How to Create a Safety Culture at Your Facility: 5 Key Steps

Safety on every level is crucial for successful organizations. No one wants to get hurt, or see their coworkers involved in an incident. Nor does management want to deal with the operational disruptions, citations, and negative press that safety incidents may cause. But risk reduction is more than just training and compliance programs—truly safe operations involve implementing a holistic safety culture, the effects of which will ripple to every aspect of operations.

It’s no secret that any workplace should prioritize safety. Among the many benefits:

Reduction in occupational health costs like lost time and productivity
Improvement of employee morale—and increased satisfaction and retention
Avoidance of operational disruptions, allowing the facility to keep running smoothly and productively

A fully established safety culture provides a platform for endless performance improvements, and can even unlock innovative solutions and team problem-solving skills that boost overall operations. The question is how to successfully incorporate safety best practices throughout the organization. To do so, they need to be made part of the core culture at a facility, so they permeate throughout the entire organization. I’ll explain how to do this below.

Worker Safety Motivations

Multiple government agencies and regulatory bodies enforce the many state, federal, and local regulations that protect worker safety. One of these is the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA), which has developed and enforces a set of safety standards that apply, in some way, to every industry. Consequences for noncompliance vary, from fines of $15,625 per violation (or even more if the infraction is willful or repeated) all the way up to full operations shutdown if violations are serious enough.

On top of this financial and compliance motivation are the benefits safe operations provide for employee morale—including employee retention and satisfaction rates. No one wants to wake up in the morning and worry about their overall health as they commute to work. The more employees feel physically and mentally safe, the more productive and satisfied they are. Contrarily, companies that regularly face worker injury tend to lose both internal and public trust—resulting in damage to brand image and poor employee retention rates.

Truly, safety is the underlying driver of every successful business. Those that look to shortchange their workplace safety programs are likely to pay a bigger price on the back end. As such, the question becomes: How can I pivot my safety program to make it the best, current, and all-encompassing initiative at my facility? To answer this question, we need to look at your program through two different lenses and plot the best course.

“Old Wave” Safety

Traditional or “old school” safety culture can at times be viewed as an aggressive entity that rules with an iron fist. EHS staff that enforce the rules are seen as authorities who maintain a safety and compliance program scripted by rules and regulations—and nothing more. This kind of EHS department enforces by the book, admittedly often with efficiency—but without sympathy for employees.

In these departments and atmospheres, there is no room for concerns to be raised; employees avoid unapproachable leadership and fail to flag unsafe situations. Questions and asking for help are often seen as a sign of weakness, and workers fear feeling incompetent for admitting mistakes. It’s often found here that safety is only about numbers and compliance—and not the real people who these safety standards impact. Humanity and error are overlooked, and this results in underreporting facility-wide, with skeptical and resistant workers.

This EHS tactic can have resounding ramifications. In these environments, poor mental health, worker-morale, productivity, and operational interruptions can be almost painfully obvious. A measly 20% of employees think that their workplace opinions matter, meaning most employees will often actually actively hide hazardous situations and concerns. This kind of organizational culture also discourages innovation and discovery. In fact, a study of organizational culture across industries found that 56% of employees will withhold ideas out of concern they will not get credit.

Traditional Safety Culture Causes Damage

The result: nervous, skeptical, and alienated workers—the ones who stand to profit the most from safety standards—do the bare minimum to maintain a lackluster program. Even if a program succeeds in the short term, this approach can cause long-term damage. A mix of poor communication and a lack of empathy between managers and staff often results in:

Worker anxiety and resentment
Long-term depression and mental fatigue
Poor overall morale
Damaged health
Reduced productivity
Operational interruptions
Regulatory noncompliance
Preventable accidents

The ongoing presence of any of the above is a warning sign for managers—who risk disaster by ignoring them. Hopefully, no one would deliberately impose this secretive, reactive, closed-off management style; often, it just happens because that’s what’s always been done. It’s a system where workers and managers deliberately do the minimum—and ignore developing safety issues until they can no longer be ignored.

