Environmental health & Safety culture in your organization must be considered a top priority and has to be maintained constantly. Because the workers are the backbone of any organization their lives and well-being should not be treated lightly.

Whether developing HSMS, conducting a safety awareness workshop, or redesigning a general safety program, you must consider the 5 components of workplace safety: Education, Encouragement, Engineering, Enforcement, and Evaluation.

So let’s examine each of these security components individually.

• Education

Without increasing employee understanding of workplace hazards and preventive actions, it is hard to improve your organization’s safety culture. Education ensures that your workers gain the knowledge of the several safe work practices that are necessary for risk management other than just their impulses.

• Encouragement

Encouragement therefore refers to something said to; or an action that brings confidence in somebody to carry out an act. The objective of this approach is to foster confidence and enthusiasm among your workers to embrace the safety culture of your organisation without having to compel them to read every page of the OHS program you may have developed.

• Engineering

The technical aspect of safety is the formulation of effective OHS policies and procedures which constitute the ‘engineering’ component of safety. In this situation, the quality of work done is considered paramount to meeting the client’s expectations. “Engineering Safety” relates to the concept regarding the design, creation, assessment, incorporation, and management of the new safety measures that are being introduced.

• Enforcement

It is not very easy to force your workers to stay committed to your safety measures; not that they are careless, but your measures may demand time that the employees did not anticipate spending. Training that is more informative but also persuasive enough to make your workers stick to your rules is needed to ensure that workers know that their safety is in their own hands. Doing so will more often than not get you ‘life’ when faced with ‘death’.

• Evaluation

One should ensure that he or she conducts safety audits frequently and ensure that he or she is conversant with the current safety requirements. Positive safety culture is in existence because people have the habits and behaviors of promoting safety but since this is a dynamic process, it requires ongoing assessment, and so it is recommended that the effectiveness of the instituted safety measures and strategies should be reviewed at least semi-annually or annually.

Conclusion

If you want to learn about how you can create a safe working environment or require more knowledge of EHS as part of your career development, UniAthena’s Environment Health and Safety course online is the best choice for you. It is free to learn and it can be taken online completely. This free short course is aimed at working professionals who need to know more about EHS. The modular learning format with bite-sized content helps you retain and understand the content easily and gives you the flexibility to choose a learning schedule. Register for the Environment Health course today to start making your workstation safe with this Environment Health and Safety certification course.