Lack of engagement is one of the highest hurdles for health and safety leaders to jump. Without company-wide engagement, safety issues become the sole responsibility of health and safety teams, who get tied up doing reactive and compliance-based tasks instead of the activities they know will truly improve safety.
There are some questions you can ask yourself to figure out if you’re missing that engagement piece in your health and safety puzzle:
Do processes sit in a dusty folder on a high shelf so that safety systems go unchecked until an audit demands hurried attention, while in the meantime you navigate a maze of under-used communication channels?
Without engagement, even the best health and safety system will gather dust.
Do you find yourself lacking the data to make informed decisions? And are you seeing a dearth of incident reports and safety suggestions from employees?
An unengaged workforce might not see the need for reporting or making suggestions even if they have them, or may not find it simple to do so.
Are you noticing a gaping chasm between safety guidelines and daily lived reality?
If members of the wider workforce aren’t actively involved in the development of guidelines, the results can become dissonant from real workflow.
Does leadership see themselves as exempt from the safety narrative? And do team leaders speak about health and safety as an impediment to operations—an exercise in ticking the boxes—and health and safety leaders as bureaucratic “safety police” rather than an integral part of operations?
An unenthusiastic leadership sets the tone for the rest of the workforce to take safety less seriously.
Are you plodding along with a safety technology built for your organisation 10 years ago rather than your organisation today?
An out-of-date system that doesn’t feel relevant to the current workforce can lead to a lack of willingness or even ability to engage with it.
Do staff see their safety and wellbeing as a priority?
An unengaged safety culture makes staff feel like their workplace doesn’t care, so they become more careless themselves.
Are health and safety incidents seen as the health and safety team's problem solely, without any ownership across the rest of the organisation?
Lack of engagement leads to lack of ownership, and a lack of ownership leads to incorrect behaviour going unchecked until it becomes a big enough problem to bring in the health and safety team to solve retroactively.
Do new safety systems and procedures crawl or fail?
Without engagement being centred within/alongside a new process, even the best system will see poor adoption rates.
A lack of engagement is not a terminal affliction—actually, it’s highly curable! And while safety tech isn’t a magic potion, when mixed well, it can really go a long way.