Driving Participation in Safety at NXT 2017: The Future of EHS

We’re just one month away from the safety conference of the year, NXT 2017: The Future of EHS, so if you’re a forward-thinking safety leader and you haven’t reserved your spot yet, now’s the time to do so!

In this post we’re going to take a closer look at one of the conference themes and something we’re incredibly passionate about at eCompliance, increasing safety participation.

Because 98% of safety professionals believe direct worker participation is the key to improving safety performance but only 27% of EHS pros say that everyone in the organization is actively involved in the safety process, we decided to curate an afternoon’s worth of hands-on breakout sessions around the topic. In addition, Dr. Judy Agnew will be introducing a new safety methodology called participation-based safety earlier in the day, which you won’t want to miss.

Participation Breakout #1 – Driving Participation from the Frontline to the Boardroom

Getting non-EHS workers engaged and eager to participate in safety activities is still an ongoing struggle at the majority of organizations. Frontline workers often feel disconnected from the safety process and management isn’t bought-in to the EHS program because they’re not aware of the state of safety at the company. To combat this, our first participation-focused breakout session will focus on helping EHS leaders effectively close the gap in their organizations by connecting frontline workers to head office, while simultaneously providing senior management with meaningful data about the company’s safety performance. In this session, an eCompliance specialist will share best practices for building a mobile-centric safety program that’s informed by positive reinforcement and solid data analysis.

Participation Session #2 – Leading a Participation Culture

Health and safety professionals currently measure participation in safety in a variety of ways, but 24% of EHS professionals don’t measure participation at all because they don’t know how to start measuring it or which metrics to track. We want to change that, which is why the second breakout session in the participation stream will walk through how to build an engaged safety culture using the participation-based safety methodology, which will include an overview of which metrics you should consider tracking in your program and how to best measure them.