Safety By Toby Graham 4 Actionable Steps to Get Your Safety Culture Off The Ground S
afety culture, safety culture, safety culture. It’s a well-covered topic. We all
know it’s important. But how do we take actual steps to make things happen? I’ll be honest here, it’s not like you can wave a wand, think good thoughts, and your magical safety culture will flourish. Building a strong culture of safety in your organization takes dedication. While it may not be magical, it’s not impossible. And we’ve got some actionable steps you can take to get yours to take root. 1. Build Your Team: Build a team com- prised of employees in varied roles to help bring your safety culture to life. As a best practice, build that team out of those who volunteer to help. If you’ve got a team of “volun-tolds” they might not necessarily be motivated to stay committed to the cause. Consider, too, that if an employee is taken off a particular job to be on the safety cul- ture team, be sure you’re paying them for that extra time.
When building your team, find out if any workers have specialized experience or experience that could benefit the team as you set out to hone your safety pro- gram success. For example, if you have a technician who used to work as a forklift operator, they could be a great resource explaining generally what your forklift training program should focus on. Or, let’s say someone was previously a firefighter. They might have some really good general knowledge to share on workplace CPR and first aid.
2. Establish Priorities: Once you’ve assembled your team, it’s all about estab- lishing priorities, identifying hazards, and discussing risk mitigation strategies. Start by assessing the probability and severity of those hazards. Once you have a sense of how likely something is to happen, you can start to prioritize as a team. For example, let’s say we’ve identified a car falling off a lift as a risk. The probability
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of it happening may be low, but the severity could be catastrophic, so this may very well become the number one priority. Another priority may be reducing the number of slips and falls on the shop floor. Also, perhaps you had a forklift accident occur once and a bunch of hand-tool errors.
Now that you’ve got a running list of hazards it’s time to assign them each with a grade. We call this a Risk Assessment. A risk assessment is an examination and evaluation of hazards present in a work- place. It’s the process of cataloging and classifying the various machines, equip- ment, operational procedures, employee behaviors and habits, working conditions, and other potential factors that could cause people harm. 3. Build Your Strategy: Ok, you’ve assessed your risks and figured out which ones you want to tackle first. Next, it’s time to focus on pre- and post-mitigation strategies.
Both pre- and post-risk mitigation focus on risk severity (acceptable, tolerable, undesirable, intolerable), risk likelihood (improbable, pos- sible, probable), and risk level (low, medium, high, extreme).
Between pre- and post-mitigation lies an important step: Identifying the department(s) involved and
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mitigations, warnings, and remedies. Let’s talk slips and falls as an example. The pre-mitigation risk severity is tol-
erable. The risk likelihood is probable. And the risk level is medium to the service department. To decrease the risk, perhaps you’ll want to increase floor inspections to three times a day. By doing so, the post-mitigation risk severity is still tolerable, but the likelihood has moved from probably to possible, and the risk level remains medium. Now, let’s use a car lift accident as an example.
The pre-mitigation risk severity is intol-
erable, the risk likelihood is possible, and the risk level is high. But, by instituting mandatory auto- motive training and contract lift inspec- tion service, the risk likelihood drops to improbable once employees are trained and the lifts are deemed to be in good
Caryn Smith
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