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Each year, you want to do all you can to protect the health and safety of your workers. You know that those investments pay off. After all, the average return on safety investment is as much as $4.41 for every dollar that’s been spent.
But how do you prioritize your safety and health investments? Depending on the resources you have available this year and beyond, here are 4 areas to invest in:
1. Safety performance indicators
It’s so important for any business to be able to show and measure its safety performance. Learn Faster, spot critical areas that need attention, and take consistent action to support health and safety.
Prioritizing the recording and tracking of leading indicators will also result in:
- More timely preventive and corrective actions
- The ability to better respond and recognize hazards
- More effective prevention through design and training.
If you haven’t already, make an investment in a comprehensive tool that can simplify or make this kind of real-time reporting possible.
2. Streamlining your workflows
Many organizations are taking steps to have all-in-one safety workflows. This means leaders across departments can collaborate on safety together. More specifically, they can collect and then manage incident reports, tasks, progress reports, and all other safety activities.
Empower your company to make safety a shared responsibility…by design.
Companies are also making investments in areas that can free up employees’ time in other ways. For example, iReport allows companies to quickly and easily automateOSHAlogs. When you (or other employees) are able to automatically generate and submit these reports, you can spend your time on other areas that will add more value to the business.
3. Leadership training and development
Time and time again, research has shown how leadership is tied to employee engagement and safety. Three examples of this include:
- One study saw that there was a lower lost-time injury ratewhen leaders displayed concern and care for the workforce;
- Another study showed that empowering workers, good relationships between management and workers, and an active role by top management in safety and healthpositively impacted injury rates;
- A third study showed that the amount energy and creativity shown by top managers and safety coordinators was a top factor in reducing injuries.
Even though growing your leaders’ capacity can at times seem allusive, leadership growth is one of the most vital pillars of safety excellence.
Ultimately, leaders have a major role in shaping your culture. And it’s these same leaders that can help to unleash discretionary thinking/behaving in employees that can benefit your company’s performance and day-to-day safety.
4. The employee experience
Creating a positive, differentiated employee experience is of paramount importance. That starts with doing research to see what experiences employees are having currentlyand seeing where those touch points could improve.
It may take a bit of work to define your employee experience and to see where any gaps are, but here are a few common areas where you might look to focus where you spend your time:
- Recruiting and hiring
- Company values and how that meets up with norms and expectations
- Onboarding
- Reward and recognition practices
- Community-related efforts
- Workspace design and environment
- Compensation and/or benefits
- Well-being and wellness
- Safety and health
- Communication of workplace risks and issues related to safety
- Continuous learning opportunities
- Events and activities
- Coaching (informal and formal)
- Employee feedback
- Exit interviews
Engaged employees are advocates for your company. They are less likely to become complacent on the job. They also create a competitive advantage that can’t be easily replicated.
Companies that have been intentional about fostering a great employee experience also tend to be safer and healthier organizations—and the opposite is true as well. This is surely one area that will continue to be worth the time and investment you put in.
Let me know what you think. Send an email to info@thesafetypropodcast.com and share with me your thoughts about indoor air quality.
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Achieve Safety Success in 2019
iReportSource gives you incident transparency, actionable insights, and easy record-keeping so you can foster your world-class safety program. Learn more about improving performance, lowering your risk, and becoming more proactive with iReportSource today.
