Traditionally, health and safety management systems have focused on compliance, covering aspects such as personal protective equipment (PPE), emergency evacuation, and incident reporting. A recent WorkSafe Australia audit of a hundred of safety management systems from various companies found the focus on compliance continues, rather than promoting safety itself.

Work health and safety management systems must also include information that motivates staff to work together on safety and fully incorporate a safety performance culture.

To elevate your work health and safety performance, consider including the following in your work health and safety management systems:

1. Whistle-blower Policies

To maintain a high functioning safety culture, workers must always feel safe – both physically and in voicing their opinion.

Employees need to feel safe when they discuss work issues and offer suggestions on how to improve workplace safety. Trust should be developed, so that the employee knows their company cares for them and they, in turn, care about the company.

Organisations must assign an individual who will be accessible at anytime, should anyone encounter work issues. This person provides an alternative to raising the matter with the immediate supervisor, if the person concerned is not comfortable discussing the matter with them. This is most applicable for addressing workplace practices such as bribery, sexual harassment, or workplace hazard neglect, where managers involved in these practices might not allow subordinates to feel free to speak up.

2. Align Staff to Conduct Standards

Conduct standards are a great way to align staff to the safety culture of the organisation. Instead of discussing the ‘how’ and ‘what’ of work safety, it's more appropriate to focus the discussion on explaining the ‘why’. For instance, if the core value of the company is ‘integrity’ then it should discuss the importance of integrity.

Try to take a humanised approach in tackling the conduct standards so that it is friendlier and clearly stated on how to operate in a company. Try to give many examples whenever possible.

When explaining your safety message, add more relevant visual images, such as infographics, that provide the information as pictures rather than words. Another alternative is to create work safety-training videos that visually explain your work safety policies.

3. The Importance of Teamwork

All too often, safety management systems focus on informing workers about what they are prohibited to do (from the process perspective). They miss out other important areas such as helping the workers understand how staff must work together to communicate about safety. Having each staff member working as one cohesive team, goes a long way towards enhancing work safety. If everyone cares for each other, then looking out for safety issues becomes second nature.

4. Conduct of Supervisors

Safety performance and staff productivity will be improved once positive communication relations between supervisors and employees are established. It allows workers to comfortably raise work safety concerns which will lower incidences of work accidents (if management will immediately act on safety issues).

Supervisors are required to possess excellent people skills to deal with their staff to motivate them to talk about issues. Try implementing codes of conduct for supervisors as well. Communicate openly with frontline staff and senior management, as well as empathise with staff about any complaints.

5. Be Friendly

A lot of organisations tend to write safety management systems that are solely written from a legal perspective, rather than the purpose of protecting the staff itself. Write the safety management system as if you're talking to your best friend or child. Write it from a perspective that you are a responsible individual in charge of taking care of a large group of human beings. This is no time to sound like a lawyer. Do not use negative language. For instance:  write "Remain calm" instead of "Don't panic.”

General advice warning

The information on this site is of a general nature only. It does not take your specific needs or circumstances into consideration. You should look at your own situation and requirements before making any decisions.

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