New View of Safety

Luckily, safety is transitioning into something much different—and far more proactive. These new approaches draw from research and the willingness to better understand human workplace psychology. People are increasingly realizing that safety is not just about wearing hard hats and utilizing fall protection systems: In the broadest sense, safety is about how people perform their jobs and interact with workplace programs.

Nowadays, EHS emphasizes the role that safety culture creation must play in employee and community engagement. First introduced by Amy C. Edmondson, Ph.D., in 1999, this concept describes the “shared belief held by members of a team that the team is safe for interpersonal risk taking. It describes a team climate characterized by interpersonal trust, and mutual respect, in which people are comfortable with being themselves.”

The idea is that in a company that allows people to be themselves, they are free to ask questions and make mistakes. Employees are comfortable and engaged, reducing workplace stress and increasing safety.

Psychological safety and security arises from the ability to:

Give and receive feedback
Raise issues and concerns
Disagree
Ask for clarification
Pose tough questions
Ask for help
Offer solutions to problems
Admit errors
Trust

Psychological safety ensures you can foster a healthy culture of safety in any facility. This initiative prioritizes involvement, allowing employees to build relationships and engage with peers in a way that promotes productivity and safety.

Finding a Balance

The key to building a safety culture is to, at the outset, set expectations for how employees can help keep operations safe. Make it clear that you expect them to deliver their voice—their enthusiasm and creativity—to overall workplace safety, and set clear standards for behavior. Team members:

Should be free to share their legitimate thoughts about general work and safety improvements
Do NOT have the license to say just anything, particularly if it’s off topic, deliberately negative, or unproductive
Can express reasonable concerns—without being hysterical or exaggerating (no “sky is falling” scenarios, unless it actually is falling)
Should take only measured risks after considering all possible scenarios—they are not to recklessly leap without looking first

Then, maximize the program by balancing these standards of expectation in tandem with high levels of psychological safety.

With low standards of expectation, workers may sense that their wellbeing isn’t a priority, which will diminish their motivation for the work and subsequent efficiency. They will not be interested in the safety program and refuse to fully engage. On the flip side, if they are being held to a high standard but it’s not made clear that they are welcome to share thoughts and feedback freely, they may become anxious in common workplace situations and other safety issues can thus arise.

Finding the right balance for your operations will support operational success—and keep your employees, as well as the general community, safe from harm.

Steps to Creating a Safety Culture

There are some key ways to begin the process of implementing a safety program at your facility:

Promote diversity, equity, and inclusion. Make these values known throughout the organization. Employees of any race, gender, religion, or sexual orientation must know they are free to be their whole selves at work, without judgment. Framing diversity as a strength to the organization will boost morale and increase productivity. It also increases innovation, as it allows individuals to draw upon their own rich background and offer these experiences and ideas up to the broader team.
Build a culture of friendship and honesty. Business is personal in such that many workers will spend more time with each other than with their own family. Promote communications and interpersonal relationships among teams. Workplace team building fosters tight links and creates a sense of inclusion. Basic honesty and trust between colleagues encourages open raising of concerns as safety issues arise.
Prioritize compliance over hurt feelings. Establish a non-retaliation policy for workers who uncover instances of noncompliance; they need to know that there will be no fault assigned when these situations are revealed. Consider rewarding those employees for pinpointing unsafe work practices. This positive reinforcement will encourage all team members to do the right thing—even when no one is looking.
Encourage reporting—without finger pointing. Create a protocol so that whenever a worker reports on a safety issue, there is no official blame or judgment attached to the corrective action. The process should prioritize identifying any and all causes of the infraction or noncompliance, and subsequently crafting collaborative new solutions to address errors.
Be a transformational safety leader—and encourage others to do likewise. A transformational leader is one who provides intellectual stimulation and inspirational motivation. They consider each worker an individual needing protection—and make decisions based on their needs, wants, and concerns accordingly. These leaders know that promoting safety boosts productivity and keep operations running smoothly on a daily basis—and, they provide an example for all other facility team members to emulate.