How to Improve Safety Culture in Your Manufacturing Business

Manufacturing business leaders are often understandably focused on improving operational efficiency and productivity. But if you want to save money, improve your reputation, boost employee retention, and potentially even save lives, it's also important to make safety culture one of your top priorities.

Developing and building a culture of safety means creating an environment in which supervisors, employees, and staff members take safety seriously and treat it as the ultimate goal. So how do you create this environment?

Understand All Aspects of Safety

First, you need to understand the core aspects of safety in manufacturing.

·   Engineering. Everything starts with engineering. In other words, you need to orchestrate a physical environment in which hazards are eliminated or reduced, minimizing potential risk of death or injury. For example, on-site nitrogen gas generation systems tend to be much safer and more reliable than using nitrogen gas from cylinders. That’s because damaged cylinders can release toxic levels of nitrogen into the environment – which is especially problematic in enclosed spaces. Identifying and eliminating or mitigating hazards in your environment is one of the best ways to improve safety.

·   Education. Next, you need to educate and train your employees so they understand the fundamentals of safety that need to be followed in this environment and so they can recognize hazards when they do inevitably appear. If your employees know the difference between safe and unsafe behaviors, they'll be in a better position to make the right choice when such a choice is necessary.

·   Encouragement. Having the knowledge is only part of the equation. Your employees also need to be encouraged to make the right, safety-conscious decisions whenever possible. There's a physical and environmental aspect of this; for example, you can make personal protective equipment (PPE) more easily available to your employees. But there's also a mental aspect of this; your employees need to feel like they'll be rewarded and celebrated for prioritizing safety over something like productivity.

·   Enforcement. It's also a good idea to have enforcement standards in place. When employees exercise safety appropriately, they should be rewarded. When safety standards are ignored or not taken seriously, the employees responsible should be disciplined.

·   Evaluation. Finally, you should have evaluation standards in place. Periodically and consistently, you should have both team and individual reviews. That means examining decisions and behaviors related to safety, and potentially introducing new standards as a result.

Start With Your Core Values

Building a culture from scratch isn't easy, especially if your manufacturing business has been around for a long time. One of the best places to start is with your core values. Listing and reinforcing your core values consistently helps remind people what type of environment they work in. If safety is your top core value, and you remind your team of this regularly, employees will be more likely to respect it.

Hire Intelligently

Obviously, you want to hire skilled and experienced candidates who can do the job you’re hiring them to do; but you should also hire for culture fit. That means deliberately selecting employees who seem to take safety seriously and are willing to follow all your safety protocols to the letter. Be mindful of job candidates who scoff at the idea of safety or have a troubled record of not following protocols appropriately.

Instill Safety Conscious Leaders

In most organizations, culture flows from the top down, giving leaders a disproportionate share of power in establishing and reinforcing that culture. Accordingly, you should make sure all the leaders of your manufacturing business are echoing your safety conscious sentiments; if you selectively promote safety conscious workers, it's only a matter of time before your culture adapts.

Educate in Short Bursts

Microlearning is becoming more popular in a wide range of environments because of its ability to reduce learner fatigue and encourage retention. The basic idea is to teach people in short bursts, sometimes only minutes at a time, while increasing repetition to make sure the most important ideas are consistently reinforced. This can help you master the art of safety education.

Enforce Consistently

Finally, you need to be willing to enforce your safety standards consistently. If an employee violates a fundamental safety rule, they need to be disciplined – and the next employee to violate that fundamental safety rule should be disciplined in the same way. If you pick and choose when you enforce the rules, the rules cease to matter.

Improving a safety culture isn't exactly easy, especially for manufacturing businesses that have been operating a certain way for many years. But if you're willing to start with the fundamentals and make a concentrated effort to improve safety, you can ultimately build a safer, more profitable, better retaining environment.