Developing a positive safety culture goes beyond the hard hats and safety boots, rules and regulations, systems and procedures. It’s not just the hard hat that keeps you safe, it’s what’s under it. A “Positive Safety Culture” is created when everyone in your organization takes ownership and responsibility for their own safety and those around them.
I can’t count the number of times throughout my career that I have investigated a near-miss incident or accident
where the person involved exclaimed “I can’t imagine how stupid I was”. It is not a question of “being stupid”, it’s a question of stopping to think for a few seconds. “How could I get hurt here today and how can I prevent that from happening”? This is not high tech but rather a matter of common sense.
To reduce personal and business losses due to injury and illness, at work and at home, we have to change the mindset, the culture, the way we think, in our approach to health and safety throughout our organizations from the board room to the shop floor.
The first challenge is to get Senior Management interested in the prevention of loss due workplace injury and illness. The culture of an organization is determined by those who control the reward and recognition system. The next step is the middle management group and finally the employee group. If everyone does a little, no one
has to do a lot.
