Page 64 - Occupational Health & Safety, June 2017

Employee Gifts & Incentives
Safety Totally Leads the Way
This is not just the path toward improved safety and lower safety-related costs; it is also the path to walk if your goal is greater customer retention, higher sales, and maximizing profits.
BY BRIAN GALONEK
such as “struck-bys” or “slips and falls,” they discuss purchasing better hard hats and work boots. While these conversations are taking place, what they real- ly need is someone in the room to stand up and say, “Let’s look at our employee engagement levels first.”
Employee Engagement Foundational
to Improving Safety
The reason this does not happen as often as it should is that it requires a more thoughtful ap- proach and will take longer than simply deciding to purchase a new training program or more PPE. And the reason that ideas like this do not flow as easily as they should within an organization is that large companies still have siloed departments that oftentimes prevent them from getting organiza- tion-wide efforts going.
In reality, what usually happens is that one de- partment (generally the one with the greatest pain point) creates a program and, if that program suc- ceeds at a significant enough level, it catches the at- tention of other departments and/or the executives. From there it may or may not expand, depending on how forward thinking the company is and any number of other factors. Regardless of where it ends, the department that is most likely to get the ball rolling with an employee engagement program that changes employee behaviors is safety.
This makes sense if you think about it, especial- ly in larger organizations that have a great deal rid- ing on how safely they work. Safety-related spend- ing (a company’s loss-pick) trends upward at 5-10 percent annually for many companies even if they perform at a relatively stable level. Costs related to insurance, claims, health care, regulation, and the like are the driving force behind this general ten- dency toward increasing safety-related costs. Those types of annual spending increases are going to naturally lead to discussions about how to “solve the problem.”
Safety managers noticed long ago that they can’t really improve safety unless they can break through the clutter of everyday life and truly engage with employees. When they have exhausted most other tactics, companies come to realize that to improve safety, they need to create employee engagement/
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60 Occupational Health & Safety | JUNE 2017
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The trend toward “total engagement” has been emerging for the past five to 10 years: a trend driven at times by the ongoing need to attract and retain talented people and by the need to address a myriad of other busi- ness objectives. Employee engagement is the key to success for virtually all corporate initiatives; from wellness to safety, from sales to profitability, prac- tically all successful attempts to improve perfor- mance start by improving employee engagement. It would therefore seem logical that employee en- gagement initiatives would emanate from the very top of an organization with directives handed down from executives to HR and operations managers.
In my experience, what actually happens is that some forward-thinking department manager de- ploys employee engagement tactics that produce impressive results catching the attention of those in the C-Suite. Very often, that manager is in charge of safety.
While I’m starting to find more companies that seem to understand that virtually all their strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats can and should be looked at through the lens of employee engagement, I’m still not finding many that act accordingly at a high level. If they identify train- ing as a weakness, they often spend most of their time discussing whether there is better training software that they should deploy. If they see an op- portunity to lower safety costs related to incidents