National Safety Month – Week One - Safety Engagement
One key to building a stronger safety culture is to first build levels of employee engagement. Studies have shown that engaged employees are five times less likely to get hurt on the job, seven times less likely to have a lost-time injury than all other categories of employees.1 Additionally, an engaged employee thinks and acts like an owner, and because of that they not only remain safer on the job, but they are also much more likely to help lead a safety culture.
Safety is all about relationships – no senior level initiatives, safety department compliance or culture improvement can have positive results if real working relationships are not established. Engagement of all employees make a significant difference in building and sustaining a safety culture:
- Peers are in the best position to observe behavior and re-enforce safe practices.
- Engaged employees help drive safety conversations.
- Engagement reduces untruths, friction, and drama. Engaged employees are more likely to present logistical facts to issues and/or incidents.
- Employee-run safety processes help increase commitment to safety as employees know and respect safety risks they face on the job.
- Engagement builds teamwork and creates a workplace where safety is everyone’s responsibility.
Sharing our experiences of recognizing mistakes and growing from them is powerful and significantly supports accountability and builds a culture of openness and growth. Communication is a key ingredient to reducing risk behavior, helping us to understand what happened and to analyze why the person was in the position to take the risk. Only employees truly know the at-risk behaviors occurring and the root causes behind un-safe actions and employees are in the best position to help implement corrective measure to ensure a safe workplace for everyone.
By creating a culture of engagement, we foster an atmosphere where safety is embraced as a core value and accepted as a responsibility of everyone.