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How To Conduct All-inclusive 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 will tell you how safe an environment is. Keeping a complex like institution, industrial set up or residential area safe is a matter of deliberate planning. These plans can be seen in policies and programs set up by the proprietors. You will also use the blueprints to assess whether the intended measures were taken to keep the places safe. Documents will indicate the capacity of the institution to guarantee safety and steps that have already been taken.

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.

Visit the site when real work is in progress. You need to assess an environment that is normal as opposed to when the factory is closed and machines are silent. During a normal day, it is easy to identify loopholes that need to be sealed and areas where necessary steps have been taken. The assessor can understand the behaviors and interactions that will either keep the environment safe or expose people around.

The leadership of the organization should be involved. Though they are not in every corner of the complex, they provide the resources and directions required to keep work places and other complexes safe. Discuss about meeting regulations set for the industry, policies of the company and your findings on the ground. Even the recommendations made will depend on their initiative to keep the place safe. They need to know that the assessment is meant to protect their premises from damage and people from injuries.

The survey should be customized by being guided by the challenges facing your client. Safety is never a generic factor. Each industry or commercial setting has unique challenges to deal with. This is why a customized package is required. Use the challenges of individual industries to develop a checklist that will guide actions to be taken forthwith.

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 report you produce should provide room for both rapid and sustained improvements. Beyond the current environment, you must consider the surrounding since the responsibility is shared. It is not about blaming people and adding expenses. Greater focus should be on keeping everyone and everything within the premises safe.




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