Monday, November 26, 2018

How To Conduct All-inclusive Safety Culture Assessments

By William Cole


Safety remains one of the main concerns for businesses and residential areas. For living and working areas to remain safe, regular safety culture assessments are required. They aim at assessing preparedness and finding new ways of averting disasters. To conduct a thorough assessment, the following steps will guide you.

A review of policies, documents and programs instituted at present. Residential areas and businesses are guided by regulations on how to keep them safe. These policies and documents indicate meticulous plans and efforts towards securing people in these premises. The policies and papers will help you establish how prepared an institution is and its conformity to set industry regulations. The policies act as a checklist on what is expected.

Communicate with employees and the management before you make any interaction. The aim is to get a positive and collaborative environment. These employees you are going to interact with need to know what you are looking for and the benefits they will reap from the process. Their responses will be open minded because they understand your goal. You need to brief them that the assessment is for their own benefit.

Visit the site when real work is in progress. You need to assess an environment that is normal as opposed to when the factory is closed and machines are silent. During a normal day, it is easy to identify loopholes that need to be sealed and areas where necessary steps have been taken. The assessor can understand the behaviors and interactions that will either keep the environment safe or expose people around.

The leadership of the organization should be involved. Though they are not in every corner of the complex, they provide the resources and directions required to keep work places and other complexes safe. Discuss about meeting regulations set for the industry, policies of the company and your findings on the ground. Even the recommendations made will depend on their initiative to keep the place safe. They need to know that the assessment is meant to protect their premises from damage and people from injuries.

The survey should be customized by being guided by the challenges facing your client. Safety is never a generic factor. Each industry or commercial setting has unique challenges to deal with. This is why a customized package is required. Use the challenges of individual industries to develop a checklist that will guide actions to be taken forthwith.

Group and individual interviews will give you a broader report. Measuring culture is complex because you have to consider such metrics as realities in workplace, perceptions, incidences that happened in the past and people involved, among other elements. Discuss how safety is communicated, successes and failures in the past, effectiveness of measures taken and past incidences, among other issues. Groups create a sense of shared responsibility.

The recommendations made should target immediate as well as continuing improvement of safety. You should also pay attention to what neighbors are doing because they could be contributors to increased risk. For any place to remain safe, everyone interacting with it must be involved.




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