How to Join the Safety Culture Movement: Part 6
Implement Best Practices and Procedures
Seems pretty naïve when you hear it – implement best practices. If it’s that simple, why isn’t everyone doing it? Well, it is simple but maybe not so simply put. Implementing best practices and procedures is really about staying connected with your industry’s community. Attend lunch and learns, go to conferences, and share safety information with your partners and competitors. Keep the dialogue around safety going. Doing this will keep you in the know about the cutting edge, revolutionary techniques and approaches to conducting work. Sharing and immersing yourself in industry-specific information will provide you with the knowledge necessary to continually improve and innovate your safety performance.
The process behind implementing best practices represents the endless pursuit of betterment and the unrelenting refusal to be satisfied with how things are now. Daunting? Maybe a little. But isn’t anything worth doing a little challenge you’re willing to accept? And, fortunately, the only way we can ensure we are employing best practices and elevating and enhancing our Safety Culture is by committee. So, it’s certainly not a challenge that any of us face alone.
The truth of the matter is this – whatever industry you are in, you want to be competitive, you want to strive to be the best in your field. However, you certainly don’t want to see your competitors fall short in their safety performance. All it takes is one incident related to your industry, and the whole field, including all of the organizations who have immaculate safety performance, can be marred in the public eye. We needn’t think too hard to come up with instances such as this. History has proven that one solitary incident can have a devastating impact on other organizations, the entire industry, the stock markets, the economy and, consequently, the food or lack thereof on your family’s dinner table.
But if we just rewind the tape, and we choose to act long before the point of impact – such a large and widespread event can be prevented with something as simple as a handshake and a conversation about how safety is being integrated into the work. Whether it be at an industry event, on a golf course or over a cup of coffee – continually draw on the resources you have at your disposal to discover the information that will support you in widening the gap between an incident and your people. Stay curious and inquisitive. None of us are masters in this space – park your ego and be confident in the fact that real wisdom and intelligence comes out of a desire to continue learning.
Best practices are continually evolving and being modified to the working environment. If they’re always improving, we should be improving alongside them. Get out there and share what you know, and do everything you can to pick up some information along the way. If we want our people to employ best practices, they need to be provided with that information – or at the very least, the means to gather the knowledge.
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