Page 31 - OHS, FebruaryMarch 2023

supervisors and offering extra safety training to employees— can be transformative, and most organizations find them well worth the time and financial cost. Each initiates a cycle that can counteract the cycle of turnover. Teach more skills and knowledge to more of your people. More people stay. Less employee turnover means the safety culture can deepen its roots. A deeper culture means a clearer sense of “how things are done around here,” with more people staying in an environment where they feel comfortable. This cycle continues to expand outward, establishing a stronger culture and compounding organizational knowledge. But if training isn’t a viable option right now, there’s still a shared underlying principle that you can adopt to reap some of the benefits. At their core, both of these types of initiatives are about demonstrating care. In any job hunt, people consider three big items first: location, wage, and type of work. As someone with safety responsibilities, you have zero influence on all three of these factors. Once you move beyond the big three, there’s a fourth influence in job migration: the desire to work for a company that cares for you. And this is where safety folks can make a difference. When workers believe their employer cares about them as a person, and not just as a unit of value production, they are happier in their job. Intuitively, they’re more likely to stay put in their job. Perhaps counterintuitively, they’re also safer. According to Rodd Wagner’s latest research into the link between happiness and safety, “happy employees are better at keeping themselves and their colleagues out of harm’s way for reasons both conscious and subconscious.” Quite simply, demonstrating care for employees can reduce injuries and turnover. There are all sorts of ways to show that you care about the people at your company, from simple things like listening, building psychological safety or saying thank you to more formal recognition programs or milestone celebrations. But none are more impactful than investing in their personal skills development—especially voluntary safety education like human factors training and safety-focused supervisor training. It’s the voluntary, not-required-by-law part that shows your care and commitment by investing in their well-being. Finding a way to make all that extra training happen, despite all the tricky logistics, signals caring too. If your leadership team doesn’t see the initial value of wedging in a few hours of extra training to keep employees safe and happy, then position it in terms of comparative savings as a method of mitigating troublesome patterns in employee turnover. It’s a lot easier, and cheaper, to train-to-retain employees than it is to replace them over and over again. Ray Prest is the Director of Marketing at SafeStart, a company focused on human factors solutions that reduce preventable deaths and injuries on and off the job. Ray has educated people about safety and human factors management for over 20 years. WE DO CLIPS READY FOR IMPRINTING Visit our website, Gloveguard.com/imprinting and request a FREE ART PROOF to see your logo or slogan on one of our clips. 888.660.6133 GLOVEGUARD.COM SAFETY@GLOVEGUARD.COM wwUwn.toitlhesd-o22nli1ne.com FEBRUARY/MARCH 2023 | Occupational Health &2S/1a/f2e3ty3:05 P3M1