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Improving the Health and Performance of Your Employees

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improving health and performance of employees

Employees working in industrial environments face many Health, Safety and Environmental challenges. Managers are tasked with ensuring that employee performance is at its best, which is only possible by making sure that workers are healthy, alert, and ready to perform their roles at a high level.  So much priority is placed upon Safety and Environmental stewardship that general employee health can feel like an afterthought or just not command the attention it deserves.  Following are three important areas of focus for industrial managers to help keep employee Health as a priority in your company culture.

 

1. Build a Health-Conscious Workplace Culture

One of the most important factors in the health and safety of employees is the workplace culture cultivated by their employer. If it is clear to your employees that you value a healthy and productive workforce, they will tend to view these as important qualities, as well. Employers often underestimate just how much influence they can have in forming their workplace culture and the lives of their employees (even outside of work).

Employers should encourage healthy behavior in general. This can take a variety of forms, from giving employees opportunities to express their concerns to encouraging healthy behaviors and rewarding personal health goals. Create and maintain a workplace “ buzz” around health campaigns such as rewarding weight loss goals, sponsorship of company teams in local fitness events, posting and celebrating employee health accomplishments. By capitalizing on employee concerns for their own health and the health of those they work with, managers can go a long way toward ensuring that the workplace is constantly increasing in general health and associated productivity.

The most important part of this process is making sure that your employees feel comfortable expressing their health goals and keeping general health as a topic of discussion. If employees do not feel like they will be heard or worse that managers don’t want to waste energy on the health conversation, they will tend to keep quiet and the positive chatter will die down.  A lack of public enthusiasm makes it increasingly difficult to improve the health of a workforce. To help make your employees more comfortable generating a buzz, make sure to give them both formal and informal opportunities to contribute.  A good way to invite employee contributions is to form a “Health & Activity Committee.”  Invite people who are eager to lead and zealous for the cause to lead the committee with the express purpose of generating participation from the general employee base; and don’t neglect their families.

 

2. Ensure Employees Have Sound Training

As with Safety and Environmental compliance, proper employee training is vital to the health of employees in any workplace.  Be sure to include personal health topics in your Health, Safety and Environmental training.  Examples of topics that deserve attention are the impact of diet on weight control; the benefits of daily exercise routine; proper hydration; the impact of tobacco and alcohol over time.

Routinely provide health data to employees designed to encourage moving to a more healthy lifestyle. This will provide reference materials to refresh themselves on various best practices and encourage healthy choices by individuals at the their own pace.

Check with your employees regularly on what topics they might find of interest. Make sure to ask them for feedback on any health benefits they have experienced over time; weight loss, lower blood pressure, feeling better, more energy.

 

3. Take Employee Health Seriously

Our workplaces tend to support the axiom, “ hard drives out soft.”  It means some hard requirements will always take priority over less pressing activities. The focus on General Employee Health tends to get pushed around by the more regulatory controlled issues of Environmental and Safety compliance.  But Employee Health should be taken seriously.  Employee Health has a direct correlation to business costs, productivity, safety performance, and employee engagement.  A more physically fit workforce will be more productive with lower incidence of lost time.

Both your Health Benefits and Workmans Comp providers, whether a large in house team or independent provider, can serve as great resources for training materials, health data, and benefits to both the company and the individuals.  Take Employee Health seriously for a real benefit to both the company and your employees.

How Do You Achieve a Safety Culture?

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Safety Culture

In a healthy safety culture all personnel share the same responsibility for safe work. Management AND the labor workforce must both support the safety culture, even though they have different perspectives.

In this blog, we share the perspectives of both roles and offer a tips for working together to achieve a safety culture!

The Management Safety Perspective:

The management goal is to provide a safe workplace and maintain safe procedures. The attitude they are perceived to have is that workers should follow them or be subject to discipline.

The role of management is to:

  • Provide leadership & management support.
  • Demonstrate commitment.
  • Communicate expectations to employees.
  • Require accountability from lower levels of management.
  • Show a sense of moral and ethical concern.

