Actively Engaging Employees Using Five Pillars of Safety

Safety culture is the shared beliefs, experiences, attitudes and passions of a group of people. A world-class safety culture in a work environment is a way of life and a belief to send all employees safely back home every day—and in the process, help the company make money, showing to senior executives that safety makes good business sense. It is an outstanding safety culture that proactively manages employee and business safety decision-making. It is an environment that allows management and employees to make decisions based on what is the right thing to do both for safety and running the business. If you do the right thing, money will flow. Business will run profitably.

World-class safety is like beauty. It is difficult to describe but you know it when you see it. At one of the printing plants with which I was associated, the ventilation system broke down in the ink room. Rather than continue to run the ink mixing operation that created a lot of vapors, the GM shut down the printing operation until the ventilation system was fixed. That is a world-class safety culture.