Creating a safety-conscious culture from the top-down and bottom-up

Words without substance are often par for the course in the world of workplace health and safety (WHS). How often do we hear executives exclaim that they are planning to adopt a holistic approach to WHS that lays the foundation for a top-down and bottom-up culture, but fail to turn their good intentions into action? This commendable strategy might sound good in boardrooms and look good on paper, but all too often it lacks the structure required to do anything meaningful about it. So, how can businesses successfully ensure this common goal is converted from hollow buzzwords into a proactive WHS culture?

Communication

Achieving a top-down and bottom-up WHS culture is often easier said than done because of a major hurdle: communication. Policies and processes conceived in a boardroom without consulting the wider business – the people impacted by them each day – are typically short-sighted. Workers subsequently feel disenfranchised and unwilling to adopt them.

The challenge does not end there: even if you have perfectly crafted policies resulting from effective collaboration, without effective channels of communication the vital process of percolating your message throughout the business will be muted. Deprived of invaluable information – such as hazard reports and assessments – stakeholders at all levels of the business will remain disengaged.

WHS software

Integrated WHS software has the power to bridge the gap between well-meaning ideas becoming reality, by transforming a business’s safety culture through worker engagement, participation, and leadership. It achieves this by facilitating effective communication at every stage of the risk cycle (identification, analysis, evaluation, and response) via intuitive tools, providing the structure and understanding required to achieve the holy grail: a holistic WHS approach that is driven from the top down and implemented from the bottom up.

Having broken down the barriers between workers and the boardroom, WHS software creates more visibility and transparency in the business – with the former responding by prioritising their personal safety and that of their colleagues going forward.

So how can Camms help?

Camms can help your business to embed a safety culture in which all employees are empowered to develop healthy working habits and attitudes through effective communication – creating a risk-aware workplace where robust controls are realistic safety goals are commonplace.

Having considered common industry pain points – from paper-based incident management to a failure to link incidents to risks – we developed an integrated solution that allows you to manage your WHS performance via an intuitive central point of oversight. Its key capabilities ensure employees at every level of your business can capture even the smallest incidents and near misses, which if left unaddressed can escalate – making incident reporting and risk management more accessible, accountable, trackable and resolvable. These capabilities include:

• Risk management: embeds operational risk management into your business’s WHS culture, so you can identify, track and manage risks effectively.
• Incident reporting and monitoring: facilitates incident and near misses reporting in real-time, and the investigation process post-event.
• Compliance management: identifies areas of non-compliance to drive business action and address legislative changes.
• Register management: access, update and maintain WHS registers efficiently.
• Audit management: schedule and manage internal and external audits and utilise the results.

This comprehensive approach to governance, risk and compliance facilitates the transparent flow of relevant information throughout the organisation from the top-down, and the adoption of a proactive WHS culture from the bottom-up – empowering the right people to make the right decisions at the right time. It is this ability to create a structure underpinned by communication that can provide executives with the platform required to turn words into reality.

Find out more about how our Workplace Health and Safety solution can support you to maintain workplace health and safety registers, identify and deal with hazards and create and track actions to address issues.