To achieve a truly positive safety culture, it would mean that all personnel, regardless of position, job description, or time spent at the work site share equal responsibility in upholding safety standards and procedures to keep the entire job site safe. Management must lead by example when it comes to safety and back up their words with actions. Another key component to achieving a safety culture is to listen to feedback from the workforce on the ground. Failure to do so distances the workforce from management:

In short, the safety system should resonate with the workforce and represent their experiences and job tasks realistically through their own input. Not taking advantage of the wealth of practical knowledge that frontline workers can provide safety systems and operating procedures essentially devalues their first-hand experience and expertise, and it maintains the cultural rift between them and the managers, ensuring that frontline supervisors continue to turn a blind eye to nonstandard and potentially unsafe practices because production goals are routinely met. – Predictive Safety.

The Workforce Safety Perspective:

The labor workforce believes that discipline is less effective than pre-incident planning. The attitude they have is management should encourage laborers to work responsibly.

A common sentiment among frontline workers is that supervisors and managers show little concern for their well-being. Most of the time there is a communication issue at the heart of this misunderstanding:

Of course, managers did care, but often they did not understand the importance of expressing that care. The managers that employees felt could be trusted even if the company could not were those who “talked to people one-on-one, gathered their opinions, their concerns and ideas, and acted on them. – Predictive Safety.

On each jobsite, managers should give everyone the opportunity to be involved in safety management. All employees must be engaged to make safety the primary goal in fostering a safety culture. The role of management is to identify and empower the “safety champions”.

How Safety Professionals Help Create a Safety Culture

The role of safety professionals in creating safety culture is to be a technical expert that works alongside management and the labor workforce.

Experience proves that safety performance improves as organizations move to an “interdependent” safety culture.

In an interdependent safety culture, safety professionals are the “safety champions” that promote:

  • Leadership
  • High safety consciousness
  • Helping others/working together
  • Open reporting
  • Accountability
  • Pride in safety achievements

This type of culture creates a platform for sustainable safety performance.

Tips for Changing Behavior:

  • Remove incentives for not getting injured and create incentives for reduced risk.
  • Use mistakes to understand root cause.
  • Report, track and correct near misses more frequently.
  • Solve problems based on dialog and understanding.

This may feel like an uphill battle:

What transpires all too often is the diffusion of the message regarding safety for the simple lack of culture, but with the right approach and effective leadership an interdependent safety culture can become a reality in your organization. – Triumvirate Environmental.

Hire the Safety Staffing Experts

For qualified and experienced safety professionals that share the same safety values, hire us to do the hiring for you. Give us a call about your next project – 225-753-1909.

3 Ways ResponsAble Improves Your Staffing Experience

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Safety Staffing

  1. We provide higher quality, better-trained, safety-aware staff.

We’re able to find high quality people because we have years of experience and connections in finding the best qualified recruits.

  • We have a background in Safety Consulting, so we intimately understand the safety issues and needs of your job.
  • As one of the few safety staffing companies in the nation, we maintain relationships with a larger list of laborers who actually have past experience working in environments where safety is paramount.
  • We offer safety training to every recruit – even those who are not safety staff, but just laborers.
  1. We provide personalized management support.

We are invested in our work force and we are invested in building long term relationships with our contractors. So we offer our contractors actual management support from trained safety personnel.

  • We understand that managing temporary staff comes with some unique challenges, and we help our contractors try to anticipate those and deal quickly with anything that comes up.
  • We are safety staffing specialists. Being a specialist means having experience and focus that others do not. And that makes all the difference.
  1. We guarantee better site safety and job performance.

With our employees on site, we guarantee a safer job site for you which means less issues for you to deal with. Our employees are more reliable and consistent for several reasons:

  • They are often looking for more of a long term relationship with us because we are focused on safety staffing.
  • They have a much better chance of repeat employment through us. This tends to make them a bit more conscientious than most temporary employees.
  • They get more training with us and it gives them more confidence.

Safety staffing is what we do. 

We are hands-on with our employees from beginning to end.  We are not just interested in staffing as a means to an end, as a way to land a bigger job.

This means we are not just looking for warm bodies, we are looking to build stable, dependable people we can invest in and re-employ over and over again with confidence.

Why does that matter to you?

