Culture is difficult to quantify yet remains a crucial aspect of
workplace safety. Most facilities understand the need for specific
safety rules and protocols, but company culture — the beliefs, values,
and attitudes of the workforce — often goes under emphasized.
That shouldn’t be the case.
OSHA says that creating a safety culture has
the most significant impact on reducing incidents and injuries. A positive safety culture will go beyond health benefits, too.
Your company’s safety culture, whether good or bad, will impact your workers in several ways.
In a positive safety culture, workers will prioritize safety in
everything they do, instinctively going above and beyond industry
standards in everyday tasks.
In contrast, in a poor safety culture, safety is an afterthought or
another requirement in a list of forgettable steps. Here’s how both
cultures impact workers.
Workplace safety
The most obvious impact safety culture has on your employees is their safety itself.
When these regulations and protocols take a backseat to
considerations like productivity and convenience, injuries are more
likely.
Various tools and strategies can help prevent safety incidents, but none are as effective as a safety-first company culture.
No matter how much information workers have, avoiding risks
requires conscious, decisive action. If employees only address these
hazards as they arise, they’ll keep appearing.
Positive safety culture is proactive, not reactive.
When workers understand what they can do to prevent accidents and
how it benefits them, they’ll take a more active role in safety.
They’ll adjust their behavior and make suggestions to eliminate
hazards instead of reacting to them, reducing the likelihood of an
accident.
Productivity
Your company’s safety culture will also impact your employees’ productivity.
A poor, purely reactive safety culture makes disruptions more likely, either through accidents or near-misses.
These disruptions interrupt workflows, making it more challenging
to maintain the same level of productivity throughout the workday.
Since accidents
are more likely in a poor safety culture, you may encounter injured employees needing time off for medical leave.
With workers out on leave, either the others must stretch
themselves further to meet demand or you’ll have to hire temporary
workers.
Temporary hires will still take time to be as productive as experienced employees, so productivity will falter either way.
A strong safety culture, by contrast, will reduce incidents, ensuring a smoother workflow.
Smoother operations will translate into increased productivity.
When safety becomes second nature to employees, not something they
need to stop and think about, their individual productivity will improve
too.
Turnover
Finally, your workplace safety culture can affect employee turnover rates.
Workers want to feel safe at work, especially in high-risk
industries like manufacturing, and that’s precisely what a safety
culture changes.
A safety-first company culture will make employees feel more
comfortable and a reactive one will make them feel less safe, regardless
of actual injury rates.
If employees feel unsafe, they won’t likely stay for long.
Workers today have an increasingly low tolerance for a lack of a strong safety culture.
Given these trends, it’s safe to assume that better safety culture can help prevent worker turnover.
Even if your actual injury rates are low, if workers don’t feel safe, you may have trouble retaining them.
A positive safety culture is invaluable
It’s difficult to overstate the importance of a positive safety culture.
Safety must be a part of everything your company does, and it must be a primary consideration in every instance.
A safety-first workplace culture will do more than just prevent accidents.
It will improve workers’ productivity and reduce employee turnover rates, too.
If you can foster such a culture, you can improve your organization on virtually all fronts.