South Dakota Safety Council Banner
Courses Calendar Instructors Whats New Search

Safety Culture Reset - Building Employee Engagement

You're doing all the "right" things - safety meetings, inspections, a safety committee, lots of training. But your employees don't really "buy in" to your program. They go through the motions, pencil-whip forms, employ workarounds for hazards instead of reporting them and break the rules when you're not looking. You have unexplained spikes in injury rates or surprise serious injuries.

It's likely that much of the safety programming you do is actually reducing engagement and motivation in your workforce. Most traditional safety programs are relentlessly negative - we focus on injuries, violations, unsafe acts; we overreact to minor injuries because they're "recordable." We only talk about problems and ignore the good efforts in our program as "what they're paid to do." We "investigate" people when things go wrong, and we usually end up blaming a person that we've hired, trained and supervised for not being "careful" enough, never looking at our own system problems. Is it any wonder that our employees aren't excited about safety?

The good news is that you can reset this negative culture with a simple shift in the language and approach to managing safety.

This interactive, hands-on program will show you how to communicate, manage safety day-to-day and respond to incidents in more positive ways that will foster engagement and develop a "want to" rather than a "have to" safety culture. You'll leave with specific, customized actions you can implement in your organization right away to begin building engagement, teamwork and trust in your programs.

Program Topics:
  • Why Traditional Safety Programs Kill Engagement
  • Putting a Positive Spin on Communications - better goals, metrics and mindset
  • Understanding At-Risk Behavior - why people do what they do, and why training alone will never change it
  • Building Positive Accountability - define what "safe" looks like in your workplace and manage performance in more positive and upstream ways
  • Incident Response That Adds Value - stop blaming people for behaviors your systems are designed to produce

    Members: $400 plus tax
    Nonmembers: $520 plus tax
  • Length: Two Days


    Already offered this term; next scheduled offering to be announced.


    Contact the South Dakota Safety Council at sdsc@southdakotasafetycouncil.org
    or phone 605-361-7785 or 1-800-952-5539.