A key tool in preventing both safety incidents and OSHA citations is to communicate safety policy in an effective way. OSHA requires some elements of communication, and if these are missing, then you are at risk of citation.
However, simply communicating safety policy and checking off the box has negligible benefits when it comes to improving employee safety. If merely checking off the box is your goal, you will likely have negative benefits; you could degrade safety versus doing nothing. That’s because this mode communicates to employees that the company doesn’t place much value on safety. Simply adding a few slogan mats or posters around the shop or office doesn’t fix this. So, what does? Here are five tips:
- Make the company’s safety documents (e.g., electrical safety program documents, company safety manual, safety steps in procedures, etc.) highly readable. When confronted with verbose prose, legalese, clumsy sentence structure, and other obstacles to comprehension, most employees will just give up. Hiring a credentialed writer to make the wording simpler and more clear is not a bad idea.
- Require each supervisor or crew leader to hold regular safety meetings. The best ones are short (under ten minutes) and focused on a single concept (e.g., what to do if you don’t have a tall enough ladder). If these are held daily (for example, at the start of each shift or after the first break of each shift), you then send a safety message daily. But that can add up to a half hour or more per employee per week; if this is a problem, then perhaps go with Monday and Wednesday safety meetings. You can also slip them into “standing around time,” such as when a crew has to wait for instructions or parts or another trade to finish up.
- Implement an employee safety certification program. Develop a 25 question test that is based on your safety documents. Hold an annual exam. Employees who miss one question or less receive a $50 bonus, a certificate, and a special hard hat sticker. Employees who miss two questions get a lower bonus. If you don’t have the resources to proctor the exam, then use the honor system. Even if someone cheats, you’ve furthered the larger goal of communicating safety.
- Empower employees in the field. If supervisors are the only people catching your people doing unsafe acts, you have a high risk of creating “catch me if you can” attitudes toward safety. You don’t want people putting on their safety glasses when they see their supervisor coming — you want them to be wearing their safety glasses at all times where safety glasses are indicated. Train all employees to question any acts that seem to be unsafe. This doesn’t mean they bust someone or yell at them. It means they ask the person doing the unsafe act to stop for a moment (so they aren’t trying to work while distracted). And then during the pause, ask the person if they could be doing that task in a manner that is more safe. DuPont pioneered this approach with their STOP program, and it was hugely successful.
- Text a safety message at random intervals. Perhaps once per week, every field employee receives a short safety message. There are all kinds of ways to manage this with minimal effort. Just make sure that effort includes taking the time to write a message that is specific and useful. Platitudes such as “Be safe” are okay once in a while, but they don’t provide information of practical value. A message that says, “Check your test leads today” would be much better. You can come up with a list of short messages (e.g., don’t stand on the ladder’s top rung, use a meter to verify the absence of power, don’t use a dust mask against a chemical hazard, read the SDS before using solvents or other chemicals, etc.) and have someone (perhaps clerical staff) send them out to a predefined list (e.g., a Contacts Group).
