Why you need to drive health and safety from the top
As with any business priority health and safety needs to be driven from the top. Senior management led safety cultures have more impact across the organisation as a whole and have better engagement. If you are a senior leader here's how to encourage healthy and safe working...
Safety culture from the top
Safety culture determines the style and effectiveness of any health and safety management system. It also determines the commitment of your staff to that system. An organisation’s safety culture comprises how people feel, what people do and what the organisation has in place…
- How is health and safety perceived across your organisation. How do your front line workers feel about how health and safety is managed?
- What do people do? What are their safety-related behaviours and actions?
- What health and safety policies, procedures, structures and systems have you got in place?
Considering these 3 aspects will enable you to define your existing safety culture. It will also help you to establish where you are on the Health and Safety Maturity Index:
Health and safety foundations
Invariably health and safety focuses on front line workers. The reality is it needs to be much more than that. Unfortunately the foundation of Health & Safety is often missed out, which includes a project plan, a steering group, a communication strategy and most importantly senior management commitment, which is absolutely critical to all of it.
If you improve leadership buy-in you will improve employee engagement, which will improve safety.
Senior management involvement
Business priorities centre around money and making profit. So naturally senior management will focus on activities and metrics that drive profit.
We know that leadership involvement improves health and safety directly. It is proven that better health and safety brings better employee engagement which improves productivity, reduces costs and helps to retain good people. So actually… leadership involvement improves health and safety which will help drive profits.
If you are a senior leader or business owner get involved today in the health and safety of your organisation. Keep your people safe and improve your bottom line.