Health and Safety Executive

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Step 5: What’s in it for your team

Introduction

Important! Before beginning this step you should have completed:

This step will help you motivate your workers by using a range of techniques to clearly spell out the advantages of working more safely.

Winning hearts and minds

You must persuade your workers to act in a way that is safe and healthy, on a daily basis that is sustainable into the future.

Key tool

You can use this DVD to motivate your workers to behave more safely. This is not about scaring your workers into action; it's about making them aware of what could happen and how they can become more alert to potential risks.

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For a full copy of the Jennifer Deeney video please contact Latitude Productions Ltd

Further tools

For further techniques you could also use:

The ‘Incentives and Rewards’ gives guidance on informing workers about the incentives and rewards they can obtain by behaving in a safer way. You will need to select the incentives and rewards that suit your business.

Incentives and Rewards

The ‘Motivating Your Workforce To Behave Safely’ presentation is a useful training aid that includes guidance on how to encourage your workforce to explore the obvious (often immediate) and less obvious (hidden) causes and consequences of safe and unsafe behaviour.

Encouraging Safe Behaviour

Summary

Having created a work environment that supports safe work practices, you must make sure that your workforce have the right kind of skills to let them work as safely as possible.

Before you do this you must first get their buy-in. When getting buy-in, it is important that you:

  • balance the negative messages about the potential consequences of unsafe work practices with positive messages about the advantages of working safely
  • practice what you preach, otherwise you will end up confusing your message
  • believe and communicate that health and safety is a top priority
  • include your sub-contractors; don’t assume that they already have the know-how to lead and engage effectively with the Principal Contractor
  • don’t demotivate your workers, by not telling them how to improve the situation

Before moving on to the next section you should at the very least:

  • have reviewed the videos and other tools in this section, and identified the potential to use these in your organisation
  • have considered your priorities in terms of which work groups to approach first

»»» Next step

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Updated: 2012-12-28