health & safety
Top-Down Buy-In
CREATING A SUCCESSFUL HEALTH AND SAFETY CULTURE FOR EMPLOYEE
WELLBEING AND STRONG RISK MANAGEMENT
By John May
Employee wellbeing fosters a happy and productive work-force.
Consequently, occupational health and safety (OHS)
is a strategic imperative that demonstrates sound risk man-agement
while protecting a company’s most valued resource:
its people. This is why it’s not only the right thing, but simply good
business to make employee wellbeing a key organizational goal.
Moreover, the best way to realize this goal is to embed it into com-pany
culture. Success does not come overnight or by accident;
there are several important leadership and organizational behav-iours
that meaningfully contribute to successfully building and
maintaining a health and safety-focused culture. Here are a few
top tips.
SENIOR LEADER ALIGNMENT
Creating and maintaining a successful health and safety culture
requires commitment from every level within an organization,
beginning at the top. Management must demonstrate to all
employees that health and safety culture is a high-priority. This
includes communicating the importance of occupational health
and safety and how this supports the company and each individual,
and clearly outlining accountabilities and collective action items
related to advancing this organizational goal. For example, the
CEO reviews and signs off on the Corporate OHS policy, senior
management review OHS-related occurrences on a monthly
basis and senior management act as champions of the OHS pro-gram
by participating in drills, training and weekly walk throughs
with staff.
SHARED ACCOUNTABILITY
While leading by example is essential, it’s equally important to
ensure everyone has a role in maintaining health and safety. This
includes engaging employees to provide feedback on existing pro-cesses
to suggest opportunities for improvement. Additionally,
creating clear lines of responsibility helps to reinforce accountabil-ity
while also enabling a greater level of control and customization
of health and safety initiatives per stakeholder. For instance,
Rabia Elif Aksoy/123rf.com
All occupational health and safety
documents should be easily
accessible to all employees
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