Positive Safety – Building a Safer Workplace.

Positive safety is an approach that fosters a culture where everyone actively identifies and mitigates hazards. It’s based on the belief that safety is an opportunity for improvement, not just a regulatory burden.

To achieve positive safety:

1. Leadership Commitment: Senior leaders must visibly prioritize safety, allocate resources, and hold employees accountable.
2. Empower Employees: Create an environment where employees feel safe reporting concerns without fear of reprisal.
3. Training and Development: Ensure employees are well-trained in safety procedures and continually updated.
4. Continuous Improvement: Regularly review and enhance safety programs and procedures.

Specific actions to promote positive safety include regular safety meetings, safety observation programs, and recognizing safe behavior.

Moving to Excellence

To transition from compliance to excellence, organizations need a proactive approach:

1. Assess Current Safety Culture: Understand your organization’s current approach to safety and employee attitudes.
2. Identify Improvement Areas: Target areas such as leadership commitment, employee empowerment, training, and continuous improvement.
3. Develop an Improvement Plan: Create a specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, and time-bound (SMART) plan.
4. Implement the Plan: Put the plan into action, make changes, provide additional training, and empower employees to report hazards.
5. Sustain Improvement: Maintain progress through continuous monitoring, regular training, and celebrating safety successes.

Positive Safety in Different Aspects

Positive safety encompasses physical, psychological, social, and emotional safety:

• Physical Safety: Ensure safe workplaces, equipment, and procedures.
• Psychological Safety: Create a supportive environment where employees feel safe to speak up.
• Social Safety: Promote diversity, inclusion, and a sense of belonging.
• Emotional Safety: Encourage empathy, understanding, and compassion.

By intertwining the eight principles of positive safety, organizations create a culture where everyone is committed to safety and values social, emotional, psychological, and physical safety.

Eight Principles of Positive Safety Culture (Moving from Pathological, Calculative, Reactive to Proactive Safety Culture).

1. Stronger Foundation: Clear safety goals, policies, and resources for employees.
2. Simplicity (Keep it simple, Stupid): Easy-to-understand safety programs and procedures.
3. Data Leads to Decisions: Using data to identify and address hazards.
4. Leadership Accumen and Vision: Demonstrating visible commitment to safety and far sightedness to see things that are not visible.
5. Active Caring: A culture of support and open communication.
6. Curiosity / Inquisitiveness : Openness to new safety approaches and ideas.
7. Making a Deep Impact: Setting ambitious safety goals and tracking progress to shift situation.
8. Celebrating Success and rewards: Recognizing and celebrating safety achievements and rewards.

Cost in Compliance vs. Currency in Excellence (As seen in Reactive Culture vs as experienced in proactive culture).

“Cost in compliance” views safety as an expense to meet regulations, while “currency in excellence” sees it as an investment with returns. The latter approach results in reduced costs, improved morale, increased productivity, a better reputation, and a competitive edge.

By shifting from a compliance-focused mindset to one that values safety as currency in excellence, organizations can create safer and more prosperous workplaces.

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