It's All About People!: A Practical Guide to Develop a Dynamic Safety Culture

By Jerry Land

Managers everywhere strive to create a safer workplace. There are many benefits to this, the most important being the wellbeing of employees, customers, and the general public. Most of these efforts will focus on identifying the appropriate policies, training, and enforcement mechanisms to ensure that work is performed in the safest manner possible.

In It’s All About People!, the author looks at a critical but sometimes overlooked element in achieving a safe workplace: the people. A company may have the most up-to-date policies and a dedicated group of safety professionals who stand ready to implement those policies, but that’s only half of the equation. It’s the old carrot or the stick argument. If the policies are managed, and changes to the safety program come down from on high, employees are unlikely to feel any ownership in the process. With no emotional attachment, employees will comply but put forth little effort to offer improvements.

When employees become engaged in creating the safest work environment possible, that moves the gauge. Only then can your company develop a best-in-class safety workplace. It’s All About People! will help you attain that level of engagement.

It’s All About People! offers numerous real-life examples of managers and employees working together to improve the safety program. Employees who take ownership think about safety constantly and look for ways to make the workplace safer for themselves and their coworkers.

Managers are provided questions to ask themselves to determine if their company has a strong safety culture. What happens if an employee encounters a situation that she thinks is unsafe? How accessible are your company’s safety policies? Are your safety meetings productive or a break from work? The answers will help you identify the opportunities your company has to develop a dynamic safety culture.

As with anything involving people, change is challenging. Changing your safety culture can be accomplished, but not without a lot of hard work. It’s All About People! provides a roadmap to make that happen.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Page Publishing, Inc.
• Release date: Aug 10, 2021
• ISBN: 9781662435508

Book preview

Chapter 1

Why Safety Matters

In industry, it is widely recognized that a safe workforce has many advantages. These include

enhanced productivity,

better morale,

better teamwork and employee loyalty,

lower insurance costs, and

less opportunity for negative media exposure that comes with major incidents.

The National Safety Council estimates that the average cost of a workplace fatality is at $1.42 million, but that’s only the direct costs such as worker’s compensation, medical expenses, litigation, and property loss. The NSC estimates that indirect costs, which include

workplace disruptions,

productivity losses,

worker replacement,

training, and

increased insurance premiums

will be as much as 2.12 times that amount or over $3 million for each fatality. That doesn’t include intangible human costs, such as:

lower morale,

hesitancy in performing certain jobs,

harm to an employer’s reputation, and

the impacts that grief and guilt may have on a workplace.

As you can see, the impact is substantial. In this guide, you will see a lot of discussion about the importance of involvement of employees at all levels. The lessons in culture change described in this guide apply to all areas of business, not just a company’s safety program. According to Gallup’s State of the American Workplace Report, 51 percent of employees are not engaged in their work. They don’t necessarily dislike their jobs; they’re indifferent. Think about the risks of being indifferent to working safely!

The results of Gallup’s report indicate that businesses whose employees score in the top quartile in employee engagement greatly increase their company’s odds of success. Engaged employees show up and do more work and stay longer with an organization. They form better relationships with customers, which lead to higher sales. The bottom line is that companies with highly engaged employees tend to be more profitable.

So how do you develop a dynamic safety culture? Much discussion on achieving an award-winning safety record is focused on the safety program itself i.e., the policies, training, governmental regulations and enforcement. These factors don’t represent the biggest challenge in the development of an effective safety program. The real test is being able to get the buy-in at all levels of the organization that will support employees working safely every day on every task they perform. There are many theories on how to convince employees to work safely. Most involve persuading employees that working safely is in their best interest for more than just the obvious reasons. It’s hard to imagine an employee who doesn’t want to work safely, but even the best-intentioned employees need a supportive safety culture to maintain