In the safety-conscious world we live in today, it can be hard to remember a time when the security and well-being of employees wasn’t a priority. Lest we take it for granted, it’s good to remind ourselves from time to time that health and safety as a workplace concept is relatively new. The laws and guidance we have now sit at the heart of all workplaces and, as a result, in many areas of the world, health and safety continues to improve year on year, with injury and fatality numbers gradually decreasing.
But, with so much at stake, organisations can still do more to ensure even better outcomes. This doesn just mean decreasing accidents. When we proactively create a better safety culture, we feel the ripples in all aspects of the business. The end resuls are real and lasting value.
But how do we achieve this? Obviously, doing so is a multi-layered process and there are no magic bullets. However, in most cases, where there is a healthy safety culture within an organisation you will find this one ingredient – a truly engaged and empowered workforce on the shopfloor.
Why does this matter?
Workplaces that involve employees in making decisions about health and safety are, more often than not, safer and healthier. This makes perfect sense when you consider that employees on the shopfloor are the best people to understand the risks in their own workplace and are also hugely influential when it comes to health and safety.
According to the Health and Safety Executive (HSE) in the UK, accident rates are lower where employees genuinely feel they have a say in health and safety matters (14%). This is significantly lower than workplaces that don’t involve employees in health and safety (26%). The HSE also notes that stronger employee involvement means better control of common workplace risks such as slips and trips. It’s very effective in 76% of cases where employees felt the business always consulted them, but only very effective in 40% of cases if they thought they were rarely, or never consulted.
By fostering a spirit of cooperation, an organisation can develop a positive health and safety culture. By doing so, the organisation can ensure they are managing risks sensibly and bringing about improvements in overall quality, efficiency and productivity.
Ensuring health and safety does not operate in a vacuum
It is so important that Health and Safety does not operate in a vacuum – if ever a workplace function needed to step outside a silo, this is it! The role of Health and Safety is, quite sensibly, to conduct risk assessment, recommend mitigations for potential hazards and carry out necessary investigations. But they don’t work in the roles that actually undertake potentially hazardous activities and, crucially, with so many operations in the logistics space happening around the clock, they cannot be with the team all the time.
Health and Safety therefore often relies on the manual reporting of near misses from operations to identify potential hazards. This has inherent challenges. The only way to really ensure employees adhere to all risk management procedures in a timely way, is for Health and Safety culture to be a seamless part of the work taking place on the shopfloor.
It is not a nice-to-have – it is critical.
The shopfloor team knows what their job requires. They know their colleagues and the physical space in which they work. They bring a practical perspective and their primary goal is to meet their objectives as efficiently as possible while keeping themselves and their colleagues safe.
With the pressures associated with meeting KPIs, it can be tempting to seek out shortcuts in procedures which can increase levels of risk. Therefore, empowering people on the ground to feel comfortable about voicing any concerns they may have, or make practical suggestions around how best to safely get the job done is key.
How do we make this happen?
The organisation will need to make the team on the ground feel respected and listened to. In my experience, you can best achieve this by getting out of a warm office and into the heart of the business. It’s essential that all team members feel confident that talking about wrongdoings won’t result in repercussions or them being seen as difficult.
The team on the shopfloor needs to have the right technology tools to enable them to report issues and suggest improvements. They also need to be motivated by feeling that their efforts have led to positive changes and are appreciated by the organisation. Communication is essential here – without effective communication, all efforts can fail.
People who feel valued and involved in decision-making are an essential ingredient in a high-performing workplace. Empowering your workforce, getting them involved in making decisions and ensuring they have the right skills to do so, demonstrates that the Health and Safety function is doing more than ticking boxes – that they take the health, safety and well-being of all team members seriously.
- Risk & Resilience