Introduction
Building a strong workplace safety culture is about more than just having the right health and safety program in place. It’s about putting it into action every day and shaping how your team sees its role in maintaining a safe workplace. By taking steps to promote awareness, accountability, and action, you can go beyond checking boxes for compliance to creating a true safety culture.
What Is Workplace Safety Culture?
The safety culture at your workplace encompasses the shared behaviors and expectations that guide safety decisions across your organization. It’s everything from how supervisors respond to employee concerns to how workers identify and report hazards onsite. It’s about making sure that safety receives the same attention as production and quality day in and day out.
A strong safety culture is built on both practical systems and attitude. Your business must have the processes in place to manage inspections, incidents, training, corrective actions, and more, along with ensuring that your team is on the same page when it comes to roles, expectations, and behavior related to those processes.
How Safety Culture Supports OSHA Compliance
Safety culture plays a key role in supporting compliant workplaces. It reinforces the systems your business has in place by enabling your team to make the best possible use of them. OSHA’s recommended practices highlight many key aspects of workplace safety culture, including management leadership and worker participation. It’s these details that make daily follow-through on written health and safety programs possible.
Incident reporting is one of the clearest ties between safety culture and OSHA reporting. You want every member of your team to feel that they can report incidents without fear of any retaliation. Not only is it mandatory to keep up with OSHA 300 incident logs, but it is essential to implement meaningful corrective action and maintain a safer workplace. With a strong safety culture, workers will have the confidence they need to report incidents and near-misses without fear of reprisal.
How to Build a Safety Culture at Your Workplace
Building a real safety culture isn’t just about making an announcement and writing down your commitment. It requires implementing repeatable systems that encourage participation, assign responsibility, measure progress, and ensure that safety workflows are completed from start to finish. By addressing these areas, you can create an effective workplace safety culture that leads to real improvements.
Encouraging Worker Participation in Safety
Safety culture can’t exist without active worker participation. Employees are in the best possible position to understand the real hazards related to their roles, tasks, and work sites. It’s your operators, maintenance technicians, and other workers who will be the first to see when changing conditions aren’t accurately reflected in formal procedures, when shortcuts start appearing, and when equipment issues and layout problems pose risks.
To take advantage of these valuable insights, organizations must ensure that communication is trusted and straightforward. You want systems in place to allow employees to quickly and easily report hazards, near-misses, unsafe behaviors, and other observations. Workers must also know that they can do so without any fear of retaliation. Implementing feedback into the reporting process will let employees know that their concerns are being heard and encourage further participation.
Getting Proactive With Leading Indicators
Many aspects of compliance focus on how your team reacts to incidents after the fact. While this process can provide valuable insights to guide corrective actions, it only takes place after potential injuries have occurred. In addition to these lagging indicators, focusing on leading indicators that highlight risks before they lead to incidents can dramatically improve workplace safety.
You can foster a proactive safety culture by integrating leading indicators into your safety programs. Putting systems in place for workers to report behavior-based safety observations and near-misses can shift how they see their day-to-day work. It makes workers more aware of potentially unsafe behaviors and conditions and provides a clear path forward for them to take action. Instead of reacting after the fact, you can have your team focused on preventing incidents in the first place.
Keeping Training Aligned With Real Worksite Conditions
Employee training is a fundamental aspect of workplace safety. However, it’s all too easy for businesses to assume that workers are fine once they’ve gone through their onboarding training. In reality, additional training is a routine requirement to keep workers safe, whether recurring training to reinforce what they know or new information required to align with changing workplace conditions.
Creating a strong safety culture means keeping your team prepared for the actual hazards they face. Changes in worksites, roles, tasks, procedures, equipment, and chemicals often require specific training to equip workers with the knowledge they need. It’s not enough to assume that employees know what they’re doing. Tracking employee training based on roles and facilities keeps requirements aligned with real worksite conditions.
Maintaining Consistent Safety Workflows
Supporting a strong workplace safety culture also requires putting the right systems in place to allow your team to tackle safety effectively. Inspections are a prime example. You should provide your team with the tools to manage inspections efficiently and encourage thorough and accurate completion. A workflow that lets workers carry out inspections, make required observations, and document findings onsite will support consistent results.
This should flow smoothly into corrective actions. Your system should clearly identify owners, deadlines, and other key details for corrective actions. Tracking status and implementing proper review and verification will ensure that corrective actions actually address the conditions they are meant to. Systems focused on accessibility, accountability, and ease of use are more likely to be fully adopted by workers, preventing unsafe shortcuts and workarounds from creeping into your safety programs.
Building a Stronger Safety Culture With ERA-EHS Software Solutions
ERA’s Health & Safety Software Solutions provide a full range of tools to empower your team to be more proactive and adopt a stronger safety culture. You can eliminate the barriers created by paper forms, disconnected spreadsheets, and navigating multiple programs by handling all of your health and safety workflows through one centralized platform.
Whether training, inspections, incident management, BBSO and near-misses, or management of change, ERA has the solution to streamline your workflows, ensure accuracy and compliance, and provide the straightforward experience required for your team to get fully involved in workplace safety. Customizable workflows, forms, and checklists ensure that our software fully aligns with the realities of your facilities, adapting to your unique operational and compliance needs.
Mobile access allows for seamless work onsite, offsite, and in the field, even when offline. Your team can report incidents, carry out inspections, and handle any other tasks whenever and wherever they’re needed. Custom dashboards and KPIs provide the transparency and oversight to improve your safety programs over time and address the true challenges your team faces. You can commit to continuous improvement and build a stronger safety culture for your business.
Getting Started on Your Workplace Safety Culture
To achieve a true workplace safety culture, you must listen to workers, give them the training and tools they need, and foster an environment where proactive safety is rewarded instead of punished. Supporting your safety programs with the right software can help make that a reality, letting workers get involved more easily and giving leadership the visibility they need to make decisions effectively.
If you’d like to hear more about ERA’s Health & Safety Software Solutions and how they can support your unique operations, schedule a call with one of our project analysts today.
Contributing Scientist of This Article:
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