10 Signs That Your Organization Might Have a Negative Safety Culture 

A poor health and safety culture can adversely affect your employees, production, and company reputation. When you want to improve safety at your facilities, understanding the signs of a poor safety culture can help you identify where to apply your efforts. 

What Is a Workplace Safety Culture? 

Understanding what a safety culture is and what it includes is essential to creating a healthy, safer work environment for your employees and supervisors. A company’s safety culture prioritizes the health and safety of those at its facilities. The business and its workers will uphold this culture through their actions, values, behaviors, attitudes, and beliefs. 

Managers and executives usually tailor techniques and strategies to fit your regular operations, but safety cultures span every industry, application, and job position. Every employee can do their part to uphold and spread the culture to new and existing work community members. 

Why Are Health and Safety Cultures Important? 

Cultivating a positive safety culture can impact daily operations and long-term results. When your organization values health and safety, you can decrease accidents, incidents, and illness in your work environment, creating safer spaces for employees and executives to navigate. However, your safety culture can also influence other factors, including: 

• Provides comprehensive corporate protection: While many people think the policies, habits, and values of a positive safety culture only aim to protect employees, it extends far further than that. For example, a safety culture can reduce accident risks, which helps protect machinery and equipment components from preventable damage and repairs. A robust health and safety culture will thoroughly provide for your business and various audiences.
• Improves employee retention and loyalty: Overhauling a company’s toxic culture can affect the experience of its employees. When businesses value and prioritize safety initiatives and strategies, employees feel more protected and trust their executives and supervisors. Companies can use their safety culture to show their employees they care about them, causing them to stay employed longer and even serve as brand advocates. 
• Reduces absenteeism: Along with encouraging employee retention, a positive safety culture lets employees be more present in the workplace. Poor health and safety standards can cause employees to call out more frequently and miss shifts due to illnesses and injuries. On the other hand, a positive safety culture lets your regular employees cover their shifts more reliably. Their experience and training help things run smoothly, keeping production levels up and reducing the need to hire temporary workers. 
• Increases quality and productivity: A positive environment that promotes health and safety will likely include fewer disruptions and risks. Injuries and accidents can lead to production halts, while cluttered workspaces can make it challenging for employees to work quickly and safely. When you prioritize health and safety, your employees can work more efficiently and focus on producing their best work. 

Understanding what a positive safety culture adds to your work environment can help companies see its benefits. You can help reduce accidents and injuries while boosting employee relationships with your company to support your goals and growth initiatives. 

10 Factors Promoting a Negative Health and Safety Culture

When you want to improve health and safety at your company, it’s first crucial to identify any signs of a toxic culture. Because safety cultures are so comprehensive, organizations can easily overlook areas where their processes fall short or create potentially dangerous settings and habits for employees. Various actions can support healthy and unhealthy work environments. Recognizing the elements that support unhealthy ones can help better direct your improvement and protective efforts. 

1. Lack of Leadership Buy-In 

Executive teams, supervisors, and managers might implement safety policies and procedures but not follow them. Leadership may believe that because they aren’t operating equipment or completing certain operations, safety policies don’t apply to them. 

The actions of higher-ups who are less exposed to everyday dangers can impact your employees’ feelings about your health and safety policies. Proper safety management requires leaders who thoroughly believe in your safety efforts. When leadership fails to see the importance of your safety culture, your protective measures lose their impact and effectiveness in daily operations. 

Highlighting the importance of your safety culture to supervisors, managers, and executives can help strengthen your policies and their influence on employees. Your leadership can make decisions that support your safety culture, from investing in new equipment to launching initiatives and incentives for improving health and safety. They can serve as ambassadors for your culture, showing they believe in its impact and success.

2. Poor Communication Between Departments 

Poor communication can lead to poor health and safety efforts when implementing companywide initiatives. Minimal efforts or poor communication channels can create more confusion and misunderstandings about policies and methods. Health and safety cultures require all departments and teams to make a sincere effort to work together and follow implemented practices. 

Implementing the right communication strategies is essential to developing your safety culture. Some ways you can strengthen communication methods include: 

• Creating distinct responsibilities and roles: When establishing communication methods, shared resources can help employees and leaders understand health and safety policies as well as each other. You can communicate standards clearly by outlining your new policies, how each person fits into them, and how you expect each role to help uphold them. Create reference documents that outline each position’s responsibilities to help everyone understand your organization’s policies and culture. 
• Reiterating and following up frequently: You must establish quality communication practices and habits when implementing safety procedures and culture. Memories are imperfect, and people are prone to forgetting essential details. You can support more seamless implementation by following up with teams and departments about health and safety procedures. Hearing information multiple times and going over problem areas will help solidify policies, improving how well people follow them. 
• Unifying goals through communication liaisons: Communication between departments is essential for upholding a companywide health and safety culture. Departments need to work together to help reach safety goals and objectives and a lack of communication can lead to conflicting methods. Liaisons can move between departments to ensure teams are working for the same purposes and maintaining your safety culture. 

Proper communication methods can strengthen your implementation efforts and safety culture. Quality communication allows employees and managers to ask questions and raise concerns. As the people who carry out procedures and policies daily, they can point out areas of improvement where things might not be working. 

3. Underreporting and Misreporting 

Reporting incidents is essential for understanding workplace safety. Employees must report health and safety violations like incidents, injuries, and accidents to trigger investigations and receive help like workers’ compensation or workplace accommodations. Reporting is crucial for identifying unsafe practices and adjusting processes and policies to prevent incidents from happening again. 

