6 Ways HR Can Engage Employees in Office Safety
For any workplace initiative to be successful, leaders must find a way to secure buy-in from all employees. No matter how small or large a suggested change may be, it takes the efforts of the entire workforce to ensure it’s performed and repeated consistently and continuously.
Buy-in is most easily-achieved when employees are engaged in their work, with those who feel a positive emotional connection to their colleagues and managers most likely to uphold best practices to the best of their abilities. However, recent reports paint a worrying picture, with only around 30% of Americans considered to be fully-engaged in the work they perform.
While low engagement of any kind can be concerning, failure to properly participate in safety initiatives can be outright dangerous, potentially placing staff, clients and visitors at risk. With this in mind, it’s vital that HR professionals find reliable ways to promote a culture of safety in their workplace, so below we’ve compiled 6 ways HR can engage employees in office safety.
What Does a Culture of Workplace Safety Look Like?
Before exploring engagement strategies in detail, it’s important to define the key aspects of a strong professional safety culture. HR must promote alignment with the following statements:
Safety is our top priority, taking precedence over all performance metrics.
Every team member is equally expected to maintain safety standards.
Feedback from all team members is factored into all safety decisions.
Safety leaders receive the support they need to be effective in their roles.
Communication across all levels of the organization is always encouraged.
All team members are involved in regular health and safety training sessions.
Easy access to health and safety policies is provided to all team members.
All safety policies are regularly assessed with continuous improvement in mind.
An organization with a strong professional safety culture will build all its workplace policies and procedures around these core principles. When implemented consistently, such efforts help to ensure the safety of all actions and practices is evaluated before decisions are made.
6 Ways to Engage Employees in Office Safety Initiatives
While understanding the principles behind a strong safety culture is a good place to start, it’s only possible to implement improvements with a commitment from all employees. Achieving consistent, business-wide buy-in hinges on HRs ability to successfully engage all employees in continuous office safety improvements, below are 6 proven ways to achieve this outcome.
1. Perform Regular Risk Assessments and Audits
Leaders can’t expect employees to uphold safety standards if they’re not shown why they’re important. While basic safety rules may be adhered to naturally, some more specific policies that reference unique issues can appear unimportant to people they don’t immediately affect.
The performance of regular risk assessments and physical security audits help leaders back up safety decisions with clear data. Incorporating business security cameras into these audits not only strengthens monitoring capabilities but also provides objective evidence to support safety initiatives. This information can be used to show staff across departments how new policies will benefit the workplace as a whole. Discussing audits as a team can also help position safety initiatives as a collaborative effort, a key aspect of strong safety cultures.
2. Encourage Open Communication and Feedback
Ensuring staff have the ability to openly share safety concerns with managers and business leaders communicates to the workforce that their opinions matter. Staff should be provided quick and simple ways to raise concerns as they arise, with multiple options like suggestion boxes and digital reporting systems made available to help promote business-wide adoption.
By demonstrating that leaders are actively listening to and acting upon employee concerns, businesses can show a commitment to collaboration in terms of workplace improvements. If staff can be sure their worries will be respected, safety issues are more likely to be resolved.
3. Factor Employee Wellbeing Into Safety Initiatives
Monitoring and managing employee wellbeing is paramount to improving office safety. Staff that feel their emotional needs are not being met are 61% more likely to suffer burnout, 48% more likely to feel stressed and twice as likely to experience feelings of sadness and anger.
Each of these factors can have a negative impact on office safety, causing staff to pay less attention to safety rules and suffer lapses in concentration that can place themselves and their colleagues at risk. Comparatively, factoring employee wellness into safety initiatives illustrates a commitment to safety not just in a business sense, but also on a personal level.
4. Include Employees in Decision-Making Processes
It may only take one or two instances of an employee offering a well-thought-out suggestion and having it ignored for that person to become completely disengaged in an initiative. Given the importance of office safety to all team members, it’s typically not worth running this risk.
Holding regular meetings and committees where employees are encouraged to share their thoughts on safety policy improvements can be a highly-effective way to boost engagement in office safety. If a business makes an effort to enact good ideas as frequently as possible, staff will learn that their opinions are valued, and a strong safety culture can be facilitated.
5. Recognize and Reward Adherence to Safety Policies
Efforts to recognize the hard work of employees have been shown to increase key metrics like engagement and productivity by 40%. When applied to office safety initiatives, reward and recognition programs can help to motivate employees to consider safety in all they do.
Taking the time during regular meetings to celebrate staff who go the extra mile to uphold safety standards ensures office safety is frequently discussed, as well as demonstrates that engagement with initiatives is worthwhile. By positioning safety initiatives as collaborative and rewarding undertakings, it can become easier to maintain business-wide engagement.
6. Encourage Continuous Training and Development
Alongside standard regular safety training sessions, it’s a good idea to explore wider skill development and continuous training opportunities in specific areas of workplace safety, especially if staff in certain departments face unique safety challenges related to their roles.
Wider safety training can be positioned as a skill development opportunity, enabling staff in specific roles to shoulder new responsibilities and pursue professional growth. By showing a willingness to support employees in this way, other team members may feel more confident to explore opportunities themselves, helping to encourage ongoing discussions about safety.
Final Word
Ensuring the safety of all employees should always be viewed as a top priority, with efforts to uphold strong safety standards benefitting businesses in numerous ways. However, it’s not always easy to encourage engagement in ongoing safety initiatives, especially if employees across all departments aren’t appropriately aligned, potentially placing the workplace at risk.
By making efforts to build and maintain a strong culture of safety in the workplace, HR and management staff can create safer, happier and more productive professional environments. Guided by the 6 principles covered above, and with a commitment to ongoing improvement, HR can effectively engage employees in office safety and ensure alignment across teams.