In today’s high-risk industries, workplace safety isn’t just a legal obligation; it’s a necessity and advantage to make sure your crew makes it home safe every night. Despite the importance of establishing and complying with safety procedures, accidents and fatalities are on the rise.
According to the National Safety Council, the cost of workplace injuries and fatalities in 2022 alone amounted to a staggering $163.9 billion (about $500 per person in the US). Fatal injuries also increased by 5.7% from 2021 to 2022, as reported by the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. Whether you work in construction, manufacturing, mining, or any other dangerous industry, encouraging safety is key when incidents are becoming more common. Dropping the ball on the job site can lead to costly mistakes, penalties from oversight organizations, and difficulties getting projects insured — all these lead to a damaged reputation, higher costs, and workers who will eventually look elsewhere for safer working conditions.
So how do you prevent these issues from damaging your company culture and bottom line? By fostering and maintaining a strong safety culture in all your projects.
What is Safety Culture?
Safety culture encompasses a set of values, mindsets, and practices that shape behaviors and experiences related to safety in the workplace. It’s the foundation a safe and healthy work environment is built on, helping to mitigate risks and safeguard workers’ well-being in any conditions. A strong safety culture goes beyond following the rules of any job site; employees must believe in the goal of making it work. It’s one thing to make sure everyone wears hard hats — it’s even more important to make sure your crew isn’t putting themselves in dangerous situations or conditions.
So why does having a safety culture matter? It might be enough to meet basic compliance, but encouraging safety company-wide can lead to fewer injuries and fatalities, higher morale for the frontline crew, and less stress daily. Long term, you can expect to see lower insurance premiums per job and greater ROI in the form of less funding spent on Workers’ Compensation claims filed due to injury. Don’t let the upfront cost of implementing a strong safety culture deter you — According to the Occupational Safety and Health Administration, businesses regularly see an average return of $4 to $6 invested into a workplace safety program. Remember, it’s cheaper to build preventative measures than pay out reactive costs after an employee is injured on the job.
How to Build a Safety Culture
While it may seem intimidating, establishing a strong safety culture from the get-go is less of a hassle than it seems, if you have buy-in across your organization. This isn’t just something your Safety Pro can worry about for a day or two — establishing safe procedures that everyone truly believes in is a daily task that requires the input of your whole team. Safety culture is a byproduct of proper procedure and buy-in. Like an artist or musician perfecting their craft, strong safety procedures take practice, revisions, and investment to make a major difference.
Not sure where to get started? Check out these tips for establishing the mindset and procedures needed for safety culture to take root.
Make Safety Culture a Top Priority
Building a strong safety culture begins with committed leadership and management. If leadership doesn’t understand the value of safety, they shouldn’t expect their employees to follow suit. When company leaders prioritize safety and demonstrate their commitment through actions and policies, employees are more likely to embrace safety practices.
To get started, make sure management and frontline leadership are always following established safety procedures and working to refine and improve current policies. Leaders should show they care by taking safety walks and gathering feedback from workers on the front line. Make sure everyone knows the goal isn’t short-term safety — you’re building long-term security across all your jobs. When your entire organization sees safety and security as a necessity, everyone wins.
Get Everyone Involved
Making sure everyone from CEOs to safety professionals and frontline workers is actively engaged in your safety culture is essential for success. If even one worker isn’t following safety policy then you’re still looking at liability on the front line. Most importantly, if management doesn’t truly care about their employees’ safety, that culture will slip throughout your organization, allowing accidents to happen.
Fostering mutual respect within your crew can also help employees understand their contribution and keep open lines of communication. Make sure they know it’s ok to report safety hazards, and regularly train them on how to provide quality observations. This allows everyone within an organization to contribute to a stronger, safer workplace.
Establish Strong Training and Procedures
Regularly reinforce safety processes and procedures through ongoing communication and training sessions. Safety violations can be huge and obvious, but something as small as neglecting to secure a ladder properly can result in an accident, causing severe injuries. Make sure everyone on the job knows and practices proper safety, no matter how small.
Encourage workers to report safety observations in real-time and document them for review and improvement purposes. Don’t be afraid to adjust as needed too — a policy that may work for one job might need to be adjusted for a different worksite and crew down the line. Be flexible, thorough, and use your experiences to make improvements to your training process.
Host Regular Toolbox Talks
Safety briefings, toolbox talks, tailgate meetings — whatever you call them, you need to have them. Organize frequent conversations using real-life examples from the worksite to promote safety awareness and facilitate open discussions about potential hazards and solutions. Here’s some tips for making safety meetings valuable for everyone involved:
- Hold meetings regularly, at least once or twice a week at the same time.
- Keep them short, informal, and focused on one topic. These don’t need to be 30-minute TED Talks — 10-15 minutes should be fine.
