8/29/2007

You'd like your employees to be involved in health and safety at your facility—really involved, not just sitting there glassy-eyed or text messaging each other during the monthly safety committee meeting. So, just how do you get workers involved in safety?

The Health and Safety Executive, an organization for health and safety professionals in the United Kingdom, recently published a study entitled, “Using Soft People Skills to Improve Worker Involvement in Health and Safety.” The purpose of the study was to answer this question: What builds and sustains an organizational environment that results in effective employee involvement in health and safety? The study, which took an in-depth look at 10 different organizations, came up with the following conclusions:

• Effective worker involvement took place in organizations where everyone had a role in health and safety.
• Clear communication of safety issues and policies occurred when communication was open and flowed from top to bottom, as well as from bottom to top, in the organization.
• Worker involvement was more effective in organizations that trained for risk assessment, and where managers and supervisors delegated risk assessment.
• Organizations with effective worker involvement had internal champions for worker involvement, and these individuals shared certain personal attributes, including openness and a teamwork mentality.

The authors of the studied posited that, no matter the skill level of the workforce, meaningful participation in workplace health and safety could be achieved for organizations that fostered these four conditions.

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