Ways to Improve Health & Safety Engagement

The health and safety of your employees should be at the top of your management priority list, no matter what sector you operate in.

But getting your employees to engage with your health and safety policies can be difficult. Creating a shared health and safety culture throughout your business will better help your teams remain safe in the work environment, and encourage them to report any potential hazards to you.

In this article, we are going to look into how you can encourage your employees to engage with your occupational health, and safety procedures.

What is a health and safety culture?

To put it simply, a health and safety culture is a set of beliefs, attitudes and principles that are shared across your organization and workforce. These three aspects fit together to help reinforce your business approach to health and safety.

Your employees will play a vital part in creating a strong health and safety attitude. Employee engagement is important here. But how do you improve your employee engagement?

Our Croner health and safety experts have put together a few tips to help you.

#1 Provide clarity for employees' roles and responsibilities

Ensuring that your employees know what their roles and responsibilities are within your business and health and safety policies.

This will help give your workforce more confidence in what it is they should be doing and who it is they should be reporting to. You can do the following to provide your employees with more clarity.

• Create robust job descriptions that outline particular employees' responsibilities.
• Give your employees a specific role that has been outlined in your health and safety policy.
• Ensure that you keep reviewing and updating your health and safety requirements, and make sure that this is distributed to your staff members.

#2 Build trust and respect

As an employer, you will understand the value of having the respect of your employee. To help you build this trust you should ensure that you communicate with your team.

Any changes to your health and safety policies. This will help you to build a relationship with your employee and show your commitment to their health and safety.

#3 Lead by example

To help engage employees in a positive health and safety culture, it is important to lead by example. If your employees see you following the correct procedure, they will too. Equally, if they see you ignoring the procedure they are more likely to disregard it, this will undermine the safety leadership of your workplace.

As an employer you must provide your teams with training, information and instruction, as well as continued supervision and any required PPE

#4 Take action against unsafe behaviours

It's important to take action whenever there is unsafe behaviour in your workplace. This includes anything unsafe for your employees or the team around them.

To combat this, ensure that your team is fully trained in how they should be acting when at work, or how to use the safety procedures correctly.

If and when an employee doesn't follow the correct procedure, it's up to you to outline the consequences to them. This should be outlined when you put the procedure in place and explained to your employees. This will help encourage health and safety engagement in your workplace.

#5 Consistent communication

One of the best ways to get highly engaged employees is to have consistent communication and safety meetings with them. This will help you to get safety concerns from your employees and help you improve your overall safety commitments.

A couple of ways that you can do this is to

• Complete a regular site walk around, this will help you to ensure that safety equipment is in good condition and being used correctly.
• Set up safety committees to combat safety concerns and help implement new procedures.
• Ensure your staff are well trained and can help reinforce the safety procedures.

#6 Educate and involve

The attitude towards health and safety in the workplace can go a long way to help engage employees in your health and safety procedures.

You can improve the attitude by ensuring that your team is well-trained in everything they need.

This training should be ongoing and constantly evolving to keep up with new health and safety regulations, and newly updated internal safety procedures. For this training, you can bring in safety professionals to help educate your employees. Contact our advice line for details on the wide range of training courses we provide.

Need Expert Advice?

Croner has a team of award-winning HR consultants who are specialists in their field. We've been helping businesses for over 80 years and our advice line is open 365 days a year, 24 hours a day. Why not speak to a Croner expert on 0808 145 3375