What are the best practices for building a safety culture based on teamwork and trust?

To cultivate a culture of safety, effective and open communication is crucial. Employees should be well-informed about safety goals, expectations, rules, and procedures, and they should receive frequent feedback and recognition for their safety practices. Encouraging staff to communicate amongst themselves honestly and offering channels for them to report safety issues, incidents, and concerns helps in fostering this culture. Clear and regular communication ensures trust, transparency, and accountability, thereby strengthening the safety culture.

Involving your employees in unsafe condition and/or process reporting and coaching is vital. Remember to stress the importance of the employee's long-term health including post-retirement, career longevity, and the success of the company early in their employment. Relaying the "why" and the "what's in it for them" can help foster a more positive approach to "being their brother's keeper" and their view of safety in the workplace in general. Your employees need to buy into a responsibility to look out for themselves, their coworkers and the company. Incidents affect all even if only one employee is involved. By speaking up about safety, coaching and utilizing the company safety resources they can help keep everyone healthy and employed.

Some ways to get started are: Collaborate with leadership on what are the most at risk tasks and train the workers to identify and come up with a plan to mitigate and document them as a team before beginning work. Coach your supervisors to be good coaches. Not all of them may have the skill set to intervene and coach or the knowledge of the processes and procedures to use for resources. Create a supervisory training that outlines their roles and responsibilities as a supervisor and has practical relevant examples of how to coach and how to have crucial conversations. Ensure that they are able to handle that part of their role and set them up for success. They will appreciate that you are investing in their career.

Collaboration and cooperation are essential for bolstering a safety culture. Working together with different teams, departments, and stakeholders, and sharing best practices, resources, and lessons learned optimizes safety measures. It's also crucial to cultivate an environment of mutual assistance, respect, and trust among employees, motivating them to work cohesively, help one another, and learn from each other's experiences. This collaborative and cooperative approach helps establish an aligned, integrated, and cohesive safety culture within the organization.

Learning and continuous improvement are key elements to progress a safety culture. Improvement can be made by learning from safety performance metrics, data, and feedback, and by identifying gaps, risks, and opportunities for enhancement. It's also important to encourage employees to adopt a culture of continuous learning and improvement, motivating them to seek feedback, learn from errors, and adapt to changes. This consistent learning and improvement approach results in a safety culture that is adaptive, proactive, and innovative.

It is important to also determine consequences for unsafe actions or inactions after coaching has been ineffective or when it is deemed a serious violation. Employees must be accountable for their actions or the safety culture will fail. The safety team should be a resource for compliance and supervisors should be responsible for ensuring their teams work safe. Collaboration with both is key. Involving those who supervise gets their support and puts the responsibility where it belongs. It also is perceived as fairer by the workers. Make it clear to new employees and those in supervisory positions that they are responsible for ensuring adherence to and participating in the company safety programs and that they can also be held accountable.