Getting Employees Involved

Get employees involved in the preparatory operations. They are the ones who do the work, can bring to the table valuable information on jobsite hazards, and experience the near misses. ... 

Extending the program beyond the immediate boundaries of employment has several effects. First, it assures employees they are valuable individuals. Second, it gets employees involved in safety throughout their lives. They do not turn safety on when they get to work and turn it off when they leave. 

Participative. Management provides economic rewards and is concerned to get employees involved in groups capable of making decisions it sets challenging goals and works closely with employees to encourage high performance. Communication flows easily in both... 

This is the best opportunity to encourage employee participation. Ask employees and supervisors to help you identify both the successful and unsuccessful parts of your program. For more detailed suggestions on getting employees involved, refer to Chapter 7 [2]. 

The development of your action plan presents another opportunity to you to get employees involved. Managers and other employees can play an important role in mapping out the details they will be expected to accomplish. 

One of the keys to getting employees involved is to meet with them. 

Management sets the tone. Refer to Chapter 6 on management commitment and leadership. If management is not supportive of getting employees involved, and unless your employees believe you want their participation, getting them to participate will be difficult and may not be successful [4]. 

This is one of the ways to get all employees involved in the safety process allowing them to participate in the inspection process. Refer to Chapter 7 for more information on how to use employees in the process. One way to get employees involved is to form employee committees or joint employee-management committees to help conduct routine inspections. By implementing these methods, you can ... 

Employees should be encouraged to help in the enforcement of work rules and work practices. Your intent is not to turn your employees into informers, but to encourage them to keep an eye out for the safety of themselves and fellow workers. Many employers have encouraged an atmosphere where a successful safety culture exists by getting employees involved. In this type of situation, employees speak up when they see safety issues— for example, a co-worker who needs to be reminded to put on personal protective equipment [2]. In many cases, employees will discuss safety infractions with their co-workers. The key is to develop a culture where personal protective equipment is not the only safety infraction that is discussed. There are many more hazards that should be identified. 

Getting employees involved in the development of the safety management system is particularly important to create ownership and buy-in. Employee involvement in the development of the safety management system will help to ensure that it fits within the existing organizational culture. 

Many opportunities can be used to get employees involved in the safety process. For example, to promote employee involvement, you can ask them to be involved in the development of hazard assessment, inspections, preventative maintenance, training, emergency response, and loss-producing reporting systems. 

Before we start our discussion on how to get employees involved in the safety process, we need to step back and look at reasons why employees do not always want to get involved. 

Based on experience, a safety culture requires support and commitment from the entire organization, especially from leadership. While commitment starts with leadership, it is necessary to get employees involvement to make the safety management system work. Effective leadership is an indicator of how well the organization is working to create a safe work environment. 

In an effort to promote safety and fight such complacency, many organizations establish initiatives to get employees involved in safety improvement, often using the same approaches taken in their quality improvement efforts. A natural outgrowth of these efforts is the involvement of employees in teams that work on improving safety. Such teams are directed to identify safety problems as well as develop solutions for them. 

If the process is voluntary, the organization has a way of measuring complacency. When employees begin to get complacent about safety, they stop conducting observations. These organizations must then take action to promote safety awareness and get employees involved in safety improvement efforts. When observations are mandatory, the organization will often continue to get observation forms and be unaware of a growing complacency toward safety. 

This edition also includes eight new case studies. The new case studies show the long-term effectiveness of a behavioral approach (Chapter 24), illustrate the effectiveness of a self-observation process (Chapter 25), and document the effectiveness of behavioral safety in smaller organizations (Chapter 26). Finally, an invited chapter from Alicia Alevero and John Austin presents their research that demonstrates the positive impact that conducting observations has on the observer] This research on what they have entitled the observer effect is important because it documents the value of getting employees involved in conducting safety observations. I am excited to be able to include a summary of their research in Chapter 27. 

Safety committees can be very helpful in getting employees involved in a safety and health program. The employees who work the jobs every day have a good idea of the safety issues within a particular task and can aid in correcting the problems. This is discussed in more detail in Chapter 5. 

Some organizational cultures inhibit the kinds of behavior needed to reduce industrial injuries. Getting employees involved in safety is difficult within the context of top-down rules, regulations, and programs supported almost exclusively with the threat of negative consequences. In contrast, employee involvement is much more likely with top-down support of safety processes developed, owned, and continuously improved upon by work teams educated to understand relevant rationale and principles. 

You will find forms to help you identify and track hazards, as well as forms to help you get employees involved in the safety process by providing their feedback, which is an important part of any safety and health program. 

What s-Wrong-With-This-Picture exercises are great ways to get employees involved in hazard recognition. But, where do you come up with the pictures and activities Following are a few resources to get your started. 

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