Workplace health and safety can be a dull topic for employees, in most cases truth be told, but that doesn’t make it any less important. The challenge for management and compliance officers is to create engagement in this area for everyone involved, so that improving work safety becomes a regular part of a team’s goals.
In this article we look at how companies can get employees engaged in compliance measures, to create a safer work environment.
Transparency Fosters Involvement
One of the most important things you can do to emphasise the importance of workplace health and safety is to hold regular audits, and then make the data visible. In fact, not only should this audit data be visible and accessible to those who look for it, it should be prominently displayed where it can’t help but be seen.
If you’re wondering how audit results, not exactly the most interesting information to most, are going to grab attention, think of it as a competition of sorts. We’ve all seen companies where signs announce so many days since the last safety incident occurred there. With the amount of information available in audit data when using a comprehensive auditing system, such as Compliance Checkpoint, the internal posting of safety information can be broken down in a wide variety of ways, not the least of which might include scorecards for different areas or departments.
People naturally like to see acknowledgement when they are doing well at something. Conversely, they aren’t as happy when it’s obvious to all that the department they’re responsible for or work in is falling short. Posting safety audit data for all to see like this creates a healthy sense of competition between departments for improvement, and provides transparent kudos to those who are excelling. So how can you share this information?
Use a Dashboard
Good auditing software like Compliance Checkpoint will include a customisable dashboard for presenting information, and it’s with the dashboard that you can create your scorecard of data for employees to see. The tangible results displayed in charts, reports, and statistics in front of them will create more engagement and promote increased attention to improving.
You can configure your dashboard however you deem appropriate, but one way to divide it could be with audit activities, audit results, improvement activities, risk activities, benchmarking of departments or groups against each other and against the organisation as a whole, and an administrative section. The benchmarking would provide the “grades” to each person or group, to promote competitive improvement strategies. It’s also important to make sure that the dashboard is as interactive as possible, so users can drill down into results as specifically as they want or need.
The goal of making audit results transparent is to make compliance less boring and more engaging on the surface, but the deeper and more important goal is improvement. In this case, that improvement benefits everyone in a very real and tangible way, by making the business a safer and healthier place to work. The vital task of the dashboard is that it must be regarded as the compliance pulse of the business. Data must be closely monitored in order for everyone in the business to feel motivated to participate in compliance, and ultimately to make the company the safest place possible to work.
