During a recent ABSS Speaker Series event, nationally recognized safety and motivation expert Jack Edgington spoke to a capacity crowd of Safety and EH&S professionals and discussed the critical building blocks of an engaged, highly sustained safety culture.
Several of the key areas covered were:
- Assessing your culture to identify barriers and challenges
- Creating a unique identity for safety through branding and awareness
- Making safety a “personal” value for employees and their families
- Recognizing performance based on leading indicators, not lagging results
Jack stressed that one of the most important steps a company can take is to properly assess their culture. Assessing your culture can reveal the true attitudes and sentiments that drive safety within your organization. The ability to identify potential areas of weaknesses allows the company to focus resources on improving specific employee needs.
Potential areas of concern, if not addressed, will continue to negatively affect employee attitude, satisfaction and tenure. More importantly, utilizing assessment results in combination with employee comments will build a platform for creating mentors and teams. Improving specific areas result in more impactful training and communication, therefore creating an engaged employee that is much more responsive to training and change.
In addition to assessing safety cultures, Jack shared how branding safety efforts can make a tremendous difference in driving engagement with a workforce. Branding your safety initiative can also create pride and ownership around safety processes and safety goals for an organization. Once an appropriate safety brand has been developed, make opportunities to share the branding with the employee family members as much as possible.
You’ll find that their support will further enhance the commitment of your workforce. Sharing the personal side of working and living safety will become a part of each employee’s idealogy… at home, work and play.
To find out more information about how Safe Solutions can help you create a highly engaged safety culture, please visit our website www.saferemployees.com.
