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Safety culture within any organisation is an important aspect to evaluate and review. An organisation's culture will influence human behaviour and performance at work. A poor safety culture contributes to incidents and can have a huge influence on safety outcomes within your safety management system.
Many organisations will focus on safety culture as a long-term business goal. However, it can be tricky to decide what safety activities to focus on to make improvements. Here are five ways to help move your safety culture in the right direction.
The first way to improve culture is simple: speak to people across the organisation. Learn what frustrations they have and listen to ways they suggest improving safety. By speaking directly to the workforce, you win over hearts and minds by taking an active interest in their working life and the challenges they face.
Questions you might want to ask could include: what is the most hazardous thing you work on? How can we improve our safety practices to support you? What safety aspect do you think is not working in our organisation?
Once you have gauged a pattern of opportunities to improve, look to draft these into a safety plan, so there is structure and resources can be allocated for you to concentrate on. Provide regular updates to the workforce so they know they were listened to. This demonstrates that the business has a core focus on looking after the health, safety and welfare of their people.
A similar step is to visit the ‘shop floor’ and see what’s going on. There may be circumstances that you are not aware of, or you may learn of a new work practice or technique that you would like to implement across the whole organisation.
A good starting point is to challenge yourself with the following questions: what risks have I observed, how is the current process managing this; and what’s missing that needs to be addressed?
After a few visits, you will likely notice some trends appearing, that you can look to prioritise. Setting these as actions to implement and monitor throughout the year will put you in a good stance to help shift that culture into being more proactive and engaged in safety. Actions can also be set on different people so more people are accountable which will remind everyone that safety remains everyone’s responsibility.
A longer-term measure but one equally important, is bringing senior management on board to improve health and safety. You want the C-suite to show their leadership and commitment through a genuine interest in safety. There will be barriers to overcome like budget, time and effort however, with persistence and putting yourself in their shoes, you can win over the majority of professionals.
Start to think about how you can better strategise your EHS plans to engage the C-suite. How are your Health and safety goals aligned to company values and business growth? How much budget should be allocated and what does the return on investment look like? Which stakeholders will see a focus on health and safety as a positive move and add a positive PR image?
Thinking this way will increase your chances of success when selling a safety idea to the C-suite. You also have the added bonus that you demonstrate extra value to the business, protecting your role and resources. Once you see the C-suite onboard, for continuous improvement, look at taking a holistic view of business risk so that you can integrate health and safety further into work practices
You cannot improve the safety culture alone. This is why it’s important to bring on board as many people as you can across the organisation to share your passion and focus on safety improvement. Looking at training, development and education is the next step to shift how the organisation thinks about health and safety.
The first challenge here will be to complete a training needs analysis for the organisation. Have you got the right type and format of training in place to improve staff’s health and safety understanding? Are you using the right providers for your organisation? Do you need to think about extra training for certain roles in the organisation or additional refreshers that might help improve health and safety learning?
These questions will allow you to check that competence improves across the workforce increasing engagement with safety. But the awareness doesn’t end with a training certificate. Couple competence with Health and safety messaging too so that a constant focus on safety remains. A cultural shift is more effective when there is an emphasis on continual communication and consultation with the workforce.
The last step to look at involves starting from the safety basics. As safety professionals, we are constantly thinking about risks and processes to keep both the organisation and people safe. Starting with reviewing common risks the organisation faces, alongside how we are managing them, will help structure the right conversations and re-evaluate whether we are truly doing enough about them.
Take a general overview first, what is your legal and risk register telling you?
How effective are your risk assessments and associated processes? How closely are safe systems of work being followed? How are people starting to think about control measures?
By getting the basics right first, you can then focus on more proactive activities within safety to move the culture forward. If everyone has a better understanding of the risk assessment process and the risk attitude of the organisation, we can begin to hand the reins over to operational teams to be self-sustaining rather than excessively relying on a safety professional.
These simple yet effective points can be used to help make a step change toward improving your organisation’s safety culture. For those organisations that employ a health and safety team or competent person, they are likely focussing on these points already so it would be imperative to continue supporting these actions if you have plans to improve safety culture.
These points should also be viewed as a starting point. Look to benchmark yourselves against these moving forwards to understand what interventions are working and what needs more work. We wish you the best in your cultural efforts.
If you would like to see how HandsHQ can help improve your training and RAMS processes, please speak to a member of our team.