- Ask for participation and encourage your crew to think critically about how their actions — or inaction — can affect everyone on the job.
- Call out success and opportunities. Keep your crew informed so they know where they stand by following safety procedures.
- Don’t be a safety cop. OSHA notes positive feedback is more effective than regular demerits, which can affect morale and trust on your team.
On top of keeping everyone on the same page outside of formal training, safety meetings can be essential for building trust and open communication between all workers.
Do Regular Security Inspections
Collaborate with workers to identify and address safety issues encountered daily on the job site. Quality observations should go beyond the surface level — Just wearing personal protective equipment or establishing a safe perimeter should be expected, but still addressed if needed. Encourage your crew to keep an eye out for unsecured gear, electrical hazards, oil spills, accidents, or other dangerous conditions.
Conduct a daily hazard analysis to identify potential risks on a job site. Uncontrollable factors like weather and location should be considered alongside smaller-scale hazards. Analyze near misses and accidents to understand underlying causes and implement preventive measures to avoid future incidents. By being proactive, you can prevent small issues from becoming major risks.
Hold Everyone Accountable
Establish accountability to recognize and reward good safety practices while addressing shortcomings and negligence promptly. Whether it’s in toolbox talks or all-hands meetings, let your workers know when they succeed or fall short. As an accident or near-miss happens, take the time to investigate what went wrong, who was involved, and how the problem can be avoided in the future. Even if something is non-reportable, digging into what happened can give you more information to correct issues that may become bigger accidents down the road.
Don’t be afraid to talk to individual workers to address safety shortcomings, either. Nobody likes to be called out for mistakes, but letting someone know when they’re falling short is crucial to getting everyone home safely. If a crew member is regularly ignoring safety procedures and causing accidents, consider letting them go before someone gets hurt. With that said, it’s important to handle corrective actions privately to avoid fostering a toxic work culture; this could end up suppressing feedback you’ll need to strengthen your safety culture.
Keep Track of Safety Reports
Ultimately, building a safety culture doesn’t matter if you can’t learn from your mistakes and successes. Similarly, observations and incident reports don’t do you any good if you aren’t reviewing and learning from them. Keep these tips in mind for building effective spreadsheets and databases:
- Keep an eye out for trends and follow up with your frontline workers as needed.
- Identify your compliance requirements and safety goals — spreadsheets can be a great way to get started on keeping track of injury rates, losses and reductions in incidents.
- If you’re serious about analytics (and you should be), we’d recommend investing in a tool or service to digitize your processes and improve your data insights — more about this in the next section!
- Set up a system for learning from your data. A Safety Pro should spend 30% of their time reviewing data and identifying room for improvement.
- Keeping your data organized can help simplify audits and identify the need for wider enforcement actions.
While it might be a hassle, analyzing data can help identify room for improvement and will help prove your safety plan is working. If needed, consider using tools to speed up and improve the process.
Use Tools to Organize and Simplify Safety
Pen and paper forms are well-established tools on the jobsite, and some industries (like manufacturing) may require them over electronic devices for security reasons. That said, chasing paper has its limitations. Physical records can be hard to store and review in an audit and must be scanned by hand and dumped into a spreadsheet to make the data useful. Even if the system works, hand jamming a pile of unorganized forms takes too long, and safety professionals are better off in the field—not sitting behind a computer building spreadsheets all day.
By investing in digital-first systems, you can simplify and improve your safety insights faster than a pen and paper system allows. Systems and tools you could use include:
- Digital forms, like Google Forms or custom solutions
- Construction safety management software with built-in forms and analytics tools
- Smart tools that record data and provide automatic, real-time insights and integration into other systems.
How Safety Mojo Reinforces Safety Culture
Safety Mojo is an Artificial Intelligence-powered safety app that facilitates the entire process of streamlining your Safety Pro’s responsibilities, without replacing or overcomplicating your existing toolset. Innovative, essential features include:
- Conversational Forms: Record your safety observations using voice-powered forms that accurately tag categories, contractors, conditions, and more, in both English and Spanish.
- Safety Notifications & Reminders: Send automatic notifications to team members about hazardous conditions, required permits and other important daily safety updates.
- Conversational Dashboards: Get instant access to the real-time data you need to make better decisions on the fly.
- Ask Mojo: Our virtual assistant provides instant access to safety manuals, SOPs, JHAs, and more — just ask Mojo a question and get detailed answers based on available documentation.
By providing simple ways to record and access information, Safety Mojo provides the AI tools you need to increase ROI, reduce accident rates, and promote a strong safety culture daily.
Building out a strong workplace safety culture requires effort from everyone at your organization. By prioritizing safety, fostering accountability, and leveraging the right tools and resources, companies can create environments where employees feel valued, protected, and empowered to contribute to a safer work environment.
Want to learn more about how Safety Mojo improves workplace safety culture? Check out our case studies today.
