The Core Tenants of a Warehouse Safety Culture
From our background in organizational behavior and industrial hygiene, the success of a company’s safety program is entirely in the hands of the employer, not the employee. In isolation, employees perceive their relationship with safety requirements as a matter of compliance – that is, they adhere to safety policies at a minimum level so that they can maximize performance in other areas that directly tie to continued employment, status, and compensation. Even in companies that stress group-wide success metrics (such as with safety), these employees are acutely aware that they’re rated and compensated as individuals. This presents a classic case of management saying one thing while rewarding another, creating conditions where a true safety culture fails to launch. Luckily, establishing a safety culture is not magic, but it does require a unique approach that may not come naturally to most managers.
To quote the National Research Council’s Safe Science textbook, “safety culture refers to an organization’s shared values, assumptions, and beliefs specific to workplace safety or, more simply, the importance of safety within the organization relative to other priorities.” Too many businesses will communicate that they prioritize safety above all else yet act in a way that clearly shows that other elements of the business take precedence. For a safety culture to bloom, management must exhaust themselves demonstrating that safety is indeed their top priority, fully adopting themselves in safety tenants such as:
- Safety culture is not a set of rules, but is a social commitment shared by all executives and employees alike.
- Safety culture is not a way to assign blame, but instead is a platform to share knowledge, raise awareness, and promote collective problem solving between colleagues.
- Safety culture is persistent, meaning it applies at all times and in all places, not just when it is convenient or prescribed.
- Safety culture can only ever have one goal: zero accidents, zero safety incidents, zero injuries, zero deaths, and zero uncontrolled near-miss scenarios.
Warehouse Safety – A Matter of Managerial Responsibility
Most discussions about safety culture focus on discrete tasks that businesses should perform to convince their staff that safety is a worthy cause. When explained this way, the responsibility of creating a safety culture is backhandedly placed on the employee. We can easily see this in the type of suggestions that are typically made on creating safety cultures, such as making employees perform safety walkthroughs, implementing safety huddles, and earning safety bonuses. In these cases, the employee must always act first. This is contrary to how any other social norm is adopted, which is through active demonstration and conduct reinforcement carried out by respected members of the group. Said another way, instilling a business norm starts with management’s actions, not the employee’s.
So, how does management go about creating a safety culture? Management must open themselves up to nothing less than an ethical paradigm shift. Safety must become the organization’s guiding light, embodied in every relevant decision, discussion, policy, and strategic plan. Safety has to be given the same attention and value as profit, efficiency, or market share. And just as with profit and brand reputation, management cannot waiver their commitment to maximizing safety. Unsafe actions must be met with full managerial scrutiny, starved out of the organization entirely. The second that safety becomes optional or is superseded for any reason, the budding safety culture is disintegrated and irreparable for the foreseeable future.
Integrating Employees into Safety Initiatives
Here are a handful of specific concepts and actions that warehouse leadership must implement to properly chart a course towards a sound safety culture:
- Discussions over Dictations – to fully engage employees in a safety culture, they have to feel as if they’re part of the overall conversation. As such, employers should involve their employees in conversations about safety planning, policies, and initiatives, as opposed to the traditional path of simply dictating rules.
- Mock Scenario Demonstrations – when it comes to personnel safety, we are strong believers in muscle memory over textbook knowledge. This is to say that employees benefit tremendously from practical safety demonstrations – or even better, hands-on practice sessions – to the point that safe actions become muscle memory.
- Safety Norms, not Safety Episodes – in the same way that cultural norms are behaviors that individuals take when no one is watching, employers must integrate safety into every aspect of the business so that it becomes the organizational norm instead of only being mentioned when a safety event occurs.
- United Front – too often, businesses confine safety responsibilities to an Environmental Health and Safety (EH&S) department, but one department alone will never have enough visibility to instill a safety culture across the company. For this reason, management must integrate safety into every level of every department, creating a truly united front.
- Zero Tolerance – in order for a safety culture to develop, there can be no tolerance for unsafe actions, behaviors, or messaging anywhere in the organization. Warehouse managers must demonstrate that they perceive all safety events as serious, without exception, to best instill confidence and equal concern in their staff.
- Non-Punitive Evaluations – any time a safety event occurs, how management reacts will play a crucial role in building a safety culture. Managers must approach the situation as a neutral fact-finding mission, intent on discovering how the event manifested and what can be done to avoid repetition without jumping to blame, anger, or judgement.
- Everywhere, or Nowhere – safety expectations must be levied everywhere in the organization to hold merit, and not skip over places or conditions where safe work is perceived to be too difficult, costly, or unnecessary. If employees come to recognize that safety only applies to some aspects of the business at some times, they will see safe actions as optional everywhere.
- Safety Cannot be Automated Away – many technology vendors in the market sell automated solutions that claim to improve warehouse safety, and while some warehouse safety products do provide tangible benefits, none of these products can completely automate away safety risks. Managers should view technological solutions as tools in their tool bag, and not as a replacement for their own attention or effort.
- Lessons Learned – a perfect safety culture does not materialize overnight. There will be difficulties for both management and employees which must be met head-on. To facilitate ongoing improvement, management must take the lead on embracing challenges openly, engaging employees for feedback and then taking clear action to showcase that the lesson was learned and will not be repeated. Once management shows this humility, employees will be encouraged to follow suit.
We hope that this discussion has been helpful for your commercial material handling needs. Fairchild Equipment is the Upper Midwest’s premier Material Handling Equipment and Service resource, with headquarters in Green Bay, Wisconsin, and numerous locations serving needs 24/7 across Wisconsin, Minnesota, North Dakota, Northern Illinois, and Michigan’s Upper Peninsula. For more information or to discuss which Warehouse Optimization solution might be best for you, please send us a message or call us at (844) 432-4724.
