Safety First Approach- What does this actually mean?

If someone were to ask you why safety is important, how would you respond? You may "know" that it's important to keep safety in mind as we go about daily activities, but how would you explain the reasons why this is the case?

Great safety culture is a valuable business asset that few fully appreciate. It has the ability to cut costs, increase colleague happiness and grow engagement whilst keeping people safe. Poor safety culture, by contrast, can hack away at your reputation, leave you with expensive legal cases and prevent you from achieving your true potential.

What is a Safety Culture?

Safety culture is the collective attitudes, beliefs, and behaviours that define an organisation’s approach to creating a safe environment. Safe cultures are built by employees?and employers?who work together in order to create a safe place for themselves as well as others through proactive thoughts like “Safety First.”

Why is it important to have a good safety culture?

It is important to create a good safety culture on the job because it will save lives. When colleagues feel safe, they are happier and more productive in their work environment. A happy colleague can be beneficial for an employer because he or she grows as an individual while feeling secure at his or her place of employment which ultimately heightens productivity levels when performing tasks.

It’s also necessary to realise how much you value your colleagues if you want them to put all their efforts into staying safe so everyone involved benefits from this quality labour force with high morale, low attrition rates and the ultimate goal focused on reduction of accidents.

A safe culture can be an organisation’s most important asset or liability in preventing incidents?from occurring. A company with strong values around safety will have fewer injuries?or incidents?because colleagues believe the “safety comes first” mindset outweighs other considerations like delivery deadlines or increased competitiveness within their industry sector.

How do you create a good safety culture?

Management commitment and style- Value life above all else

Every line manager would want that secret wand that could eradicate all worker safety incidents—including slips, trips, and falls that result in minor injuries. But, because the stakes of job accidents are so high leaders’ focus must be on preventing serious injuries and fatalities.

In high-hazard industries, making a mistake can lead to a horrific catastrophe, killing or hurting colleagues or a member of the public. A safety-first culture starts with one simple premise: Value life above all else!

If that’s your number one objective, the probability of you making the best decisions in guiding your organisation to achieve the best safety results have gone up dramatically.

Employee involvement- Consult the people most affected

No one knows what the safety situation looks like better than colleagues in the field, two way engaging conversation is paramount for success in this area. Desk top and remote risk assessments are a thing of the past.

Giving power to colleagues to stop the job if they feel unsafe and celebrate this fact if a job is stopped for this reason is another fundamental area, to create a safety-first culture and reduce safety incidents, it’s critically important for colleagues to be empowered to stop a job if they believe this to be unsafe. As leaders who are focused on the correct health and safety culture it should be your job to make sure that any team member is confident to pull a job at any moment, without the fear of retribution.

Listen up and follow through

Making it easy and non-punitive for colleagues to report safety incidents means nothing if managers don’t listen to their insights and take action where possible. If you ask colleagues for their advice, and you listen to it but don't do anything with it, are they going to bother to speak up in the future? we all know the answer to that one!

Training and Competence

Training means helping people to learn how to do something, telling people what they should or (often as important) should not do, or simply giving them information. Training isn't just about formal 'classroom' courses and obtaining 'tickets' (certificates) to work.

A competent person must have a good mix of skills, experience and knowledge (SKE's), having great credentials on paper, does not mean they are a competent person.

Communication

The best plans in the world can still fail because of communication; either a total lack of it, or miscommunication when meanings are lost and what is said is misconstrued or received incorrectly. Therefore, effective communication needs to be given just as much time and attention as the actual plan itself, as there is a high probability of failure if the communication element is ignored or not enough resources are allocated to it.

A lack of clear communication can not only hinder the unmitigated implementation of a health and safety culture, but can also end up contributing significantly to a dangerous workplace where accidents and illnesses occur more frequently

As part of HSG65 it calls out the following areas under effective communication:

Leaders

■ Ensure that time is allocated so that communications can take place.

Managers

■ Formulate plans for cascading information. Remember to plan how you will get messages

across to contractors, anyone with low levels of literacy, or those whose first language is

not English.

■ Think about what needs to be communicated and to whom. How will your health and

safety policy, risk assessment findings and safe systems of work be shared?

■ Lay out clear communications procedures for safety-critical tasks.

■ Where needed, plan your communications with emergency services. Who will co-ordinate

this and how will it be done?

■ Ensure that communication is included in change management procedures.

■ Ensure that written instructions are clear and up to date.

■ Make sure that safety-critical messages have been given attention and are understood.

Worker consultation and involvement

■ Involve workers or their representatives in planning communications activities. They will

be able to help identify and resolve barriers to communication within your organisation.

■ Are workers able to give feedback and report their concerns?

■ Have you considered vulnerable groups within your workforce in your communications

plans, eg young or inexperienced workers, workers with a disability or migrant workers

Compliance with Procedures

Health and safety breaches are generally well-meaning, but that doesn’t mean they’re not dangerous. Often, violations of employees’ health and safety come from a poor perception of risk. This is when workers believe the risk to be so low that there won’t be consequences to themselves or others from noncompliance. This can also come from a lack of understanding of why a health and safety rule is in place, and workers believing it is not relevant.

While some breaches of health and safety are intentional, they’re rarely malicious.Violations generally come from wanting to get the job done and on time, rather than a desire to sabotage.

Working under time pressures or not having enough workers to do the job can increase the likelihood of violations. Workers may believe that cutting corners will help get the job done on time, therefore line managers need to be close to their utilisation numbers & capacity planning so that jobs do not come with the issues highlighted above.

There are occasions where workers will breach health and safety violations purely because they think they can get away with it. It may be to save time or effort or because of a belief that the rules are too strict among the workers which means that there is potential exposure and gaps within your safety culture.

Organisational learning- Learn from mistakes

The final step to building a better colleague safety culture is for leaders to closely examine past safety incidents to see what can be learnt? When something goes wrong, you can’t accept simplistic explanations. You can’t accept that the colleagues didn’t follow procedure or they used the wrong piece of equipment. It’s important that there is a deeper understanding of failures, using root cause analysis to fully assess those impacting issues.

Taking it a step further, leaders should share their lessons learned with other likeminded companies. It’s important that we share when serious incidents occur so that others can learn from our mistakes, and we can learn from the mistakes of others.

Conclusion

• Safety culture is about what people do (safety-related behaviours); how people feel (individual and group values, attitudes and perceptions) as well as what the organisation has (policies, procedures, structures and systems). These three aspects are?interrelated and therefore not mutually exclusive. Any intervention on safety culture must consider all three aspects.
• A company’s safety culture is shaped by corporate practices and organisational behaviour, and so a full picture can’t be gained from just focusing on the perceptions of staff.
• If you collect data (from surveys, talking to staff) then communicate the findings back to those involved – and?take action.
• Interventions on safety culture should not just explore attitudes and behaviours of the front-line workforce, but also question and challenge managers and leaders.
• Rather than trying to influence safety culture directly, you may find it helpful to focus on a specific topic (such as procedures, fatigue, competence). How you go about this intervention could have a significant effect on a range of predictors of a positive safety culture (such as involving staff, listening to their concerns, making leaders more visible and taking visible action to improve).
• Creating a positive?safety culture takes a great deal of?time and effort; perhaps over several years; and is not a one-off process.