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After step one, compliance, is achieved, a safety culture model can begin. I plan to take the model I discuss below; of course modifying it from learning more along the way!

It is extremely exciting and challenging to change a culture within a facility. There is always a sense of accomplishment when achieving any goal. Possibly one of the hardest goals to achieve in safety is a proactive, positive culture.

What It Takes

How is culture one of the hardest objectives of safety to reach?

I am just beginning to understand how to place safety programs in place to improve culture, however, I am learning more of the challenges are with conflicting personalities. I will need to work intensively in with intention to improve my marketing and sales skills to create buy-in from executives, management and employees.

Not only do I need to implement compliance, but I choose to implement a safety culture model. In order for this to be successful, I need to demonstrate the value of safety for my customers (employees)!! During each step of implementation within a facility, it is important to consider how will the proof of value be displayed. It takes a lot of time, commitment, patience, selling safety, and continuous effort to drive a culture to best-practices and forward thinking based. 

What Goes Into It

Beliefs and attitudes will need to be redirected and trained to this new perspective of proactive safety. This is easier to do when management and employees work together to create a vision and goals. Here is the plan of action:

Establish a compelling vision for safety. As with any strategic planning, an organization’s vision needs to always align with its mission statement. 

Start at the top. Starting at the top should come first with promoting safety culture. After a vision for safety is created and tied into the business’ mission statement, targets and objectives should be created for what the company would like to accomplish.

Targets may include: holding management and employees accountable to prioritizing safety, placing expectation and responsibilities to meet compliance and go above any beyond, communicating safety effectively throughout all levels of the organization, and placing enough resources and support to implement the safety program effectively. 

Collect data to drive improvement. Managers thrive on metrics. Everyone is held accountable to the numbers whether it be production or quality. Generally, what is measured gets communicated and is emphasized to need improvement.

In safety, if an incidence rate is low, individuals may mistake that meaning there may not be inherent hazards present which need attention to mitigate. In order to avoid this type of thinking, showing metrics which are proactive drive a completely different goal. Just as if sales or production scores are low, resources are deployed to correct and improve these issues.

Establish a team and set goals. Who are they key stake holders? Who helps the stakeholders identify hazards to mitigate? 

Having top executives, management, leads and employee representatives on a team show a powerful message, however, it is extremely important for management and leads to drive safety by example. They are who is enforcing it on a day to day basis with the team. Once management and leads have set the standard of behavior, their leadership trickles down to team members around them. 

Goals could be driven from shop floor employees or management. Everyone should work together to identify hazards, report them and brainstorm as a team to offer possible solutions.

Encourage involvement: good relationships, discretionary effort, empowerment. Involvement is what will keep the safety program afloat. Employees are the ones doing the jobs on the production floor. Employees are aware of what the hazards of the job are. Employees need to be engaged and empowered knowing what they say is valuable information. Acting on employee information and rewarding discretionary efforts enforces the positive culture. 

Personally, the only types of discretionary efforts I would reward are safe-behaviors and reporting of hazards which offer some insight on what could be done better. 

Identify, assess and control hazards. In order for employees to identify, assess and control hazards, they should be trained on what to look for. Everyone may see a hazard each day, yet, think it is an acceptable risk. Sometimes it takes learning from a different perspective, such as from a safety professional, to think about hazards with another mindset. 

Training a facility safety committee in hazard identification and control is especially important to gather information from additional employees.

Evaluate and improve. When goals and projects come to completion, new goals are set. When new goals are set, new leading indicators should be identified and tracked. It’s beneficial tracking a few leading indicators to show various behaviors a company holds employees accountable for. 

Train. Train employees as much as possible. The more hands on, activity-based learning there is, the higher retention will be. Initially teaching about a topic from a video clip or through a lecture is okay, but not the primary source for employees to retain the information. 

Whenever training on any safety topic, directly relate it to the work they do. Be as transparent as possible; train on past incidents, things you have experienced at home, stories you have heard or went through. The more personal the training is, the more memorable it will be. 

Investigate. Root cause. The more complex an incident, the more complex the root cause may be. There are usually a few circumstances which line up to make the incident. Training employees who are charged with incident investigations is essential to ensure they can successfully identify a root cause.

Encouraging employee involvement in these learning experiences is a great opportunity to increase engagement as well. A union representative or a safety committee member may be present during incident investigations. 

Record keeping. Record everything. Audits, inspections, injuries, near misses, first aids, property damage, safety committee meeting minutes, opportunities for improvement. These reports help to show improvement over an extended period of time and ties into telling the story behind facility safety metrics. 

Reward positivity. As I have mentioned above, I would only reward safe behavior or an opportunity of improvement suggestion. I would also reward successfully meeting a safety goal and employees reporting near misses.