4 Steps to a Safer Workplace

The first step to success in the construction industry is ensuring the safety of your most valuable asset—your employees. Use these four methods to improve the safety of your employees’ environment:

Evaluating Your Safety Management Program
Measuring the effectiveness of a safety management program is as important as implementing one in the first place. There are two common measures employed in the construction industry to evaluate internal safety programs: leading indicators and lagging indicators. Leading indicators focus on future safety performance, measuring factors that indicate value and direction of the initiative, such as the number of new safety controls implemented, risk and hazard evaluation and potential job hazard analysis. Lagging indicators measure facts and past events, such as the frequency and severity of injuries, workers’ compensation claims and lost workday rates due to injuries, fatalities or other job-related accidents.

Proactive Measures
In order to improve upon traditional safety management programs, your company should consider focusing on more than evaluating data. The company should also incentivize proactive employee participation in safety programs. Traditional safety management programs track efficiency based upon recordable injuries but don’t always place enough emphasis on identifying and understanding the cause of incidents.

Empowering Employees
Employees can provide a great deal of insight regarding workplace safety. The focus should be on incentivizing pre-emptive hazard elimination rather than on valuing lagging indicators like zero-accident reporting.

Employee Buy-In
Invite employees to participate in the development or revision of your safety program by sharing opinions and ideas. One way to motivate employee participation is to find out what incentives are of interest to them. This ensures employee buy-in because they feel empowered through a sense of ownership, particularly when the program’s incentives are fashioned after what they want. Actively involving your employees during the planning stages of your company’s safety management program is the first step to creating a sustainable culture of safety.