Health and safety practices are a huge thing to have in place in your working environment. H&S practices are an integral piece of any business, ensuring all workers are kept as safe as possible and making sure plans are in place in the event of an emergency. However, having a health and safety plan will be of almost no effect if it is not treated with the same seriousness by all staff members on site.
Putting an effective health & safety plan in place is of no use if your employees will not engage in safe practices! For health and safety plans to work effectively, there needs to be participation and investment from both the employer and employee. If the employee does not buy into the plan’s purpose, it essentially becomes pointless to have in the first place.
If you’re looking for ways to encourage employee involvement and participation in health and safety practices, there are many ways it can be done. Some of the methods you can use are simple tweaks to your current rules or could be a complete overhaul of your current practices. Either way, this post will discuss the methods you can use to change this culture of poor health and safety involvement in your workplace.
1. Bridge the employer/employee gap
One of the biggest challenges when putting an effective health and safety plan in place is to get employees behind the employer’s ideology. This is not the case in all working environments, but in many, there may be a divide between employers and employees.
Bridging this gap is essential if you want these health and safety practices to become part of the company culture. To do this, you could find a competent person (from a health and safety perspective) among the workforce and utilise them to relay the company message about the importance of health and safety in the workplace.
Building this shared ideology regarding health and safety with employees is critical to the success of a health and safety plan being used effectively and proactively. It is a method we would recommend you prioritise if you think this employer/employee divide is a real thing in your business.
By fostering a culture built around workplace safety, you make this the new norm around your workplace. Employee compliance and engagement with these health and safety practices take care of themselves.
2. Increasing Employee Engagement
Employee engagement and interaction with health and safety practices are important to the success of your health and safety plan. To really care about the health and safety plans, employees need to feel actively involved in this process and not feel like they’re just being told that this is what they need to do.
If you have consistently been telling employees what they must do to comply with health and safety practices and you’re seeing no improvement in engagement, this could be a huge factor as to why! Employees want to feel valued and trusted, and by giving them further involvement in the creation of these practices, you provide them with a vested interest in the success of health and safety procedures.
3. Prioritise Employee Wellbeing
For employees to feel safe at work, health and safety procedures need to be solid and well thought out to minimise the risk of injury. If employees see a failing health and safety policy, engagement with these policies will quickly go down.
A safe workplace is a happy workplace. You can’t have one without the other! Keeping employees safe at work shows them that health and safety practices are working and naturally gets workers behind the policies.
If you’re seeing employee engagement dwindling within the h&s side of the business, it may be a good idea to look at your policies and the number of workplace injuries you’ve experienced recently. It may be that the answer to all of your issues with getting employees more involved in h&s could be staring you right in the face!
Employee wellbeing must be kept as a priority. Showing employees that you care about their safety can go a long way toward strengthening the relationship between employer and employee.
4. Conduct Regular Risk assessments
Risk assessments are an essential piece of the puzzle when creating and developing your health and safety plans. Risk assessments can have huge positive implications when looking to refine your plans and promote health and safety among your workforce, such as:
- Determining how effective the current plan is.
- Showing potential areas for improvement.
- Show employees that the business is being proactive with health and safety.
- Show that you’re prioritising employee wellbeing.
- Ensures compliance from all employees in accordance with legal regulations regarding workplace health and safety.
Risk assessments will show how health and safety could be improved and promotes to employees just how much the business cares about their wellbeing. In turn, this will naturally increase engagement in H&S practices.
Showing that you care isn’t just important in a monetary sense. By showing how much you care about these practices, you show employees that they are invaluable to the company. This, in turn, improves morale and gives employees a vested interest in proactively abiding by health and safety rules.
5. Put Reward/Punishment Schemes in place
A great way to enforce health and safety practices is to put a reward and punishment scheme in place that deals with both ends of the scale of health and safety. Having a disciplinary plan specifically for health and safety practices is a good way to show the seriousness and importance of health and safety practices in the business.
In the same way, rewarding employees for following health and safety practices should be considered. Acknowledge employees that do well following these practices, letting them know that their work does not go unnoticed.
This is a more assertive way of encouraging and promoting health and safety practices and should only be tried if you believe this will positively impact your workforce, but has the potential to be highly effective if this is the case.
6. Equipment to make employee’s lives easier
As with any workplace, pieces of equipment can be bought to make it easier for employees to follow health and safety procedures. For example, Tow Tugs can be utilised to move heavy loads across sites, protecting workers from any potential lifting-related injury in the process.
Depending on the industry you are working in, countless pieces of machinery and equipment are specially designed to help with lifting, moving, and general workplace safety. By simplifying the process for employees, you make it easier to follow health and safety policies and make it much more likely that they will be followed exactly.
Any Questions?
You know your workforce better than anyone, and you know which route will be best for you to pursue to get the best out of them in this respect.
If you have any questions regarding implementing these health and safety practices, or you’d like to see how our fantastic products could help your business, get in touch! We are happy to help here at Industar.