Building a Safety-First Culture

Building a safety-first culture in the workplace is crucial for reducing incidents, improving productivity, and ensuring long-term business success.

• By Troy Teepe
• Jul 19, 2024

In 2022, there were over 5,000 deaths in the workplace, and private industry employers reported 2.8 million non-fatal workplace injuries and illnesses. On a financial level, employers in the United States are paying over $1 billion a week in direct worker’s compensation. 

It’s clear from these numbers that worker’s comp incidents come at both a great human and capital cost. Despite this, many in the industry are chasing standards from behind, and looking at safety issues reactively instead of proactively. The biggest hurdle facing the construction industry today is that leaders aren’t prepared for how safety protocols will evolve.

When a safety incident happens in the workplace, it’s almost always due to human behavior, and it’s almost always preventable. Safety needs to be culture-driven. Everything that happens or doesn’t happen on a job site is driven by culture, whether leaders think they have one or not. 

Safety Culture Starts from the Top

Creating a safety-first culture can have massive benefits, including fewer at-risk behaviors, lower incident rates, lower employee turnover, lower absenteeism and higher employee productivity. Managers should understand that implementing, communicating, and understanding a deep safety culture is essential for future success. 

The most important building block for a safety-first culture is the understanding that it must start at the top. This requires a mindset shift among leaders. Safety should be thought of as a revenue driver, not a cost-center. In addition to these potential revenue-boosting benefits, safety is essential for earning new work, as many potential projects are only becoming more stringent in their expectations for safety standards on work sites.

Incident rates are being carefully evaluated by contractors, and without the right safety procedures, a company might not even be able to bid on a job. Large general contractors in particular expect well above and beyond the OSHA requirements on a work site.

Common Challenges

Once leadership is onboard, a safety-first culture is well on its way to successful implementation. That said, there will always be some level of resistance when implementing new procedures, particularly when working with teams that have been in the industry a long time. Despite statistics that say otherwise, veteran employees can feel that there isn’t a problem with the old way of doing things.

One way to overcome this is to get the team involved. No one knows the risks of a job better than the workers on the ground, and implementing suggestions from members of the team across a job site will increase uptake and buy-in. 

Second, communication is paramount. It’s essential that leadership convey a message that everyone is accountable for safety, not just designated employees. Beyond leading by example, managers need to evaluate every facet of a job for potential risks and build relationships with their employees so that those employees feel comfortable bringing forward potential safety issues. 

Training practices should also be evaluated by managers to make sure they are both thorough and understood. On some job sites, workers are not trained in their native language or are not offered any training at all because a manager assumed they’d already done it. These are risks that are easily solved if a manager is asking the right questions.

This can all feel overwhelming for managers that don’t know where to start. For individuals with their own construction company, for example, it can feel impossible to focus on the nitty-gritty of safety training requirements when you’re also thinking about how to win and source manpower for projects. That’s where safety gets left behind.

If a culture exists where safety is understood as a shared responsibility, that burden becomes a lot lighter. Partnering with a consultant who knows how to handle safety situations inside and out can mitigate that weight even more and help organizations struggling with safety to get on the right track. 

Safety Isn’t Just Good for People; It’s Good for Business

A change in safety culture won’t happen overnight, but if the foundation of training, communication and understanding is there, you’ll end up with an organization where both employees and management are competent and confident around all things safety. 

Keeping up with safety standards can feel like a headache, but the payoff is profound. When you implement a strong safety culture, you can eliminate large amounts of injury risk and increase productivity for better client outcomes. Most importantly, you’ll lower incident rates, saving your organization money and far more importantly, potentially saving lives.