How To Conduct Comprehensive 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 instituted at present. Residential areas and businesses are guided by regulations on how to keep them safe. These policies and documents indicate meticulous plans and efforts towards securing people in these premises. The policies and papers will help you establish how prepared an institution is and its conformity to set industry regulations. The policies act as a checklist on what is expected.

Communicate with employees and the management before you make any interaction. The aim is to get a positive and collaborative environment. These employees you are going to interact with need to know what you are looking for and the benefits they will reap from the process. Their responses will be open minded because they understand your goal. You need to brief them that the assessment is for their own benefit.

The best time to conduct assessment is when a factory or office is in full operation. In case you are assessing a residential area, ensure that almost everyone is home. This gives you a perfect time to assess what could happen in real time. You can also judge how people conduct their activities without simulation. Where operations are scaled down like machines being switched off or some people being away, the level of danger may be underrated or response overrated.

Discuss your expectations and findings with the leadership. This discussion should be a comparison of what is contained in the policies of the company, regulatory requirements and what you find on the ground. You can discuss the best approaches to ensuring that the environment is safer. The leaders also need to understand that you are not looking for faults but how to protect people and property.

The assessment should be personalized to reflect unique challenges facing the industry. Remember that each client has unique people, space, equipment and general environment. Unless you have a customized package, it will be impossible to solve prevailing challenges using generic solutions. These unique challenges help you to develop a checklist of action points.

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 recommendations made should target immediate as well as continuing improvement of safety. You should also pay attention to what neighbors are doing because they could be contributors to increased risk. For any place to remain safe, everyone interacting with it must be involved.




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