Bottom-Line Benefits of a Positive Safety Culture

A positive safety culture promotes sound production and operation compliance that protects all teams and all aspects of the business. From C-suite to managers to workers, a positive safety culture advocates watchful conditions that keep everyone safe.

When a safety culture is lacking, the risk is complacency and corner-cutting rather than conscientious, compliance, and a commitment to contributing to the whole. Workers arrive not ready or fully willing to work but are in position anyway, sitting behind equipment or monitoring operations without being fully present and/or even quantifiably impaired.

Ill-equipped, marginally committed, workers are more likely to cause or be involved in accidents, with workers getting hurt, equipment getting damaged, and production coming to a stop, creating a snowball of negative impacts.

At Predictive Safety, we believe that creating a positive safety culture is a top-down endeavor that begins by advocating for beliefs, shared values, and a commitment to sound practices that influence safety culture at every level of management, within every team, and each individual worker.

What Is Safety Culture?

Safety culture refers to the collection of values, attitudes, perceptions, competencies, and patterns of behavior that determine the style and proficiency of a company’s methods related to its health and safety performance.

When you have a positive safety culture, all teams are bought into their role in creating a positive end result.

• For the C-suite, that means making safety and compliance a priority, structuring budgets, and decision-making accordingly. Not just when regulation demands it, but because the health and safety of workers is a company priority.
• For management and supervisors, that means a commitment to proactive positive reinforcement of compliance and acknowledgment of wins over a reactive stance and punitive outcomes.
• For workers, that means being willing to show up prepared to work, staying alert, and taking the actions that keep everyone safe.

Common attributes of a positive safety culture include:

• Shared safety values
• Engagement at all levels
• Ongoing training to reduce risk
• Transparency
• Prioritizing proactive solutions as opposed to reactive

A positive safety culture is an investment with an invaluable ROI. It saves money, time, and energy. The practice ensures all workers are ready and willing to deliver a positive impact on the bottom line.

Benefits of Building a Positive Safety Culture

Integrating safety into an organization encompasses baking behaviors and attitudes at all levels of the company, from C-suite to hourly to contract labor. It means understanding and implementing all steps that promote proactive and preventative measures that reduce harm, and doing so comes with many benefits.

Fewer Incidents

While every project entails required safety measures, a positive safety culture entails doing everything possible to promote safety. It goes beyond compliance. It engrains thinking from management to workers that safety is everyone’s responsibility.

One of the most common factors impacting safety is undetected and unmitigated fatigue. Diligent workers at their stations are not even aware of lack of sleep, medication, or other factors that compromise their performance.

Fatigue diminishes the capacity to make safe decisions. It reduces reaction time, stunts attention spans, impairs memory, and decreases accuracy and reaction time.

Every site needs to implement measures that reduce the impact of fatigue on worksites.

A Positive Safety Culture Leads to Reduced Absenteeism and Turnover

Accidents and injuries impact morale, productivity, and the bottom line. They increase turnover. Injured workers choose not to come back, especially if they feel safety isn’t a management priority.

A commitment to safety reduces costs and loss of workers and increases loyalty and confidence in management.

Predictive Safety streamlines safety measures by quantifying fatigue and impairment. They supplement local safety compliance with a solution that tests workers quickly, ensuring stability before beginning or during a shift.

A Positive Safety Culture Also Leads to Lowered Insurance and Medical Costs

Accidents lead to insurance claims, mandated leaves from work, and lost productivity. All the burdens that affect the bottom line, and even more so in today’s environment of worker shortages. 

Fewer accidents mean fewer claims and lower premiums. Good track records lead to rebates and discounts. It’s a win-win for management and workers. Employees spend less on medical bills and remain fit for work. Administrators devote more time to project tasks with less worry about replacing and training new workers.

A proven solution here is integrating a fatigue management system like PRISM. Alongside other safety compliance measures, PRISM plays a prominent role in creating a positive culture of safety.

A Positive Safety Culture Additionally Leads to Greater Productivity and Morale

While you can certainly be proud of your record, it’s near impossible to eliminate risk completely. But if you can curtail accidents, you create an awareness of the benefits of safety that trickles through the ranks. Employees feel less stress, are more confident around co-workers and have a higher level of trust in project managers. Everything leads to higher morale and productivity.

And Enhanced Recruitment Opportunities

Your safety culture is crucial to how you’re perceived. People and contractors looking to partner with you see fewer incident reports and a proud safety history that speaks for itself. You also get a stronger selection of job candidates when they hear and see the confidence shining across the line. Your company’s safety reputation becomes a beacon for customers and top-notch employees alike.

With a strong safety culture, everyone knows that the company cares. Thus, everyone wants to do a better job.

How Predictive Safety Can Help Your Company Create a Positive Safety Culture

Predictive Safety built its reputation on providing companies in high-risk, high-stress industries a way to effectively manage and motivate supervisors to operate safer, more productive shifts. Predictive Safety makes the risk of impairment quantifiable and visible, and a risk that is seen can be mitigated.

Fighting the Hidden Risk of Fatigue with PRISM

Worker fatigue is one of the greatest threats to safety. Being tired or impaired can lead to distracted decisions, impulsive behavior, misunderstanding, unnecessary conflict, lack of awareness, less empathy, and even unethical behavior in order to get assignments out of the way.

Unrelenting worker fatigue encourages short- and long-term absences. Errors, distractions, lack of focus, and deterred motivation can permeate the workplace. It’s a significant cost to productivity.

Our PRISM solutions give managers and supervisors the ability to quantify worker fatigue levels and proactively set schedules that optimize worker capacity and performance, enhancing both safety and productivity. In turn, workers aware that the company cares about their ability to work safely are more willing to take the steps necessary to arrive ready to work and show measurably higher levels of morale.

Safety is enhanced and productivity is increased when supervisors and management can schedule worker shifts, confident the physical or mental impairments related to fatigue will not impact production. With our products, managers can confidently put workers on site. Workers are more likely to consider their conditions when showing up for work, promoting the kind of positive safety culture that enhances the bottom line.

AlertMeter^®

AlertMeter takes a proactive commitment to a positive safety culture a step further with the ability to quickly and objectively quantify any cause of impairment, including impairment due to substance use.

Our solutions, including PRISM-Monitor, PRISM-Workforce, and AlertMeter, enable a company to go beyond lip service and bare minimum compliance and create a top-down, positive safety culture that in turn can positively impact the bottom line. With these solutions in place, management can catch and manage inefficiencies responsibly. They can engage in effective, time-saving interaction with employees to improve performance, protect workers and improve morale, enhance the company’s reputation locally and as an industry leader, and build a positive culture of safety.

More Resources:

The Ultimate Guide to Safety Culture

How to Introduce New Safety Measures

Whose Job Is It? The Shared Responsibility for Safety with AlertMeter

Safety, Quality & Productivity Technology

Using Technology to Evolve Safety Culture in the Workplace

Safety Value Examples

Safety Issues Associated with Commercially Available Energy Drinks

The Best Way To Safety Excellence