What are the most effective strategies for promoting safety culture in an organization?

Safety is a category of operational excellence. In a nutshell operational excellence is about eliminating errors. Safety is about eliminating errors that hurt people. There are tools that exist that help eliminate errors in general. Good safety means effective application of error-reduction tools that will simultaneously reduce the errors that negatively impact operational excellence as well as the errors that hurt people.

The more people you involve in safety activities, the better your safety culture will be. Startup of the day with safety prayer, Promote Safety, Motivate employees, increase Consultation and participation, Safety campaigns, TBT, Safety celebration and many more to involve all the employees in safety activities.

If Top management takes Responsibility for safety culture develp and if they involve derectly in following, may boost a sustained safety culture : 1) their direct intervention in getting work done safely. 2) their direct intervention in making the workplace safe. 3) their direct intervention with the use of Personal Protective Equipment (PPEs). 4) their direct intervention on those behaving unsafely. 5) their direct intervention in the development of Safety culture.

In my opinion the the vision, mission and target or baseline shall be well defined and implemented across the functions and objectives are clearly outlined. This could help the organisation to achieve safe or effective safety management systems.

Developing a positive association with reporting health and safety issues in essential to improving your organizations safety culture. One way to promote this is to develop an appraisal system by rewarding employees who report safety hazards or concerns

Many times the employees and ground staff involvement is not considered while planning or preparing the safety management system, their engagement is much required to ensure the effective safety management system. Also the cultural and behavioural aspects are key to make the management system effective. The employee engagement system is required at all levels be it planning execution or measurement of safety performances.

Absolutely, if the employees have a freedoms to report unsafe actions,. unsafe conditions, nearmiss and other abnormalities fearlessly, this is a excellent safety culture

Safety should be made non-negotiable KPI in the organisation and reason behind this must be clear to all. Safety training must be provided with illustration through videos, stories highlighting the impacts of safety violations. Awareness is the best way to promote safety culture and Safe Operating Procedure should be followed before starting any job Who is going to suffer if any safety is violated ? What are the consequences of unsafe act and condition? Such questions should be asked rather than directly giving advice or teaching safety norms, then only employee will be able to adopt safety culture. All safety incidents, unsafe act and conditions, near misses should be reported freely and proper action plan to be made & reward to be given.

Engaging and employees runs far deeper than just getting them involved. An acknowledgement of the underlying resistance to safety must happen first. Systems are written by safety professionals, for safety professionals in a language, most cannot understand, systems are complex and often inaccessible to those that matter, leaders are too heavily focused on compliance and regulatory authorities rule by fear. So, the real focus for engagement means getting workers involved in not just being safe, but in the process of developing systems, strategy and performance monitoring. When people feel valued, they will 'always' deliver more than is expected.

Management humble interactions with the workers seeking to learn and better understand the work while building trust through and relationships.

One way to implement and improve a safety culture is to ensure that everyone is aware that there is a Leadership team in place. The Leadership team can then promote what processes and procedures are in place to achieve a great safety culture. Offering an employee satisfaction survey or opportunity for employees to give feedback on what is working and not working leads to continual improvements being made. Having a system in place that not only recognises but also has a process in place for improvement based on suggestions of the workforce can only lead to a better, safer workplace.

Now that you have implemented your safety culture program and you have your leadership team in place, you need to be able to monitor its strengths and weaknesses as well as any opportunities or threats to the programs success. This can be achieved by collating information from employee satisfaction surveys. Feedback gathered at toolbox meetings, feedback from training that has taken place and employee reviews. Once you take into account all the feedback, you can review any futher actions that need to be taken. Having a great safety culture relies on continual improvement.

One way to ensure you are reviewing your safety program for continual improvement is to audit what you have in place. Using the Plan, Do, Check and Act (PDCA) model, allows for continual improvement to be achieved. The greatest success of any Safety culture is having employees contribute to it.

Maintaining a safety culture requires a persistent dedication to spotting gaps, drawing lessons from mishaps, and putting preventative safety measures into action. As a safety contributor in my current position, I have established a system known as the C.A.R.E card, which includes recurring safety culture assessments. The purpose of these questionnaires was to get anonymous input from staff members regarding how safe they feel working for the company. Following our analysis of the data, we pinpointed areas in need of development. ISO 14001:2015 - Environmental Management Systems: Clause 10 - Improvement: ISO 14001, focused on environmental management, also stresses the importance of continual improvement.