Thursday, November 29, 2018

How To Conduct Comprehensive Safety Culture Assessments

By William Cole


Keeping working and living environments safe requires constant evaluation. It is recommended that you conduct safety culture assessments on regular basis with the aim of improving on existing measures and averting catastrophes in future. There are steps that will make your assessment thorough and beneficial as provided by experts.

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.

Engage employees before making the initial visit. This will ensure that they do not give you a guarded response. The engagement introduces them to your survey and its importance in their working lives. They should also know that you are not looking for faults but seeking to make them safer. Once they can see benefits in your exercise, they willingly and genuinely support it.

Assess the situation when the factory or commercial premise is in full operation. If you are dealing with a residential area, it should be at a time when as many people as possible are home. This is the best time to assess the full impact of a disaster. It is also during such a time that you can judge the behavior of people during a normal session. You can see the real dangers they face and identify how these dangers can be overcome.

Involve organizational leadership in mega planning. The leadership might involve a slim number of the overall population, but it is these few people who make decisions. If any measures are to be taken to improve the situation, they are the ones to decide. They also face consequences regarding decisions made or not made. You can easily convince juniors if their seniors buy into your idea. Further, these executives need to know that you are saving their properties from damage and workers from injuries.

Develop a personalized survey. Each work or living environment faces unique challenges. Even when working in the same sector, the people involved, space and overall environment will differ. This means that a generic survey will not add any value to your assessment. You need a checklist that is specific to your needs and with categories that fit your firm at the moment.

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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