How to Build a Positive Safety Culture (Not Just Compliance)
As a business leader, you are responsible for embedding safety as a core business value rather than simply seeing it as a tick-box task, and this is an essential way to protect your employees and your business. The safety culture in an organisation is not always as positive as it could be, and this is often the case when an established business is taken over or when businesses merge.
If you believe that a more positive safety culture could be the key to taking your business forward, there are many simple steps you can take to embed better attitudes and practices and support your business growth on many levels. Let’s take a look at how to build a positive safety culture, whether you are building a business from the ground up, have concerns about your organisation or have inherited a business you want to grow. Challenging the status quo can be difficult, but changing the way that you and your team see safety can improve your business in many ways.
Changes From the Top Down
To build a positive safety culture or make systemic changes to the culture that already exists, the shift must come from leadership. Visible, accountable leadership invites open communication and encourages employees at all levels to take an active role in improving outcomes for themselves and their colleagues.
Transparency is vital when you are embedding culture and policy throughout an organisation, and ensuring that everyone feels valued and has a voice is an essential first step. Managers play a particularly vital role, modelling desired attitudes and behaviours, and their approach to safety briefings and procedures will set the tone across the company.
The Keys to Creating Systemic Change
To create an environment in which safety comes first, you will need to consider:
- How are concerns communicated in your workplace? To create an environment in which employees truly feel safe, they must be able to communicate any concerns they have openly, without fear of blame. You should ensure there is a simple, accessible communication network throughout your organisation, enabling the reporting of potential hazards and near misses as part of a strategic feedback system. You might consider introducing routine verbal consultations or digital logging systems that can be accessed easily and perhaps even anonymously to avoid the fear of repercussions.
- Resource allocation. Expecting employees to deliver good, safe results without the appropriate resources sets your organisation up to fail, and allocating adequate budgets to ensure no shortcuts are taken will lead to greater savings in the long run. Protecting your reputation is invaluable, and ensuring that you can deliver products or projects to a high level without compromising on safety will establish you as a leader in your field.
- Involvement from management. When you are making constitutional shifts in your organisation, your management team must be visible and leading from the ground. Leaders and managers should be demonstrating the high level of safety awareness expected from all team members and establishing safety protocols that involve all levels of personnel.
- Employee consultations. Employees should always be involved in the decision-making process around the risk assessments and safety decisions that affect them on a daily basis, and you will find that they bring a new level of awareness to the table. You should be consulting with employees across your organisation and have a clear funnel for their observations and suggestions to be addressed and taken further.
- Celebrating the wins. A positive culture involves everyone in celebrating the things that are being done well, and you should ensure that your organisation recognises success publicly. You should be prepared to celebrate employees and teams who are achieving good results and contributing to the positive safety culture in your organisation, and you may find it helps to introduce a system of acknowledgement and recognition for the small wins. This can demonstrate that you value your employees and can also help to motivate others within the organisation to appreciate the importance of a positive safety culture in which everyone plays their part.
- Ongoing training. To establish a positive safety culture, you will need to be committed to providing high-quality safety training for employees at all levels of your organisation, and this includes general and role-specific training. High-quality training courses can make all the difference to the way your team operates, and every member of staff can help to drive up expectations and standards when this is set up well. Training should be accessible to everyone, including temporary staff, and you should ensure that refresher courses and new training opportunities are established as part of your continuous professional development programme.
- Investigation protocol. Part of establishing a positive safety culture is recognising the need for continuous learning and improvement. The way incidents or near misses are investigated in your organisation can be very important in this process, and this should always be approached from a place of system change rather than placing blame on individuals or teams. Ensuring that your investigations, risk assessments and gap analyses are water-tight can help to provide peace of mind for your entire team and demonstrate the importance of safety as a core value in your organisation.
At ASM, we are committed to working with organisations of all sizes to drive up health and safety standards in Ireland, and we can help you to identify the improvements that could benefit your team. Our Safety Consultants and Safety Officers are experienced health and safety professionals who can use their expertise to create robust, reliable safety strategies throughout your organisation.
Extensive Health and Safety Training at ASM
ASM delivers high-quality Health and Safety training to organisations throughout Ireland, including specialist training for high-risk roles such as working at height and working in confined spaces. We can provide standardised courses such as Safe Pass and Basic First Aid, and we can usually tailor our training opportunities to suit your requirements. Give our experienced team a call today to find out more about working with us to create a positive safety culture at work.
