FIVE NEGLECTED ITEMS IN SAFETY MANAGEMENT SYSTEMS

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.

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.

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.