Safety Culture

HOW TO ENGAGE YOUR WORKFORCE

 Safety Culture: How to Engage your Workforce

“The safety culture of an organization is the product of individual and group values, attitudes,

perceptions, competencies and patterns of behavior that determine the commitment to and the

style and proficiency of, an organization’s health and safety management.”

CONTENTS
Establishing a Safety Culture

Changing the Safety Culture in Your Organization

Engaging Co-Workers in Health and Safety

Implementing a Positive Safety Culture in the Workplace

Sustainability and Corporate Social Responsibility

The Benefits of Creating a Positive Safety Culture

 Safety Culture: How to Engage your Workforce

Establishing a Safety Culture

Building and maintaining a durable, effective safety culture is a
conscious, intentional process that requires successfully
completing several steps. These include:

Articulate values: It's essential that top leadership state

and reinforce these values.

Establish expected behaviors: This includes setting policies

and procedures regarding how activities are to be conducted.
Establish expected ways of thinking: A systems thinking
approach is important for addressing the factors that lead to
safety incidents.

Invest resources: Resources include sufficient time,

correct equipment and internal staff support.

De-incentivize undesired behaviors: This means

enforcing consequences for inappropriate safety actions.

Incentivize desired behaviors: Incentives include

recognition, awards, incentives and promoting safety norms.
Promote continuous improvement.

If you're unsure how to get on top of your safety needs, start

with our free guide: 9 Steps to a Successful Safety Culture

9 Steps to a Successful Safety Culture

Organizations with a positive safety culture are based on

mutual trust. Employers and workers share the same
perception of the importance of safety and have confidence
in the efficacy of the preventive measures put in place.
 Safety Culture: How to Engage your Workforce

Changing the Safety

Culture in Your
Organization
Health and safety personnel often join a company with a
pre-established safety culture, be it good or bad. When the
safety culture of the organization is not particularly strong,
costly and life-threatening challenges can arise. Changing the
safety culture of an organization is not a simple task. However,
improving your safety culture is a key driver and vital
component of a sustainable and successful health and safety
program. To improve a workplace safety culture, steps must be
taken to alter the employees’ attitudes, behaviors and norms.

These steps include:

Commitment and communication

Leading by example

Developing and implementing a positive reporting process

Providing training

Involving employees

For a more in-depth understanding of each step and how to improve

employee attitudes, behaviors
and norms, read
 5 Practical Steps to Change
the Culture in your Organization.

5 Practical Steps to Change the Culture in your Organization

 Safety Culture: How to Engage your Workforce

Engaging Co-Workers
in Health and Safety
Once an organization has established an appropriate safety
culture, the next task is to make safety consistent and reliable.
Perhaps even more challenging than achieving a certain level of
safety performance is maintaining it over the long term. With so
many guidelines, statistics and opinions, it can be difficult to
determine the right solutions for any given work environment. In
most cases, there are no one-size-fits-all answers. Moreover,
workers can become disengaged when they feel unappreciated
or their suggestions are not taken seriously. This disengagement
is detrimental to sustaining safety performance and can result in
safety concerns becoming more prevalent.

This begs the question: how can we improve the process of

engaging our workforce when it comes to health and safety?
The following should be the basic considerations for any
organization:

Commitment from company leaders

Set up Health and Safety Committees within the business

Make safety personal

Reward positive behaviors

Monitor programs and track results

On our blog: Create a simple process to engage your
co-workers in health and safety

Engage your co-workers in health and safety

 Safety Culture: How to Engage your Workforce

Implementing a positive
Safety Culture in the
Workplace

Involvement of Management with Safety Culture

Creating a safe and hazard-free environment not only
contributes to the mental and physical well-being of workers but
also yields gains in productivity. Businesses with higher safety
and health standards are more competitive and sustainable. It
shouldn’t come as a shock that poor or non-existent
occupational safety and health (OSH) practices are costly. But
did you know that for every dollar invested in OSH, companies
can expect a return of $3?

Learn how senior management benefit from improving

OSH click below:
How senior management benefit from improving OSH
 Safety Culture: How to Engage your Workforce

Implementing a positive
Safety Culture in the
Workplace

Health & Safety Committees

Establishing a Health and Safety Committee is another
important step to improving an organization’s safety culture.
These committees can implement and spearhead initiatives that
are very effective in encouraging employee participation and
buy-in for workplace health and safety. This focus on employee
involvement in safety has become ever clearer in the recently
introduced ISO 45001 Occupational Health and Safety
Management System, which emphasizes employee participation
in safety decisions.

When setting up safety committees, be sure to follow these

steps:

Select a sponsor

Assign a chairperson

Provide meeting support

Carefully evaluate and select the members

Click below for more information on setting up safety

committees and areas to be discussed in committee meetings
How to set up effective health and safety committees
 Safety Culture: How to Engage your Workforce

Implementing a positive
Safety Culture in the
Workplace
All in all, these committees need to empower employees to make
health and safety decisions in relation to their workplace. This
collective participation has a huge positive impact on employee
morale, demonstrates leadership and further enhances the
collective safety culture.

