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A strong safety culture is built by ensuring all people who work with your company, both employees and contractors, can play their role in creating a zero harm workplace. The most effective way for a company to create this positive safety culture is to embed the following five key elements into their organisation:
Belief has an important role to play because both the company’s and the employee’s personal beliefs should be targeted on the vision of creating a zero harm culture within the workplace. In order to develop such a belief, companies should use positive reinforcement techniques to encourage people to believe that all accidents are preventable in the workplace (no matter what type of environment you may be working in). Rather than accepting that accidents will always occur.
Values encompass the principles and moral standards that the company, its employees and contractors working for the company, stand by. The values connected with safety may differ from company to company but, in order to create a zero harm workplace, all employees should respect the ideal that everyone has the right to work safely and everyone is responsible for playing their own part to make this happen.
When employees know they are working in an environment in which all staff hold similar values and beliefs then they are enabled to act out this approach by ensuring safe working practices are carried out at all times. Attitudes formed in a positive safety culture reinforce zero harm approaches and behaviours by promoting an environment in which staff can challenge and question procedures that they feel are unsafe, without negative feedback on their approach.
Safety communications come in many forms and their format needs to vary depending on their audience. Your zero harm policy and updates on health and safety performance may be required in a certain format for Senior management meetings but it is also important that all people at all levels of the organisation understand these key messages too. One of the ways an organisation can get key messages out is by providing regular staff updates and bulletins. Another way that companies can reinforce their positive safety culture is by running award and recognition schemes that value safety leadership and initiative within the organisation. Positive safety communications allow companies to reinforce their safety messages to staff and should play a central element in the design and structure of their zero harm training programmes.
Finally, you will be able to see if you have successfully created an effective organisational safety culture by analysing the behaviours of your workforce. A zero harm culture should be visible in the actions of all members of staff and reinforced in the decisions taken at all management levels.
An effective safety leadership in safety is required at all levels to create a positive safety culture. It is only when a company ensures all members of staff can get actively involved in the organisational safety culture, and where staff feel they have the power to challenge safety issues at all levels, that you can achieve a culture that actively promotes and supports the vision of zero harm for all your employees.
Safety Coaching can provide assistance in both assessing your company’s current safety culture and putting in place a step change for safety plan that will embed all five of these essential elements into your company. Safety Coaching can assist your organisation by developing training packages specific to your company needs or through the coaching & mentoring of key members of your management structure to further embed the line management responsibility for safety. The bespoke training is designed to focus your management team’s commitment to promoting a zero harm culture and will provide all of the resources required to help your company create the positive safety culture.
Click on the following link for further information on how Safety Coaching can help develop your organisation’s safety culture: http://www.safetycoaching.co.uk/safety-culture-development.html