How to Improve a Safety Program in Your Business

Ways You Can Make Your Business Safety Program Better

Safety is one of the most important considerations for businesses in the construction industry. Maintaining a safe environment not only protects workers but also saves the business money and protects it from other issues.

You may already have a safety program in place, but are you confident that it’s doing everything you want it to? How can you improve this safety program?

Taking Charge of Safety

Developing and improving a safety program in your own business is highly beneficial. With a better safety program in place, your organization will suffer fewer accidents and injuries. This is obviously beneficial for your employees, who will be able to avoid grievous harm, but also for the profitability of your business. 

With better, more consistent safety measures in place, your business can save money on insurance and expense reimbursements, and it can benefit from a better reputation in the industry overall. On top of that, workers who know they have an employer who cares about their safety are likely to experience increased morale and productivity.

The trouble is that many people don’t have technical knowledge or expertise on how to create a safety program in the construction industry. That’s why it’s often important to work with outside safety consultants, who can review your existing safety measures without bias and recommend objectively better safety measures and policies.

At the very least, you need to rely on objective research for your safety program. Trust expert authorities, like OSHA, and try to objectively calculate the costs and benefits of each potential measure you might take. For example, is it worth buying a more expensive form of sound protection?

Start With a High-Level Review

Before you dig into the little details, take a step back and review your safety program from a high-level perspective. What is your guiding philosophy around safety? What are the core values that make you and your employees take safety seriously? What are the broad, foundational pillars of your safety policy, and where is it documented? Do you generally feel like your safety program is working or that it leaves something to be desired?

Look at Your Culture

The most important elements of your safety policy are in your direct actions, rules, and procedures. It’s important to have absolute, enforced rules in place that dictate how employees should work and operate, and it’s important to make protective equipment available whenever appropriate. However, it’s also important to have a safety culture in place; otherwise, people won’t respect those rules, and they may not follow your procedures. Does your organization have a clear safety culture in place? Is it respected and enforced collectively? If not, how could you make that happen?

Talk to Team Leaders

In the course of improving your safety program, talk to team leaders and anyone else directly responsible for the safety of the team. Ask them what they’re doing to make sure the rules and procedures are properly followed, ask them about employee compliance, and ask them if they have any insights or ideas that can help you improve safety even further. Host these meetings regularly to keep generating new ideas.

Survey Employees

Your employees may also have opinions about how your safety program is working and how it might improve in the future. If you conduct an anonymous survey, you can get a neutral perspective on the business safety program – and possibly develop new ideas for how to make it better.

Analyze Past Incidents

You should also take a moment to analyze any past incidents that have happened in your business. Has anyone gotten injured? Were there any accidents or near-accidents? Why did these things happen? Where did your safety program fail?

Work to Fill in Gaps

Between talking to team leaders, surveying employees, and analyzing past incidents, you should be able to generate a list of gaps in your existing safety program. The next phase of the process is to start filling in those gaps. What’s missing, and how do you address it? Can you make a change to company policy? Do you need to provide new tools, resources, or systems? Do you need to change certain workflows or procedures?

Appoint New Leaders

In some cases, you can strengthen your safety program by appointing new leaders and other authorities. Give people direct responsibilities within the context of your safety program so you have more nodes of safety enforcement and improvement.

Implement One Step at a Time

Improving a safety program isn’t easy, especially if you feel like you’re already doing everything you can to keep your organization safe. But if you remain open to new ideas, if you analyze your efforts properly, and if you take things one step at a time, you can gradually build a better program and keep your employees safer.