How College Basketball Can Help Change Your Workplace Safety Culture

As Safety Professionals we are constantly asked, “how can we improve our safety performance?” Our response is typically a variation of the same answer: You have to develop and practice a workplace culture that values safety and recognizes employees for being safe.

Incentivizing Safety is a helpful tool in building a Safety culture but the importance of how and when to reward can truly make the difference. Clients ask whether it is more important to focus on the performance or the result. An argument can be made for each, but the fact of the matter is in order to get results, consistent performance must be encouraged, developed, and practiced on a regular basis.

An excellent representation of this can be found In this year’s NCAA Men’s Basketball Tournament. In the process of watching your brackets fall apart, Villanova University’s Men’s Basketball team is finding success yet again, making it to the Sweet Sixteen for the second time in three seasons. What you may overlook is how and why they find themselves in this position. Over the course of many seasons, Head Coach Jay Wright has instilled a philosophy of defense, ball control, and teamwork throughout the entire organization. Wright and his staff consistently encourage his players to believe in and practice these values while rewarding the implementation of them through recognition and praise. The Wildcats are now one of the most respected College Basketball programs in the country, finished their regular season with a record of 32-4 and a Number 1 seed in the NCAA Tournament.

This exact mindset is something we can and should apply to Workplace Safety. When management nurtures a culture focused on safety, great things can happen. Recognizing employees for practicing safe habits (like avoiding shortcuts and sacrificing their personal comfort in the name of safety) will change their mindsets and safer results will follow. The results do not always come overnight, but as the old saying goes, “practice makes perfect”.

FDRsafety’s Safety Culture Training has impacted over 500,000 members of our nation’s workforce by focusing on “The Why” of Safety. Our Experts motivate workers to want to be safe, and improves safety performance throughout organizations.