Attitude is Everything...Especially When It Involves Your Safety

Managers are often responsible for making sure that employees do not get hurt on the job. You may have this responsibility, but either are not comfortable with it or are not addressing it as well as you would like. This article provides tips to help your entity's safety attitude.

1. Hiring procedures

Assess the safety consciousness of job applicants through your hiring process. An applicant's poor or ambivalent attitude about safety can ultimately lead to increased costs, greater absenteeism, more liability or property damage. Try to identify applicants who have a good attitude toward safety and have shown responsible behavior in the workplace.

Learn the applicant's attitude toward safety:

• Asking for copies of safety training certificates or documentation of completed safety courses
• Checking driving records if the applicant will be driving on behalf of the entity
• Administer appropriate testing.

2. Employee orientation

Federal workplace safety and health rules do not have any specific requirements for new employee safety orientation. Some rules require training or certification before or when the employee is initially assigned to work (e.g., hazard communication and forklift safety). Statistics reveal that workers are the most susceptible to injuries during their first month on the job. That's why you need to provide basic safety training to new hires as soon as they come in the door.

Your new hires need to know how serious safety training is right from the start. Emphasize that all unsafe conditions, accidents, and near-misses must be reported immediately, and describe the consequences for not reporting. Show them what equipment they can and cannot operate without proper authorization.

Make sure to cover these basics:

• The proper safety practices to use and hazards to be aware of within their department
• What to do if there is an accident or injury
• How to report emergencies
• How to report accidents and near-misses
• How to report a workers compensation injury and file a claim
• The location of Material Safety Data Sheets (MSDS)
• How to care for and use personal protective equipment
• How to use tools, machinery, or hazardous processes
• The entity's housekeeping and personal clean-up rules
• The location of emergency equipment, first aid supplies, and designated smoking areas

Schedule a follow-up meeting a few days after employees' initial orientation. You can judge if new workers understand and are using safe work practices. Answer any questions they may have. Use a checklist to review each of the specific safety practices covered in your meeting. Then, have them demonstrate what they learned.

3. Self-audit

Many potential accidents and conditions that may lead to injuries or illnesses can be discovered through specific and methodical workplace auditing, monitoring and in-house inspection procedures.

Why should you spend time doing audits and inspections? From the results of audits, you can:

• Spotlight unsafe conditions and equipment
• Focus on unsafe work practices or behavioral trends before they lead to injuries
• Reveal the need for new safeguards
• Involve many more employees in implementing workplace safety procedures

Self-audits provide invaluable opportunities to:

• Re-evaluate the safety standards of the organization
• Compare safety results against safety plans
• Gauge the relative success of safety training efforts
• Anticipate problems in advance of any OSHA inspection

4. Safety and health committees

Safety and health committees develop or oversee the development of workplace safety and health programs, monitor and help implement safety program elements, and evaluate program progress. Such programs may involve worker training, safety equipment, and safety techniques. The benefits are manifold:

• Fewer accidents, more productivity
• Less absenteeism
• Better morale

Conclusion

Keeping up with all the rules and procedures for maintaining employee safety in the workplace is daunting. It is worth the effort to establish procedures for ensuring that employees are safety conscious and trained during the hiring and orientation process, in order to prevent accidents from happening. Use safety resources from the PEP Online Resource Library (videos, presentations, DVDs, CDs, and documents). Ask for help; feel free to contact the Loss Control Department.