How To Get Management Behind Renewed Safety Plans and Initiatives

23 October 2020

Reviewing, renewing, and improving your safety plans and initiatives should be top of mind for all Health and Safety professionals.

With natural disasters occurring every year, breakouts of deadly viruses, and a constantly evolving industry with new work practices, technologies, and tools, it’s critical to be on top of your game when it comes to safety. 

Right now, every safety team should be reviewing and working to improve their current safety plan and initiative.

But renewing your safety plans and initiatives, whether on a monthly, quarterly, or annual basis, can sometimes be an uphill battle.

One of the biggest challenges for safety professionals and supervisors is getting real corporate-wide buy-in for renewed safety measures, procedures, and tools. 

It might be easy for Health and Safety professionals to audit existing safety plans and initiatives and propose new, improved efforts, but it is far more challenging to approve and gain buy-in for those efforts. Budgets are cut, timelines questioned, and ‘if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it’ mentalities are adopted.

As a result, Health and Safety managers should go the extra step to win over and gain support from leadership teams and employees alike regarding their renewed safety efforts. 

This can easily be done by a Health and Safety team that doesn’t shy away from becoming involved. 

3 easy ways to get management behind your safety plan 

There is no doubt that participation from all management levels is critical when creating an influential safety culture. Safety culture describes the attitudes, behaviors, risk perception, and values demonstrated by individuals or shared amongst employees. Safety Culture is the internal awareness and compliance to internal safety standards and processes. 

One of the most effective ways to get management on board with safety initiatives is to create and promote a safety culture within the organization. There are of course many great ways to do this, but we’ve listed the most popular and effective below.

1. Learn from others 

Mentoring is a win-win solution for everyone concerned—the employee, the mentor, and the company. The best approach is to utilize both your internal and external resources. For example, you could connect with a senior Occupational Health and Safety Practitioner to mentor, review, or consult your safety initiative. This could give your safety plans and initiatives credibility and gain managers’ acceptance and willingness to adopt safety initiatives. 

2. Establish company-specific safety culture events in your safety plans or initiatives

This is the most efficient and effective way to raise safety awareness and involve various organization management and supervisory staff members. By establishing a schedule of creative events, you can maintain momentum and support for your safety programs. Events can include getting non-safety practitioners to deliver key safety messages or hosting short presentations by a client or guest speaker. 

3. Have employees share knowledge gained from external events 

Encourage managers at all levels of the organization to attend external safety workshops or conferences. Then, establish a company practice that encourages employees to develop and deliver an internal training or briefing session from lessons learned from the event. This is a highly cost-effective way of gaining value from people attending external events. Additionally, it allows the organization to disseminate new ideas, as well as discuss industry trends. This can help with future safety plans and initiatives. Furthermore, it is a significant management development opportunity as it introduces new ideas to the organization and helps raise safety perceptions.

The benefits of renewing your safety plans and initiatives

Addressing health and safety concerns and improvements allows businesses to improve efficiency and protect their workers. As such, the advantages of getting management behind a renewed safety plan can include:  

• Lower risk, lower cost

• Reduced employee absence 

• Decreased turnover rates 

• Fewer incidents, accidents, breakdowns, and process failures 

• A safe and well-liked image among subcontractors, suppliers, clients, and other partners

How GoContractor fits into your renewed safety plan and initiative

GoContractor is an online tool that manages your worker orientation, safety training, and administration. On site orientations have become ineffective and outdated. With GoContractor, you can move your documents and certification collection, orientation, site safety training, worker data and more online. The best part? It’s easy to use. GoContractor makes job sites safer, and cut down orientation administration costs by 90%. Learn More…

Sonya Sikra

Sonya is the Brand Strategy Manager at GoContractor. She specializes in communicating how implementing tech in construction can drive productivity and profit.

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