4 Steps to Get Employees to Care about Health and Safety

So all your hard work isn't wasted ...

Hey there,

Welcome to this week’s edition of the Safety First Journal.

As a safety professional, how many times do you see situations where there is a procedure in place to work safely, employees are trained and certified, yet they still choose to take risks, rush around and the end result is an incident or injury?

Frustrating, isn’t it?

You can do all the compliance work in the world, but if you can’t get employees to buy in, you will continue to have the same problems over and over again.

I say this often, but safety happens at the front-line employee level, not at the procedure/policy level. If you can’t get employees to buy in to your safety program, your program will fail.

In this week’s edition, I’ll show you 4 steps to building real engagement and ownership among your employees when it comes to your workplace health and safety program.

Step 1 - Find the Disconnect

If you feel employees aren’t engaged with health and safety, the first thing you need to do is find out why.

The only way to do this is to talk with your people. Get to know your workers and try to understand their concerns. Every situation will have subtle differences, but here are some reasons they might not be engaged with your program:

· Lack of Context: Younger and newer employees especially may not understand the reason for safety procedures or the risks if they are not followed. If following safety procedures just feels like extra work arbitrarily imposed by management, workers won’t see the value.

· Over-Emphasis on Production. Look, productivity is essential for any business. There’s no denying it. Getting the work done quickly reduces costs, helps satisfy customers and strongly contributes to the success of the business. The problem comes when the goal of getting as much done in as little time as possible starts to get in the way of doing things the right way and doing them safely. Ignoring safety in favour of production can come back to haunt you in the form of incidents and injuries that put your production even further behind the 8 ball. When employees internalize that getting the work done quickly is more important than safety, you have a problem.

· Disconnect between Leadership messaging and front-line experience. When leadership tells employees that safety is their number one priority, but then encourages short cuts, ignores procedures for expediency or doesn’t follow the same rules, employees quickly tune them out. Employees are smart, they can quickly see through what leadership truly values and what it doesn’t.

Step 2 – Involve Workers in the Process

Who knows the challenges from line workers face better than the people who do the job day in and day out? People support what they help to create. If you want employee buy-in for health and safety, you need to involve them in the process, get their input and learn about their real challenges. You can do this by:

· Asking for input on procedures and controls. Before you put a new procedure in place, run it by some of your more experienced workers and see if it makes sense to them. Ask if you’ve missed anything, what can you do better? You can also involve newer employees by asking if the procedure makes sense and is easy to understand.

· Getting your safety committee involved. Your worker safety committee can not only give you valuable input on your ideas, they can help get other workers to buy in. Often, especially in unionized environments, workers will trust and listen better to peers than management.

· Considering anonymous hazard report forms or surveys. Giving people options to provide input anonymously helps you get honest feedback you might miss in a one on one or group environment.

Step 3 – Make it Personal

Nobody wakes up in the morning thinking a workplace accident will happen to them. No matter how many times we see it, it’s simply human nature to think that accidents are something that happens to other people, not us. You can combat this perfectly normal but incorrect assumption by:

· Sharing real stories of incidents and near misses. Of course, you don’t want to use names or provide identifying information, but keeping employees aware of incidents that happen helps alert them to the very real dangers they face on the job, and may awaken them to risks they hadn’t previously considered.

· Emphasizing how safety procedures are there to protect workers and their families. If workers see safety as just another project to reduce costs for management, they will tune it out. Human beings, all of us, need to see a personal and tangible benefit to any course of action before we truly commit to it. To get workers to understand that safety procedures are there for their benefit, you have to genuinely care about your team and be able to communicate the reasons why safety policies and procedures are in place.

Step 4 – Recognize and Reward the Right Behaviours

Too often in occupational health and safety, we only use negative reinforcement. When someone doesn’t follow procedures, we write them up.

There are times when it is necessary to impose consequences for not following safety protocols, but you’ll build a more positive safety culture if you celebrate people doing things right more often than you aim to catch them doing wrong.

· Publicly recognize people for speaking up and identifying legitimate hazards in the workplace.

· Find ways to celebrate with your teams for long stretches of accident-free work.

· Use shout-outs or small rewards for people who propose new and safer ways of doing things.

· Track safety improvements and celebrate small wins.

When you move from a rules-based safety program to a people-based one, you’ll get much better buy-in from employees and this will make your safety program much more robust and successful.

While fundamental change takes time, I encourage you to take one action this week to involve your employees in your safety program. Is there a hazard in the work that you haven’t considered? Do employees understand the why of safety procedures and policies? What concerns do they have that you may have missed?

Let me know in the comments how it goes.

That’s it for this week, have a great rest of your week and tune in next week to find out why most toolbox talks fail and how to fix them.

If you enjoy this content, I also ghostwrite newsletter content, educational email courses and social media posts for safety professionals. Message me for more information on how I can help you build your online presence and attract more opportunity in your career.

The Safety First Journal is published every Tuesday on LinkedIn and Substack.

Cheers for now,

Dan.