According to the article “Eight Ways to Create a Broken Safety Culture” in EHS today, many industrial leaders know the importance of safety in the workplace but ignore simple practices that create a safe work environment therefore creating a broken safety environment. Some practices that create a broken safety environment include ignoring exposures, focusing on injuries and ignoring safety issues until a serious injury happens.
By focusing on injuries rather than exposures, organizations ignore finding and eliminating the cause of the injury to prevent further incidences. This creates an unsafe work environment for workers. Ignoring safety issues until a serious injury happens also creates a hazardous working environment. Employers should have routine checks within facilities to check for hazardous materials or equipment to stop injuries from happening.
Employers can avoid creating a broken safety environment by using preventative methods in the workplace. By using preventative methods such as addressing hazardous areas and focusing on investing in equipment to prevent injuries, employers can create a safe working environment for their employees.
An example of a type of equipment employers can invest in to prevent hazardous areas and injuries is non-slip metal safety flooring. Metal safety flooring can be utilized in any unsafe slippery work environment to prevent injury and ensure worker’s safety. It is a long lasting, slip resistant investment versus other options such as taped on, painted on, epoxy and other safety flooring that needs to be replaced more often.
Focusing on hazardous exposures and investing in proper safety equipment to prevent injury in the work place helps employers create the safest work environment possible and avoids a broken safety culture.
Krause, Tomas. “Eight ways to Create a Broken Safety Culture.” EHS Today February 2010.