Introducing Toolbox Talks

Toolbox talks are another way to strengthen a safety culture.
Toolbox talks are brief two-way discussions about safety that
focus on a single issue the workers may face. They can act as
frequent refreshers on safe work practices and reminders of the
hazards workers encounter on the job. Since they involve
worker input, they are also daily opportunities to improve the
safety culture and facilitate critical discussions on the ground
and on the front lines. Toolbox talks are another way for safety
personnel to encourage feedback, field new ideas and
demonstrate that employees are being heard by the safety
department as well as managers.
 Safety Culture: How to Engage your Workforce

Implementing a positive
Safety Culture in the
Workplace

Tips for running Successful Toolbox Talks

Although toolbox talks are meant to be informal and there
are no set rules of how best to conduct them, there are a
few things safety personnel can do to ensure that they get
more value from them. Here is a broad framework for
productive and helpful toolbox talks:

Keep them short - As they are informal, it is not necessary to

take up too much of people’s time. 15 minutes should be

sufficient.

Define the topic - Ensure that everyone has a good

understanding of the issue being discussed. Defining relevant
technical terms is a good start.

Make it relevant - Place the safety issue in the context of the

group’s daily tasks. Use real-life examples that will feel
familiar to the workers and make the issue feel more urgent
and personal.

Ask if anyone needs training - After your initial discussion, it

may become apparent that re-training may be necessary. By
opening this topic up to the floor, you can get a feel for gaps in
training that should be remedied.
 Safety Culture: How to Engage your Workforce

Implementing a positive
Safety Culture in the
Workplace

Help Your Employees Visualize Safety

Promoting a positive safety culture can be as easy as creating
visual aids to reinforce various safety topics. One of the causes
of workplace injuries is that employees are sometimes simply
unaware of the danger present on a job site. Posters can help
them become aware of specific hazards or promote safe
working procedures in general. The information conveyed can
be as specific as “How to Use a Fire Extinguisher” or as generic
as an overview of “Personal Protective Equipment." We have
designed many visual aids across a broad range of topics - click
below to download the posters that would be relevant and
useful for your organization:

Tips & Tricks

 Safety Culture: How to Engage your Workforce

Implementing a positive
Safety Culture in the
Workplace

Teach Responsibility with Job Safety Analysis

The importance of good training procedures in promoting safety
culture cannot be overemphasized. Organizations with strong
safety cultures have one thing in common: they use proven
ways of teaching responsibility. One of these is the Job Safety
Analysis (JSA).

Job Safety Analysis

A JSA is one of the many ways you can control occupational

hazards. The process is designed to identify potential
workplace safety hazards and provides employees with
recommendations on how to control them. Conducting a JSA
can include the following:

Identifying the basic steps involved in carrying out a particular job

or task

Identifying the actual and potential hazards associated with

each step, considering the entire job environment

Making safety recommendations for each step.

Three additional things to note about JSAs:

They should be done regularly by your organization
They should be conducted as a team project
They can promote a positive safety culture and greater worker
engagement
 Safety Culture: How to Engage your Workforce

Implementing a positive
Safety Culture in the
Workplace

Workplace Ergonomics
Providing workers with the equipment they need to do their work
safely, productively and comfortably is another way to improve
the safety culture of an organization. Poor workplace design and
inadequate equipment can cause workers to bend, twist, reach
and move their bodies in ways that can lead to muscle pain or
injury. Employees who sit at a computer for the majority of their
workday can also suffer from lower back pain and other
ergonomic issues if their workstations are poorly designed and
place additional stress on their bodies. Take a look at our blog
post on workplace ergonomics for more information.

Workplace Ergonomics
 Safety Culture: How to Engage your Workforce

Sustainability and Corporate

Social Responsibility
Sustainable practices generate more than just goodwill in an
organization. When the health and safety department
incorporates their initiatives into everyday practices, they’re
working to strengthen the culture of safety. It’s all about
motivating employees to do the right thing and to make it
second nature.

Take a look at our guide on 7 Facts Everyone Should Know

about Sustainability for more information.

7 Facts Everyone Should Know about Sustainability

 Safety Culture: How to Engage your Workforce

The Benefits of Creating

a Positive Safety Culture
In a workplace that has a positive safety culture, health and
safety is part of the everyday conversation. Management
actively listens to what the employees have to say about it and
takes their concerns seriously. Employees, in turn, feel
confident about reporting accidents and near misses, which
allows the company to continually improve its safety
performance.

To read more about near misses click the following link:

Near Miss Reporting: A Different Approach

 Safety Culture: How to Engage your Workforce

The Benefits of Creating

a Positive Safety Culture
A positive safety culture is not something that is easy to measure.
Although you can sometimes feel it when you’re on a job site where
safety is taken seriously, it’s intangible. What you can measure,
however, are the outcomes of a strong safety culture. Many of those
are quantifiable, and those that can’t be reduced to a number are
nevertheless noticeable. There are numerous benefits to creating a
positive safety culture, but here are some of the major ones:

Lower absenteeism – Safer, healthier, happier workers have

fewer reasons to call in sick or show up late

Lower cost on wages – No doubling up costs with sick

pay and overtime to fill in the gaps for injured or absent
workers

Happier workforce – Employees who feel safe and secure at

work are happier for it

Lower staff turnover – If the grass doesn’t seem greener

elsewhere, companies can save on costs associated with high
turnover, like recruiting, onboarding and training

Reduced risk of fines – Better health and safety practices

means a lower risk of an OSHA inspection gone bad or hefty
fines for noncompliance
Reduced insurance claims – Investing in safety reduces the
frequency of insurance claims, saving even more money in
the long run
Reduced insurance premiums – The better the health and
safety performance, the lower the premium
Improved productivity, quality and profitability – A positive
perception of the workplace and the company results in
greater customer loyalty, higher profitability, increased
productivity and lower staff turnover rates

More satisfied clients and stakeholders – Exemplary quality,

efficiency and staff relations speak for themselves and a
company’s reputation will always be a reflection of these