Safety Professionals are Preventionists

Who in your facility is in charge of employee safety? Is it your Human Resources Manager? Or maybe it is the Facilities Manager. Chances are they have more on their plates than just waiting around for an accident to occur. 

No one in any facility is sitting around and waiting for someone to get hurt. That just is not realistic, and would not save the bottom line at all. 

Safety Professionals are preventionists at heart. They are actively looking for where an accident can occur. If there is a near miss, they are the people to go to in order to fix the procedure where an injury could have occurred. 

Do you have a safety professional on your team that is looking out for where an accident can happen? Being proactive to prevent an accident from occurring can save a life as well as production costs.

After an accident occurs there is cost to the facility as well as the person that was injured. Whether it is lost wages or the inability to fully recover. On the employer’s end, there is lost production time as well as missed deadlines. 

How can you get employees, other than just the safety professional, to embrace the safety culture? 

 There are a few steps to take in order to get your employees to embrace this new culture. The first step is to get your management team on board. If they show an interest, chances are employees will follow suit.

Communicate with staff the new changes that are going to be taking place and what is now expected of your employees. This way they can make any adjustments to normal daily routines and new procedures can easily fall into place. 

Create a safety committee that can focus on core elements of the new safety culture and bring new ideas to the table to make the facility into a safer environment. The committee should be able to track how effective their ideas are and be able to share the positive impact it has brought to the company.

Safety starts at the top and works it’s way down. Having open lines of communication between the safety professionals, management team and employees is key. Soon enough you will have a floor full of preventionists instead of reactionists.