Building a Safety-First Culture
Building a safety-first culture in the workplace is crucial for reducing incidents, improving productivity, and ensuring long-term business success.
- By Troy Teepe
- Jul 19, 2024
In 2022, there were over 5,000 deaths in the workplace, and private industry employers reported 2.8 million non-fatal workplace injuries and illnesses. On a financial level, employers in the United States are paying over $1 billion a week in direct worker’s compensation.
It’s clear from these numbers that worker’s comp incidents come at both a great human and capital cost. Despite this, many in the industry are chasing standards from behind, and looking at safety issues reactively instead of proactively. The biggest hurdle facing the construction industry today is that leaders aren’t prepared for how safety protocols will evolve.
When a safety incident happens in the workplace, it’s almost always due to human behavior, and it’s almost always preventable. Safety needs to be culture-driven. Everything that happens or doesn’t happen on a job site is driven by culture, whether leaders think they have one or not.
Safety Culture Starts from the Top
Creating a safety-first culture can have massive benefits, including fewer at-risk behaviors, lower incident rates, lower employee turnover, lower absenteeism and higher employee productivity. Managers should understand that implementing, communicating, and understanding a deep safety culture is essential for future success.
The most important building block for a safety-first culture is the understanding that it must start at the top. This requires a mindset shift among leaders. Safety should be thought of as a revenue driver, not a cost-center. In addition to these potential revenue-boosting benefits, safety is essential for earning new work, as many potential projects are only becoming more stringent in their expectations for safety standards on work sites.
Incident rates are being carefully evaluated by contractors, and without the right safety procedures, a company might not even be able to bid on a job. Large general contractors in particular expect well above and beyond the OSHA requirements on a work site.
Common Challenges
Once leadership is onboard, a safety-first culture is well on its way to successful implementation. That said, there will always be some level of resistance when implementing new procedures, particularly when working with teams that have been in the industry a long time. Despite statistics that say otherwise, veteran employees can feel that there isn’t a problem with the old way of doing things.