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The Culture Defining Opportunity Basic Safety Rights Provide

Fri, 10/28/2016

Are you looking in the right places when attempting to elevate your Safety Culture? One of the methods for improvement may be hiding in plain sight.

In our country, every worker is granted three basic safety rights – the Right to Know, the Right to Participate, and the Right to Refuse unsafe work. These rights are instituted by the Canada Labour Code and are universally mandated from coast to coast to coast - every province and territory supports them in their respective OHS legislation. Furthermore, it is the law that employers must inform employees of these basic safety rights.

But you already know that. What I’m more interested in talking about is the opportunity these rights may provide us with as Managers and leaders of people – an opportunity we might be missing out on.

Why do these rights exist? Why would the federal government think it necessary to provide employees with these rights, above and beyond all the other OHS legislation they already have in place? The answer, in my mind, is to equip employees with what they can to defend themselves against weak Safety Cultures. Unfortunately, for some, these rights become their last line of defense instead of the fabric that binds together strong beliefs, attitudes, and practices.

So, if I’m correct, and these rights were created to give employees teeth in defending themselves and their co-workers against weak safety leadership, how could something with such a negative backstory be considered an opportunity? Isn’t their existence an affront to those leaders out there who are caring and safety conscious?

This line of thinking is dangerous – let’s check our egos for a second. These rights can either be a division between Management and workers or an extension of health and safety – further maximizing the protection of everyone.

How? The law requires that employees are informed of their basic safety rights – it doesn’t suggest the way this should be done. How you roll-out these rights matters. Herein lies the opportunity.

Question – what should be your objective, as a leader, when informing workers of their rights? If it’s to comply with the law by getting your employee to sign on a dotted line below a listing of the rights, you’re missing out on a culture defining treasure trove.

The objective should be to abolish the idea that the basic safety rights are there to protect the employee from the employer. You can’t do this by handing over a piece of paper for signing or by posting the rights to a bulletin board. These approaches aren’t overly genuine and will validate the idea that you don’t care. Managers that truly want a strong Safety Culture in their organization aren’t interested in checking boxes – they see every action as an opportunity to improve the strength of their team.

Put more thought and time into how you convey the basic safety rights. Why? Because it sends a strong and resonating message through a subtle delivery system. You’d be surprised how effective something as simple as this could be, in comparison to a “rah-rah” speech that is ambiguously supportive of health and safety. People are generally very good at identifying when they’re being paid lip-service or being spoken to instead of talked with.

There are a multitude of ways you can show your workers that the basic safety rights aren’t just laws for conveying, and you can get as creative as you want. A few simple suggestions for convincing your workers that the rights matter to the entire organization are:

- Providing some “what if” scenarios that present incidents that could occur when workers aren’t empowered to be actively involved in health and safety.

- Sharing some true stories of the rights being effectively drawn on within the organization, where workers and Management collaborated to stop an incident from occurring and identified preventive actions to eliminate the unsafe situation.

- Showcasing client feedback that displays respect in the industry for your organization’s competence and know-how – thus exemplifying that the practice of refraining from doing work you aren’t qualified to complete is valued.

Of all the messaging you deliver during the onboarding process, you must ensure to successfully deliver the message that the basic safety rights are strongly supported within your organization. Respect and buy-in is a two-way street. To achieve buy-in from the workforce, they need to be comforted in the belief that leadership respects their well-being and sees their contribution to health and safety as invaluable.

When your employees accept that you and your Management team support the basic safety rights, you’re one step closer to solidifying, in the minds of your workers, the belief that everyone wants to go to work, do their job well, and get home safe.

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