Why Safety Deserves Your Full Attention, Now And Yesterday - Wiese Europe

Let’s start off with a bit of good news: more and more companies are acknowledging the importance of safety, as well as acting upon it, something to get excited about. Especially the industry players actively leading the charge for safety awareness. Nevertheless, others still have ways to go when it comes to working towards that inhouse culture of safety.

It’s hard not to notice how — for example — the petrochemical industry managed to elevate the topic of safety from minor discussion item to top priority in recent years. Unfortunately, this has also made it painstakingly clear that various related industries are still lagging behind in this, regardless of their own efforts in recent times. They’re on the right track though – nearing the point where huge steps towards safer work environments can be taken through quick and easy fixes.

In short: applying a true in-house safety culture is not yet embedded everywhere, but slowly more and more industries and companies are getting there as we speak.

Surely this proves that there’s no such thing as too many (external) initiatives to boost awareness? Let’s take a look at the measures taken by the Belgian government in this case. It has continued its streak of proactive campaigning with their recent messages of awareness, more specifically regardless fall prevention. This type of campaign brings the much-needed ammunition to the barrel of each HSE-officer out there trying to get the importance of investing in safety across. No one needs reminding but still, even a single accident is one too many.

Promoting real change

In order to establish durable change, it’s important to involve everybody in the process – no team should be left out of the solution. The balance between eliminating risks altogether and handling them in a secure manner remains difficult to maintain though.

For example, it seems all too easy to allow our general fondness of rules and procedures to create a system rendered immobile by ineffective regulation. On top of that there is the risk of causing a false sense of security, preventing effective precaution to take root.

But there’s no reason to feel discouraged just yet. Although we could be more than satisfied with our higher standards of safety, we should commit to taking it further, continuously finetuning installations and optimizing them to become landmarks of safe environments.

Let’s start building towards that safety culture, yesterday rather than today.