What is Safety Culture?

A positive safety culture helps you improve productivity, morale, and workplace safety. It communicates to frontline workers that they are valued and engages them in the process of improving workplace safety. Promoting a positive safety culture is a key aspect of maintaining workplace safety.

Three pillars of safety culture

Talking to your employees about workplace safety. Making sure they know how to perform job tasks properly. Identifying dangerous conditions in the worksite and either eliminating or controlling them to reduce the risk of injury. Assessing how well your safety program is performing. These are the basic actions of employers who value the safety of their employees. These actions are rooted in the three key elements of safety culture: Communication, Hazard Identification, and Safety Metrics.

Communication

What do workplaces with strong safety cultures all have in common? They ensure effective communication takes place between management and frontline employees. Regular communication that is open and honest can help ensure that employees and management are both willing to give and receive feedback on how to make the workplace safer. Having everyone involved will help make your workplace the safest it can be.

Hazard identification/mitigation

Effective hazard identification is key to your safety culture—everyone must be aware of any dangerous conditions on the worksite. Effective mitigation is important as it reduces the risks your employees are exposed to. Companies with strong safety cultures make hazard identification/mitigation a priority.

Safety metrics

Just like any other key component of your company, you should measure the effectiveness of your safety efforts. Review accidents to identify any injury trends and look at other lagging indicators like total lost workdays and equipment damage/loss. Don’t overlook lagging indicators—be sure to evaluate the frequency of training, inspections, and safety meetings—is it just right, or not enough? It’s important to have a clear picture of your safety program performance so you know what’s working and what needs to improve.

Be their Hero Campaign

Interested in improving the safety culture at your business? Consider implementing an employee safety campaign. Take advantage of these Be their Hero campaign ready-to-use materials such as posters and emails to encourage safe practices and get your employees home safe.

Ready to get started?

How is your safety culture? Use our free, confidential assessment to evaluate the safety culture at your business! You'll get a confidential report showing which areas of safety culture you are strong in, and what areas you need to improve on. It will also provide information and next steps to help you improve your safety culture.

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