As they say, “invest in tomorrow by practicing safety today.” While that may seem to be a very commonsensical statement, common sense is not always common.
With safety being a key component to most post-pandemic business continuity plans, there has been a re-focus on the culture of safety. Most organizations that have a safety-first mantra have put a strong focus on creating effective safety observation programs. According to Chuck Pettinger, Process Change Leader for Predictive Solutions Corp, these programs “bolster employee engagement and provide a great repository for leading indicator analysis.”
While the focus of any safety program is to incorporate best practices and learnings to ensure that your program is founded on foolproof methods, there is also a lot we can learn from their failures. Put another way, we can identify additional opportunities to further test and optimize.
How Multi-Faceted Safety Programs Can Effectively Drive a Strong Safety Culture
As far as high-impact, low-effort tasks are concerned, employers generally start off by auditing their existing safety-related practices and processes. Following this, they tweak existing ones and introduce net new ones. One practice that has been proven to drive results is that of safety observations, which are basically counts of the number of safe and unsafe actions or conditions in a work area for a given time. By documenting all safe and unsafe practices or behaviors, managers essentially use this field data to apply corrective actions and ultimately improve worker safety. On top of this, many decision-makers have implemented safety management software solutions designed to strengthen their workplace safety programs within their organization.
Chuck and his colleague Angelo Cianfrocco, summed it up best: “the re-focus on personal and workplace safety provides an opportunity for a long-lasting change in the way safety is viewed and can positively impact the organizational culture.”
Important Warnings from the Experts Themselves
Even with the most comprehensive plan, however, organizations can succumb to failure. This is where the true learnings begin. Our experts have used Pareto logic to identify seven types of errors to help you apply these learnings to your organization.
The Fastest Path to a Foolproof Safety Program
Get a head start by downloading our guide, Pandemic Preparedness: Propel Your Safety Culture Forward by Avoiding These 7 Mistakes, and learn how:
- A top-down, policing-focused and shame-and-blame approach will result in low employee morale and engagement.
- Inactions during the observation processes can foster a lack of trust between employees and management.
- Creating an effective feedback process turns your data into actions for improvement.
Click here to download your guide!
