Taking A Proactive Approach
Strengthening an organisation’s safety culture can help streamline communication and bring teams together while improving safety records and driving safer outcomes. Ninety-eight percent of safety leaders believe more front-line participation is the key to improving safety performance and building a strong safety culture.
Safety culture can be described as the behaviours, beliefs, and attitudes towards safety and its value, found within a particular organisation.
After the challenges of COVID-19, employees don’t tend to come together physically as often.
The impact of remote working, dispersed teams, modified workspaces, and the like, has increased the complexities of connecting workforces and driving a strong safety culture that will create a more proactive approach to risk mitigation.
Cultural change is never easy and necessitates a clear programme in your business to improve behavioural safety.
For example, safety observations identify unsafe acts and unsafe conditions at work sites, but without a digitised process in place for immediate reporting, it can be easy to forget risks that occurred or were observed. Of equal importance, good practices need to be recognised and encouraged.
By having the right mechanisms in place to observe and report both poor and best practices you can create a High Participation Safety Culture across your organisation and make a positive difference.
Axis Group has seen a 30% decrease in accidents since increasing their near miss reporting.
"We now have a culture where our staff are reporting unsafe conditions and unsafe acts routinely. Whether it’s someone not wearing the correct PPE, fire exits being blocked, or items left lying around to present a trip hazard - it’s this type of consistent reporting that ultimately helps to reduce actual accidents. This willingness to report these incidents that we now have within our business is underpinned by having a quick and easy system called Info Exchange."
Tracey Hammond CMIOSH
Safety Manager at Bidvest Noonan
