Workplace safety is an incredibly complicated field, and it can be a tall order to stay on top of the foundational elements of a safety management system. It gets even more complicated beyond the basics, once you account for further EHS-related challenges like lackluster supervisor support for safety and human factors that threaten to make risky situations even more deadly.
The good news is you don’t have to face these challenges alone. To make things a little bit easier, here’s a round-up of some of the most useful guides and webinars about several thorny workplace safety issues you’re sure to encounter. They’re all free to watch and read, and they’re thorough enough that even experienced safety folks are likely to find value in each one.
A guide to complacency in safety
For many, complacency is the most challenging human factor to contend with in the workplace. Complacency is hard to recognize in the moment, and unavoidable mental phenomena like the forgetting curve can cause it to build up over time. To make matters worse, complacency can negatively affect organizations in a similar way to how it affects individuals.
Fortunately, there is a great safety resource to help battle complacency on both the individual and organizational levels. Fighting Familiarity: Overcoming Complacency in the Workplace offers an informative deep dive into the most elusive human factor, reviewing how it affects the brain, the keys to recognizing it in the workplace and most importantly: the steps that organizations can take to mitigate the dangers posed by complacency.
Even if you don’t feel like complacency is a notable issue in your workplace, the guide is worth downloading for later because, at one point or another, complacency will put your employees in harm’s way.
Two resources for safety-conscious supervisors
Frontline leaders—people in supervisory roles or crew leads—can have a massive impact on workplace safety. There are all sorts of ways that these team leaders can keep their people safer, from proactively discussing hazards to helping them identify human factors as they emerge throughout the shift.
The hard-nosed research behind supervisory safety boils down to this: there are six critical factors that contribute to safety success. In many businesses, long-term EHS outcomes are a result of how much their frontline leaders contribute to these factors. Watching the webinar Culture Catalysts: 6 Safety Success Factors for Supervisors is a key first step to learning the ins and outs of leveraging supervisors in the battle against preventable injuries.
Another way to get more from supervisors is to train them in the soft skills they need to truly connect with employees, reinforce key safety messaging, and intervene in potentially unsafe scenarios. The free safety guide, 7 Essential Soft Skills For Hard Workplace Safety Problems, outlines the critical skills that can give supervisors a much greater positive impact on organizational safety results. As an added bonus, these skills can boost employee engagement, general employee happiness, productivity and other KPIs.
A deep dive on new-hire safety
Perhaps the most dangerous time in someone’s career is the first ninety days they spend at a new job. Statistically speaking, that’s when injuries are most likely to occur. It’s also when employees suffer from a host of human factors, like ambiguity, that can ratchet up the risk even further.
In fact, the risks are so numerous (and can differ so greatly from one type of employee to another) that the guide on new-hire safety Fitting in Fast: Making a Safe Workplace for New Hires begins by outlining the many dangers that people need to contend with any time they begin working for a new employer or change roles at their existing company.
The guide goes on to present a host of solutions for senior leaders and EHS professionals, from quick wins to long-term solutions, making it an essential for anyone who takes the safety of new employees seriously.
A fatigue safety primer
In workplace safety terms, human factors are the mental and physical states that can affect how people perceive hazards, make decisions and act in the workplace. This means that human factors can be a major influence on overall risk levels for employees. And while there are plenty of human factors, from confusion and illness to frustration and overconfidence, there’s a single factor that is more recognizable than the others, and that is a constant threat in every situation: fatigue.
Fatigue can make someone overlook a major hazard in the workplace. It can make someone fall asleep at the wheel of a car. It can even make them trip over their own feet and fall when there aren’t any notable hazards present. In every industry, fatigue is a problem. That’s what makes A Comprehensive Guide to Overcoming the Effects of Fatigue in the Workplace—a free safety guide on managing the effects of tiredness of workplace safety—so important.
The guide dispels several myths about fatigue and helps position it as a wide-ranging safety problem that is best managed with a 24/7 approach. Because fatigue is so omnipresent, it’s a worthwhile read for EHS professionals of all stripes. So check out this guide, and the other resources listed here, to score an advantage against the complex EHS challenges and invisible hazards in your workplace, and help keep your people safe.