Steps to help create a safety culture

Successful safety performance will come about with a successful safety culture.  It takes the values set by management to determine the way that the workforce acts. Therefore, a safety conscience culture has to be established through the management and passed along to the workforce.

Here are a few steps to help create a safety culture:

• Present workplace safety as a continuous process and not just a compliance requirement
• Actively encourage workers to improve safety performance, and recognize improvements
• Involve the employees in the safety decision making process
• Use accident investigations as action planning, not fault-finding missions
• Explain why new safety processes have been implemented and how to measure its success
• Investigate “near-misses” as indicators of a series of events and not as a one-time or isolated event
• When accidents or “near-misses” occur look first at why the safety process failed instead of looking to place blame