It Takes a Team to Build a Safe Workplace – Here’s How to Do It
Workplace safety isn’t a one-person job. It’s a team effort. How’s your safety team doing? Read to get some key tips from Totalika, to make your workplace safety team efforts a major success.
Teamwork – Integral to the Success of Workplace Safety
Teamwork is an essential component for the success of all safety efforts at the workplace. Focusing on safety without teamwork is like building a house without laying the right foundation. If you are striving to create a workplace that emphasizes safety, then you need to get all employees and employers committed to the safety effort.
So how do you work on building workplace safety among all? Let’s take a look at the ways to boost teamwork at the workplace.
A Safe Workplace has several teams working together in Conjunction
- Safety management team – this includes the top level executives whose job involves keeping the workplace safe.
- Then there’s the team of employees working along with their co-workers formally and informally, to ensure that everyone remains safe.
- There’s the safety committee that’s working together as a team to identify workplace hazards and take the right measures to prevent them.
- Finally, the entire workforce is one big team that comprises all the other teams. This workforce team works together to prevent injuries, accidents, and fatalities in the workplace.
How to Keep Safety Teamwork Alive?
To ensure that safety works as a team effort in your workplace, you need to consider these fundamentals:
- Make Safety a Workplace Priority – Safety at the workplace is not possible when you consider safety as a one-time job. You should talk about it every day and hold regular safety meetings to discuss new safety problems in the workplace. These meetings should also help to identify solutions to safety issues faced by employees in their daily jobs.
- Keep the workforce informed about Changes – If there are any changes in workplace safety policies, materials used, hazards and other operational procedures, make sure to keep your employees informed about these changes, then and there. Remember that Ignorance is the main reason for accidents in the workplace.
- Provide Regular and Consistent Training to Employees – You need to provide all employees with regular and periodic training. Whether it’s instructions for operating new machinery or learning new skills, practicing fire-safety drills, regular training is essential to mould your workforce into a tight-knit unit who depend on and help each other.
- Choose the Right Workplace Equipment – Very often, business owners in an attempt to reduce overall costs, choose low-quality machinery without the right safety mechanisms or provide employees with poor PPE (Personal Protective Equipment). This is a fatal mistake that ends up being costly in the long run. Make sure to provide your employees with the best equipment as well as PPE. Furthermore, ensure that they know how to use the equipment properly.
- Encourage Employee Participation – By encouraging employees to be active participants in your safety efforts, rather than just remaining as silent spectators, you get them to participate in safety measures willingly. Remember that all employees have something to contribute to making a safe workplace. Get employees involved in safety hazard detection; choosing the right solution and decision making. This makes them feel valued, getting them to adopt safety willingly.
- Encourage Suggestions and Feedback – Very often, the best safety suggestions come from employees, since they are directly involved in the job. Listen to their ideas for making the workplace safer.
- Reward Safe Behaviour – Provide lots of positive feedback and reward employees when they focus on safe Similarly, when you spot unsafe behavior make sure to point it out, without making employees feel bad about it.
5 Features of Effective Safety Teams
All successful teams share a few characteristics that make them effective. These features include:
- Focus – All successful safety teams are focused on the same safety mission. They identify hazards, work safely and are focused on preventing workplace accidents.
- Goals – Successful safety teams understand safety goals and are committed to achieving it. Everybody on the team works together to achieve the common goal of – creating an accident-free workplace.
- Involvement – Successful safety teams are successful because everyone on the team is involved whole-heartedly in the safety effort.
- Co-operation – In successful teams, members cooperate with one another and depend on their co-workers to identify hazards and rectify them, to follow safe operating procedures and to prevent accidents.
- Communication – In successful safety teams, team members have clear and open lines of communication. They share information with one another, offer warnings to their co-workers, reinforce safe behavior and constantly remind each other about safety.
Stay Ahead of the Safety Curve with Totalika
The key takeaway here is that a safety-oriented workplace can be created only with teamwork. And, for the best teamwork, you need to nurture care, responsibility, selflessness, and transparency among your team members.
Look out for ways to improve the workplace conditions and to better the well-being of all employees. As you start building cohesive and focused teams, you can see a marked increase in workplace safety. Remember, that safety is everyone’s job and all team members have a stake in safety.
The key takeaway here is that a team-led safety program offers more than just a reduction of safety-related accidents. It boosts the overall work culture, leading to an increase in productivity and efficiency.
Are you wondering how to boost safety at your workplace? Get in touch with Totalika to get a custom safety program for your organization.