New Year’s resolutions don’t have to be restricted to personal improvements. While some people are making plans to change their diet, adopt a new fitness routine or read more books this year, EHS folks of all stripes can choose instead to make gains in their professional life.
Setting a health and safety-focused resolution can be the first step in strengthening workplace safety culture, learning to better manage human factors or investing in the growth of your own career. To that end, here are three New Year’s safety resolutions that will help safety professionals up their game—and keep more people safe.
Focus on safety climate, not on safety culture
Safety culture is a slippery concept. If you ask ten EHS professionals to define what safety culture is, there’s a decent chance that you’ll get ten different answers. Because it can be so hard to pin down what safety culture means, many people in the industry end up with partial or makeshift understandings of safety culture. And if safety pros can be inconsistent with how they view safety culture then just imagine how challenging it must be for the average worker to get a grasp on the concept.
The most straightforward definition of safety culture is that it’s the way things are done around the workplace. How often and thoroughly are near-miss reports filled out? How engaging are pre-shift toolbox talks? How consistently is PPE used? All of these things are part of safety culture.
This means that, as columnist Ray Prest notes, safety culture is “the result of established procedures and processes, the efficacy of training plans, the strengths and weaknesses of supervisors as well as the individual abilities and mental states of a whole bunch of workers, plus many other factors. It’s a classic example of the sum being equal to the parts, and then some.”
Clearly, even the simplest definition of safety culture is complex. So this year, resolve to focus on safety climate instead of safety culture. At its core, safety climate is the way things are done today. While culture is large, amorphous and hard to influence, climate is the exact opposite. A safety professional who focuses on climate rather than culture asks themselves: “What positive influence can I have on my workplace today?” They don’t worry about trying to shift the entire company’s safety view. Instead, they concentrate on what they can do in the moment.
This year, resolve to consistently focus on safety climate, because the cumulative impact of daily actions can add up quite significantly—to the point where the larger safety culture starts to change for the better.
Learn about managing human factors
One of the major conundrums of medicine is that very few people ever intentionally get sick. At the same time, medical professionals can plainly tell when people’s actions and habits are contributing factors to an illness. As a result, many doctors practice preventative medicine. They know that there’s no use blaming someone for getting sick, but offering advice on things a patient can do to avoid future maladies helps lower everyone’s risk of illness.
The same is true of workplace safety. No one wants to be injured at work, so it’s incumbent on safety managers to give employees the skills and awareness they need to reduce the risk of incidents. That’s where human factors management comes in.
In most incidents, a person’s mental or physical state is a contributing factor. As one example, research has shown that human factors are a leading cause of slips, trips and falls. A worker can successfully navigate a wet floor if they’re paying attention. But someone who is tired or distracted can trip over their own feet, even when in the absence of other environmental hazards. Teaching employees how to manage these mental and physical human factors can go a long way to reducing both the number and severity of workplace incidents.
But it can be hard to start managing human factors from scratch, especially for safety professionals who have a full workload without the added burden of researching best practices for human factors training. This is why the ideal human factors-related resolution is also easy to achieve. This year, resolve to talk to someone with experience in human factors management, whether it’s a safety consultant, a training vendor or a safety professional who has already implemented a human factors management process at their facility.
It costs nothing to talk, and it’s a good first step to learn about what’s required to effectively manage human factors in your workplace.
Invest in your own skills
Successful safety careers don’t just happen. They take hard work, dedication and planning. Most seasoned safety professionals have the hard work and dedication part taken care of. But they’re often so busy that they forget about the need to plan the next step in their career or to invest in their own skills.
The EHS Careers Guide provides a 16-point self-audit of your personal knowledge and abilities. It’s a great way to identify where you excel and where you might need improvement. It could also help you recognize areas where your strengths are being underutilized in your current role. Additionally, the guide offers a number of practical tips and tricks to boost your capabilities so that you can bring the best version of yourself to your current role—or can make yourself more appealing to a future employer.
This year, resolve to focus on your own career. Whether you’re looking to change jobs or you’re happily entrenched at a company you love, it’s never a bad idea to plot out your career path to make sure you’re heading to (or are already in) the right place—and to make sure that you’ve developed the skills and know-how to match.
These aren’t the only New Year’s resolutions that are available for safety professionals. From helping others build habits to attending more safety conferences, the only limit is your imagination and your ability to make it happen. Whatever you resolve this year, know that your focus on professional improvements can make a real difference in both your own career and in the health and safety of others.