How To Measure Safety Culture

How To Measure Safety Culture – Health and safety are a part of the culture of the company. Culture is customarily characterized as a common arrangement of convictions, standards, and practices, recorded and conveyed through a typical language. Companies have discovered that declaring safety and health excellence a “priority” is likely to be short-lived if safety and health values are not consistently (and constantly) shared among all employees and at all management levels.

For instance, if employees believe that productivity is more important to management than health and safety, they may attempt to “work around” a danger and knowingly put themselves in danger.

However, in order to avoid the potentially greater loss that an accident or illness might cause in the future, they will frequently report or repair hazardous conditions—often at some loss of productivity that is acceptable to management—if they believe that management values their safety and health. Even though it’s a little oversimplified, this illustration shows how powerful a strong safety and health culture can be.

Here are four steps to help you measure safety culture:

1. Identify and collect all unused data in a single system and ensure that it is indeed “clean”—complete and accurate—to begin centralized data cleansing. There are a number of business intelligence and data analytics solutions that make it simple to visualize and understand safety outcomes and potential issues. You will be able to proactively identify risks by centralizing, cleaning, and utilizing these kinds of tools. This will allow you to plan specific interventions and correctly allocate your safety spend.

2. Integrate information: Once your EHS data has been consolidated and centralized, the next step is to combine it with other information sources to get a complete 360-degree view of your safety procedures. This could be data from your enterprise resource planning systems, equipment maintenance systems, or data from a third party like weather reports. To guarantee improved outcomes in the future, you can begin to use predictive modeling to compare data between leading and lagging indicators once they have been integrated.
3. Engage from the shop floor to the C-suite: For a new initiative to be successful, management must commit to it, and frontline employees must buy into the program and actively participate. Employees will not participate in your programs if they are not engaged which will ultimately have an effect on the frequency and quality of inspections, audits, and other important EHS data entering your system.
4. Measure your safety culture and identify metrics: Safety culture can be difficult to measure, but it can serve as a baseline for determining how well your company is doing and which leading indicators are affecting workplace safety. There will be variations in how an EHS department measures safety culture across organizations and industries, but below are some general metrics you can start tracking right away.

How To Measure Safety Culture

Three steps to measuring a safety culture:

What makes a safety culture successful? Is this a policy list? Your PPE? or Number of incidents recorded?

Complex factors drive a successful safety culture. They basically reduce to how you impart wellbeing and how your representatives see security comparable to administration needs. Therefore, assessing context clues is the only way to evaluate your safety culture.

In three easy steps, you can evaluate a safety culture:

1. Audit Your Projects and Arrangements

The initial step is to take a long, hard glance at your security projects and strategies. This appears to be simpler than it actually is.

It requires going through all of your documentation in depth. Your communications channels, work order processes, incentives, incident investigation, and other processes are laid out in detail in these documents.

Additionally, this is where you will find your programming language which is more crucial than you might think. Keep in mind that the first safety communication tool is your programs. You are already at a disadvantage when trying to promote a culture of openness and communication if your programs are designed in a way that is inherently punitive and the language reflects this.

2. Communicate with Employees and Leadership: This brings us to the second step which is to communicate with employees and leadership. This is your first chance to take an active culture assessment step, so treat it with caution.

The health of your safety culture depends on a culture of employee engagement, but management’s role is more influential than many people realize. Even when managers are unaware of the cues they are sending, employees frequently follow their manager’s lead. For instance, requiring all employees to wear hard hats in a particular location is pointless if managers never do so.

During this step, it is essential to evaluate your safety communication. At the end of the day, what messages are your supervisors sending, whether or not they mean to? And how are those messages being interpreted by your employees?

3. Last but not least, examine your safety training thoroughly because it is one of the most obvious forms of safety communication in your toolbox.

Training employees not only demonstrates your commitment to safety but also lets them know how you feel about it. Assuming that preparation phases are repetition and will generally be given out correctively, it lets workers know that you consider wellbeing a crate to be checked, not a guiding principle.

Summarily, this is what it entails:

Commitment from management. Allocate 60% of the KPI to this.

It is best practice to give this function 60% of the key performance indicators. Measurable data points include:

• Requested versus actual budget
• Employee hours spent on safety prevention
• Funding for tools to implement the safety program
• Marketing support for safety programs

Employee engagement. Allocate 30% of the KPI

Measurable data points include:

• Employee-to-work-hour ratio;
• Training competency evaluation pass rate;
• Number of observations and safety suggestions submitted;
• Training effectiveness results from feedback surveys.

Safety management system. Allocate 10% of the KPI.

Measurable data points include:

• Inspection scores
• Audit scores
• Percent of completed actions
• Percent of safety procedures reviewed.

How to Manage Health and Safety

Your company’s health and safety can be managed with the same level of success as other parts of your business. The key is to coordinate and arrange for what you want to do.

Start by making a list of the tasks that are carried out at work and the equipment that is utilized. The Management of Health and Safety at Work Regulations require an assessment of the risks to be carried out and those risks to be controlled when working at height using a stepladder such as changing light bulbs.

Then consider how Health and Safety relates to other management systems such as maintenance of portable appliances and the electrical installation. On a regular basis, checks should identify issues before they become more serious and cost more to fix than annual maintenance.

If a stepladder is used, it may be necessary to check that it is safe to use by conducting an assessment of the dangers to employees working at height. As a result, an accident-related civil claim is less likely to occur.

Workplace Safety Concerns for a Remote Workforce

You may not know this, but in some places, workers’ compensation insurance covers telecommuters. Your company could be held liable if a worker trips and hurts themselves while going to check their email or breaks a leg while trying to get a briefcase out of the car by tripping over a dog.

Although similar situations have been determined to be compensable, these scenarios sound a little ridiculous. Consider the safety of your employees’ workplaces if they work from home. Check your state’s workers’ compensation laws and requirements first because they will vary from state to state.

Many businesses are new to managing remote workers’ safety. You can incorporate your telecommuters into your safety culture by following the best practices listed below.

• Run a physical assessments of a representative’s remote workplace.
• Define the limits of a work space. Employers could be held liable for any incident that occurs on the employee’s property if these boundaries are not established.
• Give your remote workers a set schedule to follow. You could also be held liable for anything that happens in the employee’s workspace if you don’t have regular working hours—no matter when those hours are worked.
• Keep a particular rundown of representative obligations and extent of work. An employee can’t sue for a non-work-related workplace injury because of this.
• Instead of a permanent work-from-home position, think about offering flexible remote employment. The amount of time employees spend working in their own, unregulated environment is limited when they are on-site for a portion of their workweek.
• Treat remote workers in the same manner as on-site employees when it comes to safety training.
• Even if Zoom is used, require remote workers to attend safety meetings and get them involved in safety-related campaigns.
• Give people who work from home as telecommuters a list of safety tips they can use in their home office, like sitting at their desk, taking breaks, and doing safety sweeps of their workspace.
• Provide recommendations for ergonomic office furniture, mouse pads, and other items. Offer to reimburse them for their purchase in full or in part if it fits into the budget. It helps reduce the likelihood that workers will sustain an injury while working from home, and it is the same as purchasing equipment for your on-site employees.