September 2016 newsletter – The key to a strong safety culture
- The key to a strong safety culture: positive employee attitudes
- Improve safety performance with Attitude-Based Safety Culture Training
The key to a strong safety culture: positive employee attitudes
By Fred Rine
There are many drivers of a strong workplace safety culture, but perhaps the most important is employee attitudes: if employees want to be safe, rather than merely feeling they have to, they are far more likely to make the right decision about a potentially unsafe action.
In fact, positive attitudes by workers and leadership are at the top of OSHA’s list of ingredients of a strong safety culture, which the agency believes is critical to a safe workplace.(Others include involvement and buy-in of all members of the workforce, meaningful and measurable goals, training, accountability, and policies and procedures that serve as reference tools, rather than obscure rules.)
Of course, employees have to understand safe working techniques, and have the right equipment on hand to be able to use them. But in most accidents, the employee involved already knows how to act safely, they just choose not to, either because the safe approach takes too much time, or the personal protective equipment they should use is perceived to be uncomfortable.
What exactly does “want to” mean? Let’s take an example from everyday life – using a ladder at home. Most everyone knows that you aren’t supposed to stand on the top two steps of a ladder. It’s just too easy for the ladder to kick out from beneath you, resulting in a fall. But how often have you, or someone you know, done just that? It wasn’t that you didn’t know the right way to do things, it’s just that you wanted to get the job done quickly more than you wanted to be safe.
The same goes in the workplace. A critical ingredient in building an effective company safety culture is making sure workers understand why to be safe, rather than just how to be safe. When that “want to” culture is in place, employers find that their safety performance improves.
So how do you change employee attitudes? How do you get them to want to be safe?
The surest route is training, such as FDRsafety’s Attitude-Based Safety Culture Training (formerly called Safety Awareness). This is not techniques training that shows employees how to be safe, although that is, of course, important. It is motivational training – training that helps them fully understand the consequences of their actions each and every day, and changes their thinking when they have to make a choice about safety.
To be effective, this training needs to be interactive and prompt attendees to look into their own hearts. When they do, most quickly realize that family and friends are depending on them to come home safe and sound each day. That realization drives them to “want to” be safe, rather than merely feeling they “have to.”
Fred Rine is founder and CEO of FDRsafety, one of the five largest safety consulting firms in the United States. Contact him at info@fdrsafety.com or 1-888-755-8010
Improve safety performance with Attitude-Based Safety Culture Training
If Fred Rine’s article just above made you want motivate your employees to “want to” be safe, FDRsafety can help.
Our Attitude-Based Safety Culture Training is a proven motivator for more positive employee attitudes towards safety. More than 500,000 workers, supervisors and managers in a wide variety of industries have experienced this training, and their employers report that the change in attitudes it drove have improved safety performance.
The training (formerly known as “Safety Awareness”) is highly interactive, led by experienced facilitators, and is consistently given high ratings by participants.
We are so certain you will find it valuable that we offer employers a free pilot program so you can see the results for yourself.
Contact us today at info@fdrsafety.com or 1-888-755-8010 for more information and to sign up.