5 Steps to a Strong Safety Culture

Strengthening an organization’s safety culture can help streamline communication and bring teams together while improving safety records and driving safer outcomes. Ninety-eight percent (98%) of safety leaders believe more front-line participation is the key to improving safety performance and building a strong safety culture.¹ 

Safety culture can be described as the behaviors, beliefs, and attitudes towards safety and its value found within a particular organization. With the current state of the world, having all workers come together physically in one place is not feasible. This has left EHS professionals searching for an alternative means to connect the workforce and either start or continue to develop their safety culture. The impact of remote work, dispersed teams, modified workspaces, and the like, has increased the complexities of connecting your workforce and driving a strong safety culture that will create a more proactive approach to risk mitigation. 

In 2020, we conducted a survey with over 800 companies in North America, within small, medium, and enterprise businesses in a range of high-risk industries from energy and manufacturing to construction and mining. We asked how they feel about the state of safety and our survey revealed: 

• • 33% feel poor safety culture is a business challenge
  • And over 40% see Health and Safety as a competitive advantage, if managed well

  In a previous study¹ , EcoOnline analyzed organizational safety performance over five years. Through this, it was found that companies usually fall into one of the following four categories: 

Let’s dive into what each of these categories means:  

Low Compliance Culture: Low risk industries where the law requires safety training. Low Compliance Culture organizations implement minimal training, resulting in low adoption and low safety activity rates per employee.  

Reactive Culture: Reactive organizations responding to a particular incident where someone has injured themselves in the office. These organizations see high adoption rates and low safety activity rates per employee.  

Task Force Culture: Safety professionals eager to point out deficiencies and violations, resulting in high levels of safety activities per employee and low adoption rates.  

High Participation Culture: Highly proactive with commitment to safety from the CEO all the way to the front-line workforce, resulting in high safety activities seen per employee and a high adoption rate.  

A ‘High Participation Safety Culture’ is the ideal, but under current circumstances, understanding how EHS professionals can increase worker participation when so many are widely distributed, disconnected, or unwilling to engage is challenging. 

Download our newest whitepaper, 5 Steps to a Strong Safety Culture, to learn how to overcome this and what the different steps are to strengthen your safety culture.