How to Create a Safety-Centric Culture
How can you influence your employees to care about safety as much as you do? What will it take to get your employees to think, breath, and dream about risk reduction? In other words, how can you create and sustain a safety-centric culture?
Just like anyone else in your shoes, you care deeply about your employees’ health and wellbeing. But, ironically, it often feels like they don’t care about it themselves. They take too much risk, putting themselves and others in danger. This hurts your bottom-line, productivity, accident rates, and most importantly, it hurts people.
While these are pressing issues for you today, they could be history if you work towards building a safety-centric culture.
What is a Safety-Centric Culture And Why is it Important?
In short, a safety-centric culture is one where every employee from owner to part-time employee puts safety before anything else. Every decision that everyone makes at the company has safety in mind. The benefits should be clear: when everyone cares about safety, your accident numbers go down without you having to do all the heavy lifting.
That’s the answer you get for a nickel. The answer you get for a dollar is more complicated and nuanced. It involves intrinsic questions such as:
- What is safety and risk?
- What is culture?
- How do you shape culture?
These are important questions to answer if you want to have a large impact on your employees’ safety. However, it would take a novel to adequately explain it. Some of our products such as The Leadership Development Course, The Fleet Safety Course, and LLLC Certification get at these questions in depth.
For the sake of your time, we’ll focus this article on a few basic things you can do to lay the foundation for a safety-centric culture.
