3 Things on safety !

“Think Different.” It’s a much quoted phrase from the infamous vintage Apple advertisements, but what does it have to do with safety? More than you’d think. When we set out to conduct a survey of safety training professionals, we found some insights we didn’t expect to find. Including a few things that safety managers at certain organizations do, and “think different” most certainly applies to them.

Here are 3 things that safety managers running the most successful safety programs do:

1. They delegate tasks effectively

There are a lot of hats safety managers must wear every day. In fact, there are more than a dozen different hats safety managers are expected to wear on a daily basis. But they’re usually not alone. More than half of all successful safety programs have anywhere from 2-4 employees dedicated full time to safety management, according to a recent SafetySmart survey.  And successful safety managers certainly use these resources at their disposal.

Nearly 80% of all safety managers said they prefer to spend their time:

• preparing safety training materials
• keeping up with safety compliance regulations
• reinforcing safety communications and awareness
• conducting audits and inspections

While they use their teams to handle the remaining items such as:

• managing safety equipment and PPE;
• hazardous materials management;
• managing eLearning and other remote training; and,
• managing training recordkeeping;

2. They invest in being better at safety training

Safety managers that run successful safety programs really stand apart from the crowd in this this area: there was recognized need to make an investment in training materials and tools like videos and eLearning to become a better-rounded professional for themselves and for their team.

They also realize that to run a successful program, it doesn’t happen all by yourself. They support their teams with tools and consultants.

In fact, safety managers surveyed spend nearly 30% of their safety budgets on finding new sources of instructor-led training material, and an additional 20% on new toolbox talks and training videos. That’s half of their annual budget on new safety meeting and training material!  And, over half the sample (56%) would spend even more money on it if they could.

3. They believe in a well-rounded program

Perhaps the one thing that the most successful safety managers do different is that they are aware that one single aspect of a safety program is not going to get the job done. They recognize that everything has to be synchronized and work together.

Posters are one example of this. Posters often get a lot of flak in the industry—people debate their usefulness and purpose, etc.—but the majority of safety managers who run a well-rounded program realize that when you do training, you need to have a way to reinforce your message.  And those combined efforts collectively play a vital role in the overall success of your safety program.

In fact, across all industries, safety managers stress the importance of reinforcing safety messages. In our recent survey, the majority of managers said they not only use them, but would prefer to use them more frequently.

Message reinforcement is deemed the biggest benefit of safety posters, but this isn’t the only way successful managers stay on top of things. Nearly 79% of safety managers mentioned an increase in demand for tools, and 73% had greater demands for safety services this past year.