One problem many safety programs encounter is there just are not enough resources for full development/training and continuous improvement, supervision, and enforcement — or at least, it appears that way. You have the potential to make the reality different at your company. You just have to tap into an often untapped resource.

What is this often untapped resource? The very people who engage with the program. In the bad old days of the “management sets the rules and employees try not to get caught breaking them,” you really did need more resources than were actually available just to sustain the program. Making it effective was a pipedream. The idea that management could use progressive discipline to achieve a safe workplace was disproven by the injury and death statistics. And you didn’t have enough supervisors to catch people breaking the rules.

NFPA 70E came on the scene during those bad old days. If you look at the latest revision (and even if you go back through previous ones), you will see this concept of tapping workers as a safety resource is a core idea.

If the people doing the work understand why they are responsible for their personal safety and how they can manage that responsibility, then you have an environment in which the safety program can become self sustaining (albeit with continued help from management). It would be self-sustaining in the sense that management doesn’t need to continually push for people to follow this or that rule. Here are five tips to make good use of this resource.

Train in concepts first, details second. 

Details stick only if there is a framework for them to stick to. Build the framework first. If you are teaching lockout/tagout (LOTO), you can numb people’s minds with details that they can’t easily (if at all) stitch into a cohesive concept. If you present the concept first (and make sure each student understands it), those details will tend to stick — and they will stick in a way that makes them much easier to recall and use.

Use practical exams wherever possible.

For the most part, tradespeople work with their hands. If an abstract safety concept can be recalled for an oral or written exam, but there’s no connection between the concept and the physical work, then teaching it served no purpose.

If John chokes up when asked to demonstrate how to roll up electrical gloves, that doesn’t mean you should switch to an oral exam. It means John isn’t ready to implement that technique in the field. If he chokes because a coworker is watching him, he could suffer a far worse fate than failing a test. Or take Bill, who chokes on a written test but does great on a demonstration exam in the real, physical world where he actually works. Make the exam mode match the work mode.

Integrate safety into the workflow.

One style of procedure-writing is to insert large chunks of text consisting of “safety warnings” into the procedure. These usually are ignored because they interfere with the work flow. The solution is to integrate the steps as if they are just another part of completing that particular task. Because when you think about it, that’s exactly what they are in the field.

If step No. 3 is “Perform LOTO on the supply breaker and verify absence of voltage at the motor,” you are going to get the LOTO and voltage check. You are depending on luck if you expect to get it with four paragraphs of all caps and asterisks jammed in there as if it doesn’t really belong.

Don’t manage people; coach people.

If you assume that crew members are unsafe people whose bad safety habits need to be discovered and pointed out, then you’re going to create a negative association with safety and put a chill on compliance. But if you engage with people as a coach of elite “safety athletes” who is there to help them improve on what they are already good at doing, you create a positive association, not just with safety but with continuously improving on safety.

Seek constructive criticism, and act quickly upon it.

How often do you ask people what safety concerns they have? How often are you specific about it? There is a big difference between asking whether there is “a safety issue” and asking whether there was a problem with finding the right ladder or obtaining the right PPE. The more specific the question, the more likely you are to uncover a problem you can do something about.

When an employee reports an unsafe working condition, what is your response? Do you make a note of it to get to later? Or do you show that you understand the fact that safety is ahead of all else? You show that by stopping whatever you are doing and addressing that particular problem. Maybe you can’t solve it at the moment, but you can put the solution into motion and find a temporary means to defang that particular safety snake.