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.

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.

Hold discussion sessions for groups and individuals working in the industry or commercial setting. This helps you to have a broader perspective of the issues at hand. The discussions should center around workplace realities, past incidences and perceptions of people working there. You should also pay attention to how issues of safety are communicated within this environment. By holding the discussions in groups, you invoke a sense of mutual responsibility. This is very important whenever a disaster strikes.

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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