Best Practices for Workplace Safety and its Key Ingredient

Safety is not a normal checklist exercise. The cost of putting environmental, health, and safety best practices in place to prevent disasters far outweighs the expense of dealing with them after they happen. Investing in equipment, machinery, and processes can help businesses reduce the number of safety accidents, eventually leading to zero.

While it is a legal responsibility to provide a safe working environment for employees, companies that take a proactive approach to safety tend to have higher employee engagement and customer loyalty. As a result, a holistic, enterprise-wide approach to effectively managing risks and aiming toward an incident-free organization provides a strong economic proposition.

This blog explores the best practices for workplace safety and the advantages associated with it. This blog is an excerpt from the whitepaper “Streamlining Health & Safety Processes in the Consumer Packaged Goods (CPG) Industry with a Next-Generation EHS Solution.”

Benefits of Implementing a Comprehensive Safety Policy

Implementing a good safety policy allows you to:

• Identifying hazards and prioritizing mitigation measures based on their severity
• Evaluating the efficacy of current health and safety practices
• Implementing a safety policy for continuous improvement
• Aligning it with business objectives
• Communicating the policy inside the organization
• Creating processes and standard operating procedures (SOPs)
• Keeping track of progress
• Effective continuous improvement (CI)

Key Ingredients for the Successful Implementation of a Health and Safety Program

key ingredients for the successful implementation of a health and safety program include:

1. A Top-Down Approach

A well-thought-out and implemented health and safety program goes beyond regulatory compliance. It has the potential to promote employee trust, engagement, and, as a result, workforce productivity. There’s no denying that a well-designed safety culture that is implemented will yield direct financial and operational benefits.

However, the following factors must be planned for this to happen:

• To reassure employees about the organization’s commitment to workplace safety and employee well-being, leadership commitment is critical.
• The program will be more effective in bringing about the required changes if it takes a top-down approach.
• In addition to advocating policy changes, senior management must be involved in monitoring and measuring the impact of those changes.
• Management commitment would be reinforced by periodic management reviews using data points and tracking key performance indicators.

2. Employee Buy-in

Other strategies for safety leaders to inspire staff involvement, in addition to management leading from the front, include:

Communicate and Reiterate: Productivity and safety should be prioritized equally. Supplement safety efforts by establishing an effective communication system that provides employees with information on safe behavior. Give them tools for reporting and tracking incidents. Provide them with training to ensure safe behavior. This will assist the organization in reducing the number and severity of incidents while also improving its brand image.

Positive Reinforcement of Safe Behavior: It is critical to report negative incidents and outcomes to respond in a timely manner. However, encouraging positive behavior is equally important in preventing future recurrences. This includes sharing information whenever processes were followed, extra effort is required to address a safety observation, and so on. Near misses are frequently more difficult to detect. Safety leaders can encourage employees to report near misses and safety observations by instituting a reward system.

Create a Caring Environment: Employees must have faith in the system and believe that their safety is important to the company. Responding to their reports on observations, near misses, and incidents are therefore critical. Ensuring timely action and closure also increases employee trust in the organization’s commitment to safety. Employees can be encouraged to identify systemic issues by safety leaders, who can foster an environment of trust and confidence in which incidents can be reported freely and without fear of retaliation.

3. Enterprise-wide Rollout

Managers of health and safety make a workplace safe on many levels. These include

• Employee safety through infection and injury prevention
• Risk mitigation across various functions across the supply value chain ensures enterprise safety.
• Environment protection is achieved by ensuring that processes and activities do not endanger the environment in any way.

A successful health and safety program should include all functions of the organization in order to protect the interests of all stakeholders, including employees, customers, suppliers, and investors, as well as the environment and the community in which they operate.

4. Staying Compliant

The Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) establishes health and safety standards for organizations. It defines the risks and requires manufacturers to audit and inspect their facilities on a regular basis to ensure risk mitigation and a safe workplace. Manufacturers must also submit documents on a regular basis, and noncompliance results in penalties based on the severity of the violation.

ComplianceQuest’s EHS Solution for Integrated Safety Management

Transform to a fully connected business with ComplianceQuest’s EHS solution- a next-generation AI-powered quality and safety management platform, built on Salesforce. Our connected suite of solutions helps businesses of all sizes increase quality, safety, and efficiency as they bring their products from concept to customer success.

Our intelligent data-driven platform comes with best-in-class integrated processes to mitigate risks, protect your employees, suppliers, and brand reputation, and increase innovation, compliance, e, profit, and customer loyalty. ComplianceQuest is pre-validated and easy to implement, use, and maintain, allowing for streamlined communication and collaboration across the product value chain.

Know more about ComplianceQuest’s EHS solution by requesting an online demo: https://www.compliancequest.com/lp/ehs/