Proactive safety management

Responding is Phil Molé, health and safety expert, VelocityEHS, Chicago.

If you ask a typical workplace safety manager, you’ll probably hear that safety is a collective responsibility shared by workers, safety professionals and management.

In practice, there’s often little systematic effort to involve anyone other than safety pros in the processes. Too often, safety teams operate in a silo from the rest of the organization, with others taking part in practices such as collecting and reviewing safety data only when an incident occurs.

For organizations committed to optimizing workplace safety, this is a real challenge. Safety teams that are disconnected from the rest of the organization are in a poor position to do their jobs effectively. They’re also likely to find themselves working with siloed safety data resources, further complicating the ability of organizations to identify and mitigate safety risks.

To improve safety outcomes, organizations need to find ways to unify safety management by making it a truly collective responsibility. Employers need to make it a priority to implement the processes and procedures and enshrine the cultural values necessary to break the safety function out of its silo and involve all stakeholders in safety operations.

Of course, understanding why to unify safety management is only the first step toward better safety outcomes. The more complex riddle to solve is how to make safety management a unified, consistent operation that stretches across the organization.

Here are clear and actionable steps organizations can take to achieve this outcome.

Unify safety data. You can’t involve all stakeholders in safety management effectively if there’s no single source of truth that they can all reference to understand the organization’s safety procedures, risks and outcomes. To that end, organizations should invest in processes and tools that can bring all relevant safety information within a single, central platform that’s accessible to everyone. Unified safety data is the foundation that ensures the success of a broader unified safety management initiative.

Track all relevant hazards. At most organizations, there are multiple types of safety risks to manage – with four common categories: physical safety, chemical safety, ergonomics and operational risks. A unified approach to safety management must bring reporting and assessment of all these categories of risk within a central platform and set of processes. Otherwise, the organization risks leaving some safety insights trapped in a silo and failing to integrate the safety function equally across all its parts.

Embrace proactive safety management. When safety management is proactive rather than reactive, organizations are better positioned to involve all relevant stakeholders in a meaningful way in safety processes. After all, if the only time that workers interact with a safety pro or see the involvement of management in safety operations is after an incident, they’re not likely to embrace or believe in a culture of collective safety responsibility. But when the safety team asks them proactively what the organization can do to make their jobs safer, or when safety pros announce proactive changes to that end, safety tends to be something that everyone takes more seriously.

Strive for continuous improvement. Going even further than proactive safety management, organizations should also embrace the practice of continuous improvement – which means always searching for ways to enhance safety even more, no matter how good safety controls or outcomes are currently. Continuous improvement is important to unified safety management because it’s another way to encourage the involvement of all stakeholders – and, in particular, to provide them with opportunities to leverage the safety data collected in pursuit of even better safety outcomes.

A unified safety culture isn’t something that arises organically at most organizations. On the contrary, the disunified nature of safety risks and data, combined with many competing priorities, are the key reasons why safety so often becomes an island.

But it’s possible for organizations to overcome the forces working against them by implementing the roles, procedures, data resources and tools necessary to make safety management a collective, unified affair. This isn’t easy work, but it’s critical for any organization aiming to operate as safely as possible.

Editor's note: This article represents the independent views of the author and should not be considered a National Safety Council endorsement.