual break locations. This breaks the ice between different departments and allows for the sharing of ideas and experiences. The management can then use some of these examples in safety discussions in the future making every lesson all the more pertinent to the new employees.
Toolbox talks also help tremendously in spreading relatable stories. Allowing your staff to have a topical conversation about safety will give your experienced team members a place to share their wisdom.
Some companies even allow their highly experienced staff to select the courses that will provide training for the staff. The people at the ground level have a great perspective so naturally giving them teaching responsibilities has many benefits to safety and production for that matter. Not only do they know what can go wrong after hours in the field, but they can pick courses that resonate with them as opposed to dreary lessons with little to no practical knowledge.
Training
Training signals to everyone that you emphasize awareness, which is crucial to safety. The more your team knows, the less that can surprise them.
Choosing training courses is an art in itself. With so many to choose from, people can make the wrong choices, and a wrong choice reflects on a company and can undermine the safety culture. There are courses out there that have been proven popular through reviews and popularity.
To get a good idea of the impact of your training, simply ask your staff afterward how they felt about the video. You may find that your courses are dated, boring, or unrelatable. This can easily be the case and good to know if it is because it can easily be resolved, especially if your Learning Management System includes eLearning course subscription packages.
Popular and Highly Rated eLearning Safety Courses
SET Safety has been a partner of BIS for years, and many of their courses are popular and highly rated. The following are just some courses available at SET Safety.
- Fall Protection – Construction
- Personal Protective Equipment in Construction Environments
- Material Handling Practices for Construction
- First Aid in Construction Environments
- Health Hazards in Construction
- Electrical Safety for Construction: Power Lines and Lockout/Tagout
- Walking and Working Surfaces in Construction Environments
- Hand, Wrist & Finger Safety in Construction Environments
- Power Tool Safety for Construction
- Hand and Power Tool Safety Training
For a full list of SET Safety’s courses, visit their course library.
Conclusion
In order to start your safety culture on the right footing, you need to make sure every facet of the company understands your values to ensure they echo the same values to others. Then relations can spread those values. That way, when you implement training, the entire company understands why and they give teammates the time and stations required to complete the courses. After these values are instilled, safety will become a variable in every discussion and awareness will spread through the channels you’ve supplied. New employees will see clearly that their safety and wellbeing are respected and this trend should carry on to their actions.
