The Importance of Building a Safety Culture

One of the ways we help you move your business from danger to a safe place is by making sure that you have the right safety culture within your company. Now, of course, having the right safety culture is important to you, but is it to your employees? If you don’t know, it may be time to evaluate the culture within your company and find ways how to improve it.

What is a safety culture? A safety culture is a shared belief, practices, and mindset that shape an organization in a positive way. A safety culture sets a standard for overall safety at your company. For example, at one of our client’s place of business, the warehouse manager was driving around on a forklift with the forks up. He ended up hitting one of his coworkers and took out his legs. After 21 days of this man being in the hospital, he passed away, all because of the carelessness and the lack of a safety culture within this company.

Now, the issue with that is that it starts to become a common practice because if the warehouse manager is doing it, then everyone else is going to start doing the same thing and start driving the forklift in the same way. Now, had the warehouse manager have been driving with the forks down, it would have created a culture of safety within the organization and would have shown everyone else what is the standard. Of course, once we came in, we set those standards in place and help them implement it so that safety was clear all across the board.

Why should you implement a safety culture? According to OSHA, an established safety culture can reduce your costs of injury and illness by up to 20 to 40%. Think about it. Employers pay almost a billion dollars per week on workers’ comp costs, which is coming straight out of company profits. Injuries and illnesses increase workers’ comp and retraining costs, and loss of productivity from injuries and illnesses equate to roughly $63 billion a year. If you have high workers’ comp costs or your premium increases every year, analyzing the effectiveness of your company’s safety culture is a good way of controlling those costs.

Your first step to promoting a safety culture is to contact your risk manager at The Bunker today. Once you’re here, we’ll provide you with a roadmap to get started and help you along the way.

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