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By Traci Long
Compliance is critically important to protecting employees. It can be difficult to achieve in some environments but establishes the baseline requirements for safety on the job. Due to the obvious legal nature, focus naturally tends toward this until it becomes standard. Decades ago, reaching this standard meant lower costs, higher productivity and competitive advantage. But most companies stopped there. There was little need to go beyond mandates.
These days, companies are much more aware of altruistic needs, such as resources for employees' health and wellbeing. After all, the employees are the company. The initial focus is still the same — compliance. But after this is achieved, how do you evolve and ensure you properly focus to build on the foundation you've created? There are many answers to this, and while the planned structure may be different for each location, industry, workforce, etc., figuring out your starting point is the initial step.
An assessment helps you to determine where your strengths and opportunities lie to best focus for maximum return on investment. This typically involves a Pareto analysis (as I mentioned in the previous blog), a perception survey, review of historical data and interviews with different levels of the workforce. Assessment findings are important to utilize in the development of your strategy to improve. Without this critical data to drive your plan, how can you be confident in which vital elements to include? How data-driven is your strategic safety plan?
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