Journey to Real Safety
It’s a long journey for any company to develop a safety and work culture that can approach the award-winning heights that Encore Trucking has.
Let’s set some background.
We all have Safety first, Safety programs, and Safety protocols; but there comes a point where you may hit a wall. Your safety program’s okay, but it just doesn’t seem to get any better. And that may be fine, until you start getting some really challenging, demanding work, that requires a higher standard. That’s when you start to realize that your company’s fiscal performance may depend on your safety program’s effectiveness; and you look for other answers. Why isn’t your safety effective? The programs are all in place? And you see the wall.
Now a warning.
Look inside your company and you probably already know; NOW, that there are characters and personalities; people with degrees of influence and power with such entrenched negative habits, grating traits; that it is impossible to change the culture. You need to be prepared to uproot, and make changes, big ones; and if your not looking within yourself at you own faults and trying to encourage and work on your strengths; it can’t work. Companies need to work with their entire structure, but it has to start at the top. You need to change the culture.
The doing may be easier than you think. The agonizing over the moves is painful. But once you start, there will be palpable relief, throughout the company. People’s work will improve, they will feel better, about the task, themselves. Some gritty element, some pushy, potentially nasty attitude has been removed. Most of the staff will have put up with, or carried this weight for long enough to ignore, accept it, but once it is removed; the office, the staff will all feel it; and you will wonder why you hesitated so long.
Because now, you have a chance to build a really positive work culture; and only then, will you get a buy in for the hard, every day, slogging, that a good safety program demands.
More later.