While many businesses see safety as a cost, investing resources in a workplace safety culture can actually have a positive effect on your bottom line. In fact, a survey of CFOs of mid-sized companies cited increased productivity, reduced costs, increased employee retention and increased morale as the top benefits of workplace safety.
“When budgets get tight, poor safety cultures tend to cut safety first because they don’t understand its importance,” says Jonathan Theders, president of Clark-Theders Insurance Agency Inc. “Good safety cultures find ways to continue to focus on safety because they know what the ultimate downside could be.”
Smart Business spoke with Theders about how to create and maintain a culture of safety in the workplace.
What are the keys to developing a successful safety culture?
One of the keys is getting your people to look at the establishment of a safety culture as not simply compliance but as continuous business improvement. Sometimes the only reason companies do safety initiatives is because OSHA tells them they have to. They may be doing the right thing, but they aren’t doing it for the right reasons.
Once you get a grasp on why something works the way it does, or how a safety procedure integrates into your day-to-day work, that culture begins to permeate.
One benefit of a great safety culture is the camaraderie that forms. When you are focused on continuous improvement, people challenge each other. When they see people breaking through a bad habit, or taking shortcuts to make things easier, they hold each other accountable. It’s not just a management thing then; the whole organization is feeling the importance of safety.
When you get to that positive safety culture, employees will do the safe thing not just because they have to but because they want to.
How can you change your company’s culture to integrate safety?
Leadership is an essential part of a changing culture. You constantly have to talk about it and reinforce those good habits.
Culture change is an evolution, not just a change in behavior on a whim. You don’t just flip a switch and suddenly you have a healthy safety culture. It takes dedicated time and effort.
An example would be wearing a seatbelt. When the law passed requiring mandatory seatbelts, some people embraced it, but many resisted. It made safety sense, but it was ‘change.’ Continuous effort was made to educate and enforce the law, and today we don’t think twice about using seatbelts. The culture changed, and it has become a standard of living.
