Creating and Sustaining a Safety Culture: A mini-guide for today’s health and safety pros
Like many businesses, of course you want to ensure your people enjoy a safe working environment. But as you’ll know, it’s one thing to put a robust safety strategy in place, it’s another to have employees live and breathe it in how they work every single day.
An organisation’s culture governs how the business operates and how people interact. It regulates what’s seen as acceptable (and what isn’t). And it underpins trust at all levels – whether in the firm’s management, its health and safety teams, or between coworkers.
Of course, creating and sustaining a safety culture is anything but easy. Culture tends to be organic and to resist any kind of top-down regulation. It doesn’t like to be written down and codified. It’s a free spirit. In fact, heavy-handed approaches to imposing a culture tend to result in a them-and-us environment where frontline workers actively work against management ‘initiatives’. Truth is, on the whole people don’t like change. More than this, they hate being changed.
So what can you do to foster a true safety culture in your business? In this mini-guide, we’re going to offer some insights and approaches you can use. We’ll look at the role of management, the critical importance of effective communication, and we’ll explore five building blocks you can use to structure your approach. Let’s get started.