Our focus on safety staffing allows us to offer more of our recruits more consistent employment, which allows us to attract better people and be more selective in our recruiting.

Since we are building a work force, not just staffing a single job, we can justify our own investment in more than the required upfront safety and employment training and have more incentive to offer real management support to the contractors we work with while our employees are on your job site.

To improve your staffing experience, give us a call to talk about how we can provide the staff you need for your business. Reach us at 225-753-1909!

How to Create a Culture of Safety

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Culture of Safety

We all know how important safety is to your workplace. It keeps things running smoothly, manages risk, creates trust with your clients, and most importantly prevents injuries and accidental deaths.

You can’t build or sustain a workplace that values safety all on your own.

It has to be a culture. Merriam Webster defines culture as: “the set of shared attitudes, values, goals, and practices that characterizes an institution or organization.”

Managing a safe workplace has to be a shared effort by all. Safety must become a core, shared value by every employee from the top to the bottom.

A Strong Safety Culture Pays Off

Consider these numbers : “A recent SmartMarket Report states that an improved safety culture decreases reportable injuries by 10%, increases the ability to contract new work by 10%, and increases the ability to retain staff by 18%.” See source here.

A safety culture is beneficial to everyone- even your company’s bottom line. Ready to work on creating a culture of safety? Let’s start with this question:

Are You Managing or Leading?

Most companies are very strong on the managing side. They can make things happen. But not so much on the leading side. What’s the difference? While there’s much to read about this topic, to put it simply, a leader helps employees to see the why behind the instructions- taking it a step further in terms of motivation and overall influence.

By managing, organizations make things happen. It’s a linear, practical function…By leading, organizations show employees why safety matters, why they should be motivated to get behind it and want to do it.

Tom Krause, Ph.D., CEO of Behavioral Science Technology Inc., continues to explain that leading in the area of safety is absolutely vital, especially when it comes to the senior leadership of a company. He says, “If senior leadership gets it right, then the culture will change. If senior management doesn’t get it right, then everything else is like swimming upstream. It’s a struggle.”

8  Culture-Building Tips from OSHA:

  1. Define safety responsibilities: Do this for each level within your organization. This should include policies, goals and plans for the safety culture.

  2. Share your safety vision: Everyone should be in the same boat when establishing goals and objectives for their safety culture.

  3. Enforce accountability: Create a process that holds everyone accountable for being visibly involved, especially managers and supervisors. They are the leaders for a positive change.

  4. Provide multiple options: Provide different options for employees to bring their concerns or issues full-face. There should be a chain of command to make sure supervisors are held accountable for being responsive.

  5. Report, report, report: Educate employees on the importance of reporting injuries, first aids and near misses. Prepare for an increase in incidents if currently there is under-reporting. It will level off eventually.

  6. Rebuild the investigation system: Evaluating the incident investigation system is critical to make sure investigations are conducted in an effective manner. This should help get to the root cause of accidents and incidents.

  7. Build trust: When things start to change in the workplace, it is important to keep the water calm. Building trust will help everyone work together to see improvements.

  8. Celebrate success: Make your efforts public to keep everyone motivated and updated throughout the process.

Work with the Safety Experts

Partner with us to add the best trained and equipped safety personnel to your team. We’ve built a company on a culture of safety and we take pride in being the safety specialists.

When you outsource with us, you’re getting people that will bring a culture of safety to YOUR work environment. Call us today at 225-753-1909 or contact us here for more information about outsourcing!

Does Your Safety Staff Measure Up?

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Safety staff measure up

In a lot of ways, your line of work is constantly being measured in terms of safety. There’s a high standard that is expected of you and your employees. Naturally, you can’t afford to hire just any safety staff.

You need trained, quality safety professionals to do the job- not just anyone. You need more than just “warm bodies” when you’re trying to ramp up for a new job on a deadline. With stakes this high and your reputation on the line, you have to eliminate the risk of hiring anyone that falls short of your high standards.

Here’s the good news: you don’t have to worry about finding the qualified staff that measures up to the safety regulations of your industry. We’ve made it our area of specialty to do that job for you.

Reduce risk with the safety specialists.

