Putting trust in your staff is a standard part of any day-to-day business operations. Entrusting that your team can stay out of trouble is essential. However, it’s easy to notice days where your staff appear a bit more blasé about safety than usual. That can be annoying – but you should never ignore those signs. Have you noticed a drop-off in safety standards? Then it’s time to change the message.
You might think they don’t care – that is not often the case. A lot of the time, they simply have grown tired of the same old message. People don’t get excited by metrics and figures – they want to see something a bit more tangible. Sure, management might care about performance analytics – but your average staff member isn’t going to get motivated by a graph of a percentage.
So, if you want to make your staff more likely to work to a higher standard of safety, you should change the message. To do that, you need to actually put safety across in a way that matters to them. Funnily enough, telling staff, they should stay safe because it’ll cost the company money is not exactly inspiring!
What can you do to improve safety standards at work?
First off, talk to your staff about the things that apply to them. For example, you might think they all read through that big safety manual you gave them, think again! Don’t think that simply handing someone a tone of safety ideas is enough. Instead, you need to tell them what they get out of being safe all the time. And no, telling them that they’ll get home without injury is not an incentive. That is your job as an employer; staff will not be motivated by that message. Most people think, it won’t happen to them.
Instead, you have to make it more applicable to them. Simply repeating training mantras is not going to make a difference. Telling someone, they are violating a rule or section of the rulebook inspires nobody. What you can do, though, is this: self-improvement and development.
You don’t want your staff to follow safety rules just for their own health, but for their improvement. Talk to them about how the little things you are asking for will make them work better, get more done, and earn more money essentially. Focus all of your efforts on making your staff more productive and helping them to get finished earlier without cutting corners.
And the best way to do that? Of course, it’s by being safe. You don’t need to drill safety in the workplace in so much – you need to drill in improvement in the workplace. Hide your message of safety within the message of improvement, and staff are far more inspired.
Show them it helps to make life easier, work simpler, and earning money quicker. Trust us – that is far more inspiring than someone shouting safety figures or employee death rates!