Have a health and safety policy and plan in place? Great! But how can you ensure everyone’s 100% on board?
Here are four simple steps from Livewire HR to get your crew on the same page.
- Make it relatable – to engage staff in health and safety at work, they need to understand why health and safety is important (imagine they’re injured during a work day, how would it impact their life?), understand what health and safety is, how to do it properly (this requires regular training), and be involved in making decisions that impact their life and work.
- Keep it simple – start with small things that are easy to implement, like team meetings with health and safety on the agenda, where you look at both physical and mental health.
- Have a ‘no blame policy’ – if something happens, you want your staff to tell you so you can fix it, train them, or take appropriate action. Make sure they feel comfortable to tell you about a situation, even a near-miss.
Strong leadership – if management doesn’t take health and safety seriously then their team won’t. Business owners need to role model what good health and safety is. We need to be constantly learning about it (especially industry-specific health and safety), and filtering our learnings to our team. Sometimes having a conversation using open questions is more engaging than a PowerPoint presentation.