“Why is safety important?” This statement is connected to both the question we get the most, and the complaint we hear the most, “I don’t have time, is this really important?”
Yes, health and safety is important for many reasons.
# 1 It’s the law.
The Health and Safety Act in each province/territory states that employers have to take all steps reasonable in the circumstances for the protection of the worker. A health and safety program is designed to recognize, assess, control and evaluate hazard controls – keeping workers informed and safe.
#2 Bad health and safety is bad for business.
Poor health and safety costs the business a lot of money in both direct and indirect costs.
Employers (and even workers) who fail to follow their duties and responsibilities can be subject to heavy fines and even jail time.
Incidents and injuries in the workplace cost time, money, and resources.
There are legal reasons, financial reasons, and operational reasons to care about safety.
The first way to tackle turnover and absenteeism is to look at your safety program.
#3 It is part of our social responsibility.
At the end of the day, we want to ensure our workers are getting home safe. However, safety isn’t always common sense. This means we have to ensure they know about hazards in the workplace and participate in training.
By emphasizing the need for safety, completing the training, and doing the compliance packages, demonstrates the employer cares about their employees and helps prove due diligence.
So, what do we do with this information? How can we motivate employees to participate? Here are some ideas!
Consider engaging workers by making training/safety talk completion into a competition.
Tie the safety program to employee performance reviews.
Break the requirements into smaller chunks/activities.
Discuss your program at the safety committee meetings.
What is working and what isn’t?
What could be changed?
What does the committee want to see?
Do an employee engagement survey to understand how they would receive more value.
Create incentives.
Perhaps gift cards when training is at 100% complete.
Each completed Safety Talk gains one token to enter a draw for a prize.
“The Boss” delivers lunch/coffee to first employee who completes.
A special badge to put in their email signature.
Have any others? Are you doing anything special? Let us know by emailing communications@systems24-7.com