All For One

Getting your employees on board with safety is not always easy, but it takes teamwork to prevent work place accidents.

When even one person is not being safe it jeopardizes the safety moral of the whole company and can lead to accidents. This individual’s neglect for the rules can put others at risk, and if tolerated it can lead employees to believe that their safety is not important to the company.

In a safe workplace, there are lots of teams working together. There’s your safety management team. There are employees teaming up with co-workers formally and informally to protect one another. There may be a safety committee working as a team to identify and correct hazards.

However, sometimes in these large teams we forget to motivate each individual to work with safe practices. It is important to give each employee a feeling of empowerment over the safety of the job. Experts also say that the best programs are those in which everyone feels responsible for safety.

How’s your team doing? Have you stopped to ask am them for their input? Can your employees say that they helped identify workplace hazards? An employee is more likely to comply and motivate others to comply with rules and regulations that they feel ownership of.

Have you discussed openly the consequences of an unsafe workplace? Do your employees understand that without a safe company there may not be a company to work for? Or that a co-worker’s neglect may prevent them from going home at the end of the night?

Data collected by OSHA states health and safety programs that include employee empowerment and accountability have reduced injury rates by as much as 90 percent.