Workplace safety doesn’t exist in a vacuum. Your organizational culture, processes, and challenges all impact your safety program and performance. Whether your company is growing, downsizing, transforming itself for a new generation, or simply trying to stay afloat in an increasingly competitive business climate, the question isn’t whether safety will be affected—it’s how.
Consider some of the top challenges identified by respondents to the 2nd Annual Safety Progress Survey from SafeStart and the EHS Daily Advisor:
- “Our company is currently undergoing a massive transformation; this will impact HSE staff. People are stretched thin and may be losing sight of obvious hazards, risk, etc.”
- “Transferring training to an online format effectively.”
- “Budget—not having enough funds dedicated to acquiring PPE and other safety-related materials.”
- “Keeping everyone informed and up to date on safety due to the large and rapid turnover we seem to be going through right now.”
- “Changing the safety mentality of older employees. Things are not done now the same as they have been done in the past.”
- “Culture change throughout the facility.”
- “The ongoing changes to regulations, guidelines, and standards.”
All of these challenges have one thing in common: change. Whether the changes are related to technology, staffing levels, regulations, or company culture, today’s safety professionals are increasingly tasked with sustaining safety excellence amidst the moving targets of business strategy, economic trends, and evolving processes.
As a safety professional, your job is to guide your company’s safety efforts through the myriad challenges and opportunities your organization faces, both internal and external. Key to success is anticipating the potential impact of business strategies, management decisions, industry trends, and more on your safety culture and taking proactive steps to ensure that workers are not put at risk.
Safety expertise alone isn’t enough to succeed at this task, and you can’t do it alone. You need to secure buy-in from front-line workers all the way up to the C-suite, communicate effectively across your organization, and possess a firm grasp of the complex interplay between safety and productivity, quality, company culture, and the bottom line.
At BLR’s 2018 Safety Summit from April 16-18 in Orlando, Florida, expert attorney Adele Abrams and world-renowned safety speaker and trainer Regina McMichael will present an engaging panel discussion titled How Organizational Processes Impact Safety Success. They’ll focus on broadening your understanding of safety and the organizational factors that impact it in order to drive success in your program.
Attend the event to learn more. Safety Summit is the nation’s leading safety conference to experience inspiring keynotes, best practice-rich general sessions, and targeted tracked sessions on the latest risk management/OSHA compliance developments and practical strategies for improving safety performance at your organization.
