How Operations Teams Play a Role in Safety

Safety is something that businesses of all kinds should be concerned with. But if your culture is to truly support the safety of your workers, it isn’t enough to simply put the message out that safety is important – you’ll also need to lead by example, and incorporate safe practices into every aspect of your operations.

Leadership and operational ownership

When operations managers are visibly engaging in safe behaviours, they’ll have much greater authority when they come to hold others to account. There are also special duties that leadership might ensure are fulfilled. These include conducting regular risk assessments, providing appropriate equipment such as construction site footwear, and devising policies around first aid and your response to emergency situations.

Embedding safety into day-to-day operations

Rather than being an additional nice-to-have, safety should be regarded as integral to the success of the business. In other words, if you don’t meet your goals when it comes to safety, then your business can’t be regarded as successful, however impressive your performance in other departments.

You’ll want to measure your performance according to the right metrics. These might vary from workplace to workplace, but in every case, they’ll need to deal with the prevalence and severity of work-related accidents, illness and injuries.

What can really make a difference, however, are the accidents that don’t result in injury. Near-miss reports can help to address underlying problems and help to ensure that the event in question never occurs again.

Communication, involvement and front-line engagement

Operations teams should be in constant dialogue with workers when it comes to safety. This means not only talking, but listening, too. You’ll need to convey instructions and policy details, but at the same time, you’ll need to be receptive to the insights your workers provide. Have policies in place for feedback, ongoing hazard-spotting, and briefings.

Ideally, any given employee should be able to not only spot problems, but also feel comfortable raising the issue with more senior members of the organisation. When training around safety is appropriately dispensed, and refresher courses and regular team meetings drill the fundamental principles into everyone, it might become much easier for hazards and other safety failures to be spotted and addressed.

Continuous improvement, data-driven insights and culture reinforcement

If you aren’t continuously improving the safety of your workplace, then you could be failing in your duty of care toward your employees. Your culture should allow you to continually monitor performance according to your stated metrics. This is a matter not just of identifying and calling out problematic practices and behaviours; it’s also a matter of recognising when things are going well, and giving everyone working within the organisation the right set of positive and negative incentives.