F OR SAFETY SAK E
4 STEPS TO CREATING A PREVENTATIVE SAFETY CULTURE Hitting a thumb with a hammer or dropping a two-by-four on a toe are common workplace injuries. These represent the roughly 3 million nonfatal incidents enterprises reported yearly, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. But chalking up more severe incidents as accidents and not doing anything about them creates a much more dangerous threat—lack of a safety culture. The Occupational Health and Safety Administration recently released a study detailing results from the first year of its severe injury reporting program, and the outcome looks bleak. OSHA believed that although roughly 10,000 severe injuries were reported, nearly 50 percent of these types of accidents went unreported in an era where the spotlight is on improving employee safety by preventing predictable injuries. Workplace safety has come a long way since the industrial era, and even more so with the inclusion of Safety Management
18 | Official Publication of The Ohio Landscape Association
Software in various industries. But to effectively stop injuries in their tracks, prevention should be at the top of every safety manager’s mind.
1. DEVELOP AN ALL-INCLUSIVE CULTURE You can’t keep employees safe without getting them on board. It’s a difficult task for a safety manager revising the perception of a workplace riddled with oversight and rampant violations. Injury prevention isn’t possible if the people experiencing problems don’t want to make a change. continued on page 20
