Safety Plus: Get Your Employees Involved

OSHA has long advocated employee participation as basic to workplace safety. An agency publication puts it this way: "Employee involvement provides the means through which workers develop and express their own commitment to safety and health for both themselves and their fellow workers."
BLR’s OSHA Required Training for Supervisors newsletter states that OSHA sees multiple benefits of employee participation in safety programs:

• Employees come to realize that as the ones most directly affected by safety and health hazards, they have a vested interest in effective protection programs.
• Team decisions have the advantage of a wider range of expertise and experience.
• Workers are more likely to support and use programs in which they have input.
• Employees who are encouraged to offer their ideas about safety and health improvements and whose suggestions and contributions are taken seriously are more satisfied and productive on the job, and take fewer risks.
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  Levels of Involvement

  There are three levels of employee involvement in workplace safety. The first level is workers' involvement in performing their jobs safely. For example:
• Using tools and equipment safely
• Wearing required personal protective equipment (PPE)
• Talking to you when they have questions about hazards or safety procedures
• Lifting properly to prevent back injuries
• Avoiding horseplay and other risk-taking behavior

The second level goes beyond specific jobs to include the work area and group. For example:

• Reporting unsafe conditions
• Keeping the work area clean and organized
• Reporting accidents and near misses
• Looking out for co-workers and helping them stay safe

The third level involves organization-wide participation. For example:

• Looking for ways to make the work and the workplace safer
• Sharing ideas about safety improvements through the organization's suggestion system
• Participating in safety committees
• Assisting in workplace safety training programs as trainers and coaches
• Reaching out to co-workers throughout the organization to encourage everyone to work more safely

To create the safest work environment, you need to encourage all three levels of participation among the employees you supervise. Read on to see what some organizations with strong safety cultures and low accident rates have done.

Part of the Solution

CoorsTek, the largest manufacturer of technical ceramics in the United States, has a safety-suggestion program called “Solutions” at its Clear Creek, Colorado, plant. The program is open to all employees or teams that identify a particular hazard and devise a solution to fix it. Once approved, a solution is turned back over to the employee or employees to be implemented. If they're not able to make the changes themselves, they fill out a maintenance work order and make sure maintenance follows through.
In just one year, 930 employee safety suggestions were submitted and implemented. Although this program is organization-wide, you could adapt the idea to an informal employee safety-suggestion process in your department to encourage more participation in safety improvement.

Hazard ID Meetings

Another organization, the Nova Group, a defense contractor in Napa, California, actively involves employees in identifying hazards in the tasks they perform each day. Every morning supervisors get together with work crews to discuss the work and the potential hazards workers might face. Although the meetings are led by supervisors, the focus is on employee suggestions to hazard management.
"We ask them, 'Do you know of a better way to go about this?'" says Nova's Corporate Safety Director Butch Gibson. "If you can get employees to the point where they're suggesting what to do," says Gibson, "they're going to start watching out for themselves and others. They become owners and become more involved with the program." Once employees see that their ideas are getting attention, Gibson adds, they become even more involved.
Depending on the nature and number of hazards your employees face, you might not need to meet every day—once a week might be enough. But the idea is a good one, and it can generate a lot of employee participation in workplace safety.

Do Less, Get More

These examples suggest that organizations and supervisors who are most successful in maintaining a safe workplace rely heavily on employee participation in their safety and health programs. And their experiences show that employees who are involved in identifying hazards, improving safety procedures, assisting in training, and taking on other safety responsibilities are safer workers, because they understand that they play an important role in their own and their co-workers’ safety.