If your company doesn’t prioritize health and safety, your employees won’t either — they will continue working with injuries or after accidents. A comprehensive safety culture can help employees understand how to proceed after incidents. They’ll know how and where to report and other actions they might need to take to increase visibility and care after incidents. 

Several other factors can contribute to low reporting rates, including the following: 

• Fearing backlash: Employees may omit details or elect not to report problems because they fear their involvement will cost them their job. A healthy company safety culture will assure employees they can protect themselves and their jobs through reporting. 
• Fearing peer judgment: Employees might want to put on a persona after an accident to look tougher than they are. They might think their coworkers will think differently of them or see them as weak if they report. 
• Expecting a lack of support: Employees in high-risk and -movement jobs may think pain is part of the work. They might believe it’s normal to deal with frequent injuries, accidents, and other incidents in the workplace without any care or help from their employers. Previous jobs at companies with poor safety cultures can also shape how new employees address and report problems with your business. 
• Misinterpreting injury severity: Employees might think they can treat their injury at home instead of going to the doctor. When they believe the damage is minor, they will overlook reporting or underemphasize the injury in reports. However, these injuries can lead to long-term effects like stress fractures and strains. 

4. Lack of Employee Engagement 

If your employees never discuss health and safety after you introduce the policy, they might not see the relevance or significance. You need to carefully cultivate your health and safety culture if you want it to be successful. Along with leading through examples, continual engagement lets managers and supervisors ensure that employees understand the importance of your safety culture. 

Some ways supervisors and managers can engage their employees with your safety culture and policies include: 

• Providing training opportunities with manager involvement. 
• Observing guidelines in action.
• Explaining the relevance and reasons behind new policies and procedures. 
• Leading conversations and discussions about health and safety. 

Managers can take a more hands-on approach to increase engagement and understanding of how your company’s safety policy works daily. 

 

5. Negative Feedback From Employees 

Overwhelmingly negative feedback often signals that management and leadership are not listening to the needs of their employees. You should be especially aware of repeated complaints, which signal a critical issue your leadership hasn’t addressed. 

Your employees are excellent resources for improvement. Negative feedback is a way for employees to identify and communicate failures in current systems and policies. People who use equipment, processes, and facilities daily can alert leadership to potential problems and spark change throughout the company. Taking action on negative feedback about changes or existing policies lets you implement effective new health and safety procedures. 

6. High Accident Rates 

High accident and injury rates are the consequences of a poor safety culture. Companies without a positive safety culture may teach employees to value their productivity above their health and safety, leading to increased carelessness and recklessness. However, your management team can help lower accident rates by contributing to greater employee engagement. Leadership must provide employees with the knowledge, training, and equipment they need to keep themselves safe by preventing or reducing accident and injury risks. 

7. Double Standards in Place 

Double standards exist when managers, supervisors, and executives require employees to follow policies they don’t. When this happens, employees may believe those policies are a means of control instead of safety and lose faith in the health and safety culture. You can better protect everyone in your company by ensuring all leaders and supervisors follow your policies. 

When a supervisor or manager fails to meet safety guidelines, enforcing the consequences of breaking rules and policies will emphasize your safety culture’s importance. If your company takes health and safety seriously at every level, employees will internalize that mindset and better understand its value. 

8. Traditional and Conservative Mindsets 

Tradition supports many businesses. However, regarding health and safety, traditions and lack of change can pose risks to employees. 

Implementing new processes takes time and impacts efficiency, which can lead to lower productivity during early phases. Conservative health and safety positions usually revolve around the idea that there’s no need to eliminate a potential danger because it hasn’t caused issues yet. Dangerous traditions and poor health and safety practices can harm employees. Even if the process or equipment works fine now, it can lead to severe injuries, accidents, and liability later. 

Instead, companies should regularly assess their processes to identify potential risks. While it may take time to adjust to new strategies and procedures, they can improve employee health and safety, improving the payoff. 

9. Stubborn Employees or Managers 

Though a positive safety culture applies to everyone, some might resist change. These individuals can harm how well your company adopts health and safety initiatives. They can endanger themselves and others, damage equipment and goods, and influence others to reject safety standards. Health and safety efforts take the entire company’s participation to be effective. 

10. Cost Cutting and Profit Maximization 

Organizations have many priorities to consider when making decisions and many place costs and profits over health and safety. They might see new gear and equipment, more time off, and other tools or benefits as too expensive when other policies optimize costs. 

However, poor safety cultures can increase costs in other areas. In 2020, workplace injuries accumulated over $163 billion in business costs. Injuries can leave companies responsible for medical bills, lost wages, and other workers’ compensation benefits. Additionally, factors like damaged equipment and facilities and a reduced workforce can lower productivity after an incident. Lost wages and productivity cost companies $44.8 billion in 2020, along with $61 billion in administrative costs and $34.9 billion in medical bills. 

While protective equipment and processes can have a higher price tag up front, their cost is far less than the impact of the accidents and injuries they prevent. A safety culture can preserve your company’s finances and assets, including your employees. 

Improve Workplace Safety With Rigid Lifelines  

The right equipment tells your employees that you are serious about changing your safety culture and improving and strengthening workplace health. Rigid Lifelines offers a wide selection of fall restraint and arrest equipment to keep your employees safer while at work. With products for various industries, you can find the fall protection solution that will function best for your applications. 

Contact Rigid Lifelines today to discover how we can help your company develop and grow its health and safety culture.