Monday, November 26, 2018

How To Conduct Comprehensive Safety Culture Assessments

By William Cole


Safety remains one of the main concerns for businesses and residential areas. For living and working areas to remain safe, regular safety culture assessments are required. They aim at assessing preparedness and finding new ways of averting disasters. To conduct a thorough assessment, the following steps will guide you.

A review of policies, documents and programs will tell you how safe an environment is. Keeping a complex like institution, industrial set up or residential area safe is a matter of deliberate planning. These plans can be seen in policies and programs set up by the proprietors. You will also use the blueprints to assess whether the intended measures were taken to keep the places safe. Documents will indicate the capacity of the institution to guarantee safety and steps that have already been taken.

Engage employees before making the initial visit. This will ensure that they do not give you a guarded response. The engagement introduces them to your survey and its importance in their working lives. They should also know that you are not looking for faults but seeking to make them safer. Once they can see benefits in your exercise, they willingly and genuinely support it.

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.

The leadership of the organization should be involved. Though they are not in every corner of the complex, they provide the resources and directions required to keep work places and other complexes safe. Discuss about meeting regulations set for the industry, policies of the company and your findings on the ground. Even the recommendations made will depend on their initiative to keep the place safe. They need to know that the assessment is meant to protect their premises from damage and people from injuries.

Develop a personalized survey. Each work or living environment faces unique challenges. Even when working in the same sector, the people involved, space and overall environment will differ. This means that a generic survey will not add any value to your assessment. You need a checklist that is specific to your needs and with categories that fit your firm at the moment.

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 report emanating from your assessment should recommend both rapid and sustained ways of improving the situation. Beyond the measures taken by the client, those of neighbors and the wider environment are important. When neighbors are safe, your client will also be safe.




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