Great Minds = Great Ideas
Every year, you resolve to make changes that affect you personally and professionally, right? Well, with that mindset in place, let’s start 2021 by exploring tips to build a safety committee at your workplace. The goal is to empower your employees through participation and raise your collective safety game by creating something that is both effective and enjoyable.
Safety has never mattered more than right now. Driver and transportation safety can be part of your organization’s culture without being viewed as a chore. Tapping employees to help shape that culture is a great way to start. So, here are seven tips to help get the ball rolling, courtesy of the National Safety Council and Safety+Health Magazine:
- Put progression before perfection at the start: Begin with both immediate goals and long-term goals. Ask: How can I cut costs, reduce injuries and reduce the number of transportation safety incidents? Be careful that you do not aim too high in the beginning.
- Embrace variety: Your employees come from all walks of life. Be sure your safety committee follows that same model. Include representatives from varied positions and backgrounds, from the loading dock to the executive suite.
- Develop a core program: Think of this as providing education and tools so committee members will be able to communicate safety policies, procedures and messages.
- Plan meetings ahead of time: Pick a committee chair, develop agendas and distribute them so committee members can come to meetings with questions and ideas to move tasks forward. Set time limits for meetings to keep everyone focused.
- Rotate committee members: How many people do you want to serve on your safety committee? Seek volunteers to increase investment. Set up a system that allows for new members to bring new energy on a regular basis. This could mean establishing term limits: two years on, one year off, for example.
- Don’t be boring: Make safety fun, and make participation on your safety committee fun, too. On occasion, bring in a guest speaker to provide inspiration. If possible, meet on the patio or in a park when the weather is good. Be innovative, be creative and be willing to explore new ways to share road safety axioms. Get T-shirts for committee members … employees, too? Set days to dress in safety gear. Create your own traffic safety slogans. Take safety snapshots and post them on your company’s intranet site.
- Open the window and look outside: Get in touch with others and see how they move the safety needle. If you’re in gas and oil production, reach out to safety leaders in retail or medical communities. If nothing else, this can help you see things differently and get your brain thinking differently. Sharing is caring.
Safety is 24/7 and 365 days a year. Safety does not sleep or take a vacation. A safety committee can help you navigate issues ranging from vehicle maintenance to driver behavior. The sooner you start, the sooner you can boost the size of your safety team. Safety needs to be everyone’s top priority right now.
Chance to Brush Up
They say you cannot change what you are, only what you do. If that’s true, then I suggest you do something different to promote driver and transportation safety in 2021. Use our updated e-learning modules to empower your employees with road safety knowledge they can put to use on and off the job.
These interactive 5- to 7-minute modules are fully compatible with mobile devices and cover traffic safety challenges that confront all employers:
- Aggressive driving
- Distracted driving
- Drowsy driving
- Impaired driving
- Passenger restraint
Find out if your employees can identify behaviors that define aggressive driving, or if they understand cognitive distraction as it pertains to cellphone use and driving. Do they know what it means to choose safety?
Develop a plan for your employees to complete one of our e-learning modules each week for five weeks. Then, when they’ve completed all five modules and passed the final quiz, present them with a certificate of completion. Equally important, you will be able to track their progress and reward them for prioritizing safety. Can you give out prizes, too?
I believe the start of a new year is a great time to try new things. These e-learning opportunities can allow you to expand on your training efforts during a time when many in-person activities have been put on hold. Education is one way to affect change. By ourselves, we may not be able to change the world or speed up the return to a new normal. But we can change our own habits and our own ways. We can stay positive, and we can do things differently.
Put another way: You change your toothbrush every two or three months. Why not update and change your road safety offerings once in a while, too? Try our e-learning modules now.