Creating a successful employee safety program within your own organization is a daunting task. You need to create a real program that actually keeps your employees safe… while simultaneously maintaining a tight budget. Which, oftentimes feels like an impossibility, leading to stalls in program implementation due to uncertainty.
The day to create a safety program structured for success was yesterday. Every injury on the job costs $117,000. Preventing just 10 injuries a year could produce almost $1.2 million in savings. Additionally, every $1 spent on safety programs yields a $4-$6 return in reduced costs.
Here are 5 steps you can take to create a successful safety program today:
1. Get Management On Board
For your safety program to truly work, you’ll need complete buy-in from management and leadership. Successful safety programs require a culture that is built from the top-down, advocated and enforced by strong leaders invested in the safety of their employees. Open a dialogue about safety with key management officials in your business, today, and consider setting a specified meeting for the discussion.
For in-depth specifics regarding exactly how you can convince leadership to get on board with your safety program, read this article.
2. Conduct A Safety Analysis
Once leadership is on board, it’s time to actually begin creating the program – and this begins with a company-wide safety analysis. The purpose of this safety analysis is to identify workplace hazards and locate weak-points in pre-existing safety procedures. We highly recommend having a third-party firm conduct this analysis for you, as safety professionals understand exactly what to look for in diagnosing safety hazards. Plus, this eliminates any possibility of workplace bias, keeping the analysis as clinical and efficient as possible.
To learn more about the benefits of a professional safety analysis, visit our P3 Safety Culture Analysis page, here.
3. Create Real Preventative Processes
Now that you’ve diagnosed the problems, it’s time to create actionable solutions. By further analyzing each safety hazard in the workplace, you can better understand how to address the danger with systematic processes. These processes need to be written down in simple, explicit steps. For instance, if a safety analysis identifies your current lockout/tagout procedures to be insufficient, then new preventative controls should be drafted to address those insufficiencies (i.e. new steps that outline proper lockout/tagout procedures for forklift operations).
To learn more about various different methods of injury prevention, check here.
4. Train Employees
You’ve identified hazards and created safety controls to address those hazards. Now, your employees need to be properly trained – not only in new safety procedures but in basic safety knowledge as well. Consistency is necessary when trying to maintain injury reductions in your company, and training provides that consistent knowledge refresher that employees need to keep safety at the forefront of their operating mindsets. These training sessions vital, and it’s important that you design them to be engaging to ensure retention.
For explicit tips on creating engaging safety programs that your employees will stand behind, read this article.
5. Continuously Improve
A successful safety program isn’t a one-and-done setup; it requires continuous feedback and analysis to ensure real improvement. This includes a myriad of different sustainable procedures from employee-management communications, surveys, audits, and program reviews. However, when your safety program has cultural buy-in from everyone within the company, these procedures become cooperatively simple.
To learn about digital safety applications that help continuously improve your employee safety programs, visit our MySafetyApps page.
Don’t wait to begin creating a successful safety program for your company any longer. Ensure that your program is set up to be as efficient and sustainable as possible by reaching out to us by phone at 630.759.9908 or by email at Info@Optimum-USA.com, today.
