Understanding Your Employees' Attitudes About Workplace Safety

It should be a given that all companies should be working to improve workplace health and safety. However, companies need to get employees on board with their safety policies and practices, which can be easier said than done.

It starts with gaining an understanding of how employees feel about occupational health and safety. But what would be the best tool for evaluating employee attitudes about workplace safety? The simple answer to this is communication. Of course, the real answer is far more complicated than that. Let’s take a closer look at some of the best ways to evaluate and learn about the attitude your workers have toward workplace safety.

Questionnaires

There’s nothing wrong with using an informal questionnaire to gauge how your employees feel about workplace safety. It can be as short or as long as you want, as long as you give employees the time to fill it out and be honest. You can also choose whether you want to ask multiple-choice questions or have essay-style questions. The thing that matters the most is asking the right questions about the right topics. Ask how they feel about safety at the workplace and their specific role in keeping themselves and everyone else safe. If you ask the right questions, especially in an anonymous questionnaire, most employees will give you honest answers.

Round-Table Discussions

If you’re okay taking the anonymity out of the equation, try having a round-table discussion with employees as part of a focus group or safety committee. In a group setting, some people might be more comfortable sharing their true feelings than during a private meeting. It’s usually best that employees outnumber supervisors or managers in these settings. The employees will feel that there is strength in numbers, allowing their true attitudes about workplace safety to be shared.

Post-Training Survey

We all know that training is a huge part of workplace safety. But it’s important for that training to be effective. Try giving workers a survey to fill out after training to see if they absorbed the information. This can tell you how closely workers were paying attention and if they get out of the training what they needed to get out of it. In a way, this will tell you their attitude toward safety because it’ll let you know if they took the training seriously or not.

One-on-One Meetings

At one point or another, supervisors will have to conduct one-on-one meetings with employees. While these can be tense and confrontational at times, there will be no way for employees to hide. Some people can stay quiet in a group setting or lie on a questionnaire, but in a one-on-one conversation, you can usually get an impression about how a person feels. Even if their words are saying the right thing, their body language can tell you how they feel about workplace safety.

Suggestion Box

It sounds simple, but every workplace should have a suggestion box for employees to make anonymous comments and complaints. After all, nobody is forcing people to put something in the box, so this will be the most honest that employees will be. If there are issues or attitude problems with occupational health and safety, you will see them come through in the comments placed in the suggestion box.

Get the Right Safety System in Place

If you are worried about the attitude toward safety within your company, you might not be using the right safety management system. At EHS Insight, we have software that can transform the way you manage workplace safety. Our system can help you communicate better with employees, not to mention helping with hazard identification, training, and all other aspects of workplace safety.

When you’re ready to get serious about workplace health and safety, give us a call and we can have our software up and running in no time.