1. We’re a part of your industry so we understand the regulations that you’re responsible for maintaining. We’re experts at safety and we’re in the know about the latest OSHA requirements. We take that burden off of your shoulders.

2. We handle all of the details (hiring, training, payroll, support and liability) so we can onboard your staff while you work to ramp up for the next project. While you’re preparing for the next job, we’re supplying the employees you need to do you current job.

3. We supply safety staff on demand. We know that what you really need is a supply chain with extra, fully-trained safety professionals that you can just call up when you need a position filled.

4. We specialize in all the work and details that you don’t have time for when you need additional safety staff. We have grown experience in working with companies just yours, so we’re able to handle your safety staffing at a level of excellence.

As one of the few agencies in the country who specialize in industrial safety staffing, we can provide a higher level of thoroughness, personal attention, and training that measures up to the high standards of your safety regulations.

We staff a wide range of safety professionals, confined space attendants/fire watch, and laborers. We’re constantly recruiting trained personnel so we can be ready for you when you need us.

Does your current staff measure up to regulations? If you cannot answer with confidence that they are, give us a call for a free needs assessment. You can reach us at 225-753-1909.We look forward to speaking with you!

 

Why Traditional Staffing Agencies Fall Short in Your Industry

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Staffing

You have an industrial work environment. A manufacturing plant. A construction site. A refinery. A petrochemical terminal.

Let’s face it- most of the time you’re not looking for clerical help or for an IT guy to fix your computers.

What you’re looking for is high quality, temporary help- strong and capable individuals that really understand safety. You need a guy comfortable in a hard hat and face mask.

Traditional staffing agencies are generalists. They’re not going to have the quality safety staff that you’re looking for. Although generalists are a great resource for some companies, they fall short in your industry.

Here’s 4 reasons why traditional staffing agencies fall short in your industry:

  1. They don’t provide the specific skills you need.

Here’s what you need to know about traditional staffing agencies: they take pride in the size of their workforce, but it isn’t the specific workforce that you’re looking for. They’ll have typists, clerical workers, file clerks, warehouse workers, dock hands, receptionists, and more. These are generalists and variety is what they do well. They can handle many needs, but not yours.

You’re not looking for generalists, you’re looking for specific skills. You need safety specialists that are comfortable and equipped to work in an industrial environment. A general staffing agency is not what you want- you need a specialist.

  1. They cost you more money than a specialist.

Think about the costs that it takes to keep a variety of specialty trades and people on a payroll. The training, wages, benefits, continuing education, tools, supplies, equipment, and management costs can really add up. The truth is, it can be very expensive for a general staffing agency to maintain such a diverse staff.

Providing variety costs money. And you pay for it.

If you choose a generalist, you are paying for those who work for you. And by default, you’re also paying for those who aren’t.

A traditional, general staffing agency has to keep a great variety of people on the payroll, maintain all their benefits, and market each of the services they offer. The management of it all is costly. You’re going to be the one paying for it.

  1. They don’t understand your industry.

OSHA. You’re very acquainted with them. You work hard to maintain regulations and to provide a safe and healthy workplace.

Even an unintended violation can cost you thousands of dollars, threaten the safety of your workers, and negatively affect the reputation that you’ve worked so hard to build.

A general staffing agency cannot provide the level of OSHA training and expertise that a specialist like ourselves can provide. An industrial safety staffing specialist will know more, will receive more training, and will have more experience.

We’re a part of your industry and we understand the regulations that you’re responsible for maintaining. We can team up with you to make sure that your workplace meets every standard and safety regulation.

  1. They provide variety, not excellence in one area.

It’s been said by many successful business leaders that it’s better to focus concentrated efforts on doing one thing well than to try to do many things mediocre.

We embrace this notion and our niche of providing excellent safety staff for industrial companies like yourself.

You just can’t expect a generalist staffing agency to provide the very best industrial staffing workforce. In fairness, it just isn’t what they do.

Their focus is to provide a workforce that meets almost every need. Almost.

In your search for industrial specialists, look to a specialist staffing agency. It’s all we do. And we tend to do it very well.

Let’s talk about how we can move your business forward together in the new year. Give us a call at 225-753-1909.