One might think that health and safety are the sole responsibility of the health and safety manager, but that shouldn’t be the case. Health and safety at a workplace are everyone’s responsibility.
Managers’ responsibility is to make sure that processes run smoothly and employees are interested in health and safety issues. Everyone should be ensured about their personal importance and impact on the matter. In addition, all employees are expected to make observations and report them further.
Let us introduce three crucial pointers on the most important aspects of health and safety at a workplace and how to transform the safety culture from reactive to proactive.
The information needs to be easily accessible and comply with legislation. There’s no use of knowing the health and safety regulations only on the highest ladder, but every employee should be well-aware of their responsibilities and expectations in terms of law and company regulations.
In order to know that everything is truly running smoothly and all the regulations are met, it’s a good idea to conduct periodic checks. The idea is not to pry on employees or purposely catch somebody neglecting the instructions, but to find possible deficiencies. And if and when that happens, the shortcomings can be addressed and fixed sooner rather later.
Reactive reporting plays a key role. It’s really hard to tackle obstacles if they’re not reported. Usually, the problem is that employees don’t report the smallest deviations and sometimes completely neglect to report positive observations. However, all these deviations are report-worthy. If employees consider it too hard or time-consuming to insert information about the smallest incidents, then the problem lies most likely in the system. A good idea is to consider easy-to-use and simple mobile tools for inspections purposes in order to involve everyone in the process.
It’s important for an H&S manager to collect data and look at analytics based on incident reports and the previously mentioned periodic checks. That way the manager can actually proactively act to improve health and safety at the workplace. When the tools and procedures are intact and the information is distributed through the right channels, the whole safety culture can be changed from reactive to proactive. People don’t only react to incidents but consciously work proactively to avoid them.
If you want to broaden your understanding beyond HSEQ, check out our blog series about the VUCA framework.
Want to learn more about measuring Health and Safety? Download our FREE Ultimate Guide To Safety KPIs:
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By doing this, we are making work more meaningful for all parties involved.
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