A healthy and safe work environment works for everyone’s benefit and should therefore be everyone’s responsibility. While legislators, employers, and managers can devise the most precise strategies to deal with workplace-related risks, the workers’ capacity to follow them is what determines their success.
Why is it important to test your team’s health and safety culture?
Good health and safety practices protect workers, subcontractors, customers, and thepublic whenever they interact with your organization. Every person involved with your company has a responsibility to adhere to certain health and safety standards.
Through safety training and assessment, companies can help prevent potential injuries, material losses, and even somebody’s passing due to an accident. Not only are good health and safety practices beneficial to productivity, but they can also have a positive effect on staff turnover, sickness absence, and the quality of management.
The implementation of adequate health and safety standards benefits:
- All workers and direct employees;
- Management;
- Temporary workers;
- Subcontractors and freelancers;
- Clients and partners;
- Anyone who visits the business premises.
How to assess the problem-solving capabilities of your team
What should be tested?
Understanding your team’s attitude toward health and safety means learning how well workers comprehend and adhere to safety policies. Additionally, employee attitudes towards health and safety, including their comprehension of why policies are enacted and their capacity to follow them, goes over and beyond the mere knowledge of rules and regulations.
Understanding workplace hazards
It is unavoidable for workplace activities to generate potential hazards. However, the range, nature, and distribution of these depend on the type of work performed. As you can imagine, the safety needs of a construction site are not analogous to those of a hospital, an office or retail space.
Employees must be sensitive to potential risks related to their workspace to lessen the chance of accidents happening. Many industries implement processes to guarantee the safe fulfillment of tasks, and every employee should not only be able but also willing to follow them.
Adherence to health and safety management systems
Through organization and taking the proper precautions, companies can minimize the occurrence of workplace hazards. Nonetheless, negligent workers can diminish the value of the best safety policies if they don’t follow the rules.
All members of an organization should understand and adhere to the following:
- Policy: All employees should understand that policies exist. Not only is an up-to-date set of regulations essential to guarantee their physical and mental well-being, but it has also been written to meet all legal requirements.
- Organization: From understanding general procedures to the meaning of workplace-specific safety signs, the competency of employees is dependent on their ability to adhere to organizational processes. A team’s effective capacity for cooperation and communication is necessary to guarantee safe working standards.
- Performance: Measuring performance is beneficial to improve operational efficiency as well as safety-related procedures.
Health and safety culture
The health and safety culture of an organization is one of the most crucial factors when it comes to keeping a workplace risk-free. It is possible to measure many aspects of a company’s safety culture. For instance, one can measure a team’s competence and capacity to cooperate and communicate. By doing so, these can be managed, supported, and improved.
The health and safety culture influences the behaviour of individuals at every level of an organization and shapes the way daily procedures are handled. Creating strategies to promote a positive health and safety culture is beneficial to all areas of a business.
Measuring progress
When organizations plan ahead, they should always keep health and safety concerns as one of their major priorities. If one does not periodically analyze the state of a company’s health and safety knowledge, then there is no way of knowing if it has improved or deteriorated.
To ensure the success of future safety plans, the planned objectives should align with the SMART method. That means that plans should be:
- Specific,
- Measurable,
- Attainable,
- Realistic,
- Time-bound.
By having a concrete idea of a team’s health and safety culture, companies possess a measurable value to gauge the success of their strategies. Aside from monitoring, if goals and objectives are met, managers should also keep an eye on how employees perform their tasks and what results are obtained. Rewarding employees for their accountability and adherence to good health and safety practices can have a positive impact on performance.
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When to test your team’s health and safety culture?
The assessment of the health and safety of a work environment should be a perpetual process. Periodic assessments of health and safety are essential to ensure no one will be harmed or mistreated. An organization will not be held liable for any potential issues if the proper steps are taken to keep the workplace safe.
How do you test your team’s health and safety culture?
The most efficient way to measure the health and safety culture of a company’s workforce is to perform routine testing procedures. Regardless of the type of industry your business operates in, the workforce must learn how to perform their tasks out of harm’s way and understand all the safety rules.
Identify potential hazards
Understanding the potential hazards specific to your workplace can help you accurately gauge your risk assessment levels. A factory setting, for example, contains several conveyor belts and other equipment that could easily catch someone’s hair and end up in an emergency situation.
Common occupational health and safety hazards to look out for include:
- Falls: Falling due to losing one’s balance or due to a misstep is a very common occurrence. Tripping hazards abound in many workplaces. Cables running through the ground can cause someone to trip and poorly lit rooms can be lethal to someone in a hurry.
- Physical trauma: All work environments must be able to provide enough room for people to be able to move unrestricted. However, people bumping into one another due to hastiness or obstacles along the way can lead to an accident. Employees must know the importance of adhering to good safety standards like using their helmets and boots. Other important safety measures include not running and staying out of the way of forklifts and other vehicles.
- Temperature-related hazards: Heat and cold over a certain threshold can be harmful to people. Sources of heat that may be hazardous can include ovens in kitchens and heavy machinery while operational. Employees should be aware of how to operate equipment in order not to cause it to overheat.
- Fire hazards: Fire is a very dangerous hazard. Unfortunately, many fire hazards occur and a single spark can suddenly devour a whole workplace if not rapidly dealt with. Any source of heat or electricity is a potential fire hazard. Many workplaces, such as offices, contain paper documents and wooden furniture, which can very easily be consumed by fire.
Use a workplace health and safety test
There is no point in implementing the best security measures and procedures if the people who are meant to follow them do not do so. Companies should strive to have a comprehensible assessment of how well their employees are acquainted with good health and safety practices. Moreover, modern workforce assessment tools can let employers know their employees’ perceptions of the importance of safety.
Testing procedures help employers better understand the people that collaborate with them. The results of tests can let a company know the overall strengths and weaknesses of its workforce. Testing can also be used during the pre-employment assessment of potential hires to see their aptitudes, motivations, culture fit, and much more.
HRID’s safety test
The ID-Safety (Saf) test is the best resource to analyze your team’s workplace safety culture. The test measures the fundamental factors for safety in the workplace. Anyone who operates in an environment that requires safe behaviour, from a hospital to a factory floor, can gauge their workplace health and safety culture through the test.
Four fundamental factors for good workplace health and safety are measured by the test:
- Attitude;
- Motivation;
- Perceptions of the importance of safety;
- Personal characteristics.
The Id-Safety test consists of 104 multiple-choice questions and 2 ranking questions. It takes around 30 minutes to complete the test. It is possible to take the test in English, French, and Spanish. The ID-Safety (Saf) test is an efficient assessment tool for both organizational development and recruitment purposes.
An organization that regularly uses the ID-Safety test can gather valuable insights into its general safety profile. This will help determine the overall possibility of risks in the workplace.
When taken into the decision-making process, this information can be used to reinforce an organization’s vulnerabilities. The ID-Safety test can be taken in tandem with the ID-Cognitive, ID-Mechanical, and ID-First Line tests to receive a complete evaluation.