Worker Participation: How To Get Your Workers To Care About Safety
Worker Participation: How To Get Your Workers To Care About Safety
What is one of the biggest challenges any safety manager has? Worker participation. You can build an amazing safety program, but if yOu can’t get your workers to participate, none of it matters. In this article, we will dive into some secrets you can start applying to ensure your workers care more about your safety program.
First off, there is the practical side of participation and a cultural side and both are equally important.
From a practical point of view, this looks like your near-miss program and stop work. Are your workers reporting injuries and is there a hesitancy to report any of these things? Are your workers hesitant to report illness, injuries, first aid concerns? Have you had any workers come to you and express that why don’t feel comfortable in a confined space or that they want a different setup? These are questions you have to ask yourself to judge how your worker participation is from a practical standpoint.
The first step in improving worker participation is ensuring that your workers know they will not lose their job if they speak up. Oftentimes, we have seen that workers don’t want to speak up because they feel their supervisor will be mad or they may get passed up for a raise opportunity or promotion. Workers need to know that if they use their voice to say something doesn’t feel or look right, that feedback will be encouraged and rewarded.
The sad thing is this is not normal. It is common for workers to feel like they are doing something wrong by stopping work or expressing that something seems wrong. Whether it is coming from a supervisor or coworker, workers don’t often feel the psychological safety to speak up which makes worker participation nearly impossible from a practical standpoint.
Why is this? Because we are human and it is natural to not want to cause friction. You don’t want to get a dirty look from a colleague you reported. You don’t want to get passed up for a raise. You don’t want to cause tension in the workplace you come to every day.
We get it, but every worker has to ask the following questions: “Is it worth it to compromise your colleagues' safety to avoid them being frustrated when you report them?” If someone who is risking their life or other lives in the workplace is too immature to not be able to appreciate you making the safe move, they are not mature enough to be on the job in the first place.
As a safety professional, it is your job to create an environment and culture where your workers know they can speak up, stop work, and report unsafe behavior and they will never lose their job or experience negative repercussions
Most workers don’t speak up because they pull the “not my job” card. This phrase of saying “it’s not my job” is one of the most toxic attitudes to your safety program and your company culture as a whole. Most safety incidents could be avoided if someone stepped up and reported something that “was not their job”.
I won't forget this one gentleman was welding on a tank. He had his ladder tilted up on a tank and he was on top of the ladder and had welded little stops to the bottom of his ladder. He created these makeshift supports so he could climb on top of his ladder to weld.
At the time, he was using a grinder and the ladder stops broke. He fell and the grinder sliced his face open. He was working by himself but as we were interviewing employees about the incident, we realized others saw him. An administrator walked by, a supervisor walked by, someone leaving their shift walked by. All of them knew something looked right but chose not to say anything because it was “not their job” or they were off shift.
Worker participation comes down to workers feeling like they can participate without any kind of reprimand.
This requires creating a culture, not just rules, that encourage worker participation. One thing we have seen be extremely successful in helping this is to group workers into smaller groups in safety meetings. We then encourage them to talk and share some of their recent experiences with the group. By sitting in a smaller group, workers feel more comfortable sharing.
Once they were in these groups, we distributed mock accident reports to the group. Everyone started talking about the accidents and what could have been implemented to avoid the scenarios. The employers were fired up to come up to us and share “Apolonia! These guys were idiots! We know exactly what should have been done.”
We then shared with them that the “mock accident” was actually an incident report from their team earlier in the year.
It is so important that your workers are coming up with ideas of how to implement safe practices on their own, rather than just hearing lectures from safety managers and supervisors. Let them come up with the ideas.
Once we created groups for them to talk about their experiences and come up with solutions to mock accident reports, the light bulbs began to go off for the workers. Once they realized the accidents were relevant to them, the importance of the incidents and safety became clear.
If you are wanting to increase your worker participation in your safety program, start by implementing these two things:
Ensure your workers know they can speak up and there will be NO NEGATIVE CONSEQUENCES.
Split your teams into SMALLER GROUPS to talk about solutions to mock accident reports.
It is critical to understand that there is the practical side of worker participation but it is primarily cultural. If your work culture makes your workers feel like they can’t speak up, they won’t.
Are you interested in getting professional advice on how your safety program can be improved? If you are looking to have higher worker participation, more engaged safety training, and less incidents, schedule a call with our team.
We would love to have a no-pressure call with you to talk through some ways you can improve your safety program.Schedule a call by clicking here.
