Is a strong safety program possible when you have less time to spare? The COVID-19 pandemic has rendered most of 2020 plans obsolete, exhausting many business’ efficiency levers. With tighter margins, supply chain issues, increased overall business complexity and more stringent cleaning schedules, it is crucial for employers to find productivity gains-now more than ever. Ensuring your team’s safety is now essential to keeping your productivity on track. Nevertheless, how do you accomplish this without both sacrificing efficiency and overextending your already stressed personnel? Productivity is easy to define: The effectiveness of productive effort, however this is hard to achieve. Although your team might be rewarded for “speed,” working quickly is not the same as working productively. It may sound trite, but building a strong safety culture and unlocking productivity go hand in hand: create greater output with less effort and injury, in other words,
Work Smarter Not Harder!
Shared accountability
Unless everyone on the team feels responsible for the outcome, the team will never achieve its full potential. Whether the outcome is more output or fewer injuries, shared rewards and performance transparency are critical here
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COMMIT
HIGH LEVEL OF TRUST
Team members need to be comfortable admitting mistakes. By doing so their mistakes can help others and enable others to help them improve. Effective feedback drives trust, as associates learn that managers care about them as individuals and also will hold them accountable for clear objectives.
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Clear and open communication Teams need to be able to communicate. This means clear and open expression of ideas and, perhaps even more importantly, active listening. A shared vernacular can be incredibly helpful as it simplifies communication (especially helpful in a busy restaurant) and reinforces messages. Creating open lines of communication will help employees watch out for each other and even point out ways to improve their work.
Supportive environment
The other 3 elements will only manifest if the members of the team feel safe and supported by the rest of the team and the company. Only by openly communicating ideas, feedback and mistakes, and by holding one another accountable can the team continually improve to achieve the goal.
If the leadership and management teams are not committed to building a culture of safety, they do not stand a chance of creating and sustaining one. In addition, while many leaders and leadership teams will put a commitment on paper and speak to it, there is too often not enough dedication to see it to its conclusion.
