It’s that time of year again! Drop everything you’re doing, run to your workplaces, and start preparing for the wonderful and joyous celebration of… Safe+Sound Week!?
The “What” and the “Why”
So what is Safe+Sound Week, again? And wait, why are we even celebrating it? Shouldn’t we value workplace safety every week of the year?
Safe+Sound Week is a national safety campaign run by OSHA every August to encourage the implementation of safety programs in every workplace, as well as to celebrate the success of these programs in the past.
And, yes, safety is still very important every other week of the year! By designating a week to focus on our safety programs, we have just another reason to review our plans, improve our methods, and ensure standards are efficient and effective.
Three Facets of Safe+Sound Week
Safe+Sound Week includes three main facets of a successful workplace safety program: management leadership, worker participation, and finding and fixing hazards.
- Management leadership, the first facet of Safe+Sound Week, centers on the importance of an educated company leadership committed to employee safety. This can look like developing a safety policy statement, providing resources to implement safer standards, and/or rewarding employees who follow safety procedures well.
- Worker participation, the second facet of Safe+Sound Week, emphasizes the value of individual experiences and creating opportunities for employees to have their voices heard. This can look like including workers throughout the whole process of developing safety standards, encouraging employees to report incidents, and working with employees to define what safe work practices look like.
- Find and Fix Hazards, the third facet of Safe+Sound Week, highlights how hazard maintenance is vital to a successful safety plan. This could look like conducting inspections to help identify possible future hazards, reviewing information about possible hazards on the job site, and checking that existing safety controls remain effective.
2023 Focus
This year, OSHA has designated the main focus of Safe+Sound Week to be mental health and well-being. An unsafe workplace can be detrimental to both employee physical and mental health, and it is important to understand the impacts of workplace environments on overall company morale. A healthy workplace environment can also have a large impact on business success, as employees who have a higher mental capacity for work will produce better quality results. We’ve gathered some resources to help you ensure your workplace environment reaches the standards needed to function as effectively as possible:
- Article: Let’s Talk Psychological Safety
- Training Sample: Abusive Workplace Conduct
- Training Sample: Anti-Harassment
- FAQ: Navigating mental health in the workplace
Why Safety Matters
Okay, all that sounds great, but… why should we care about safety again? It seems like so much extra effort for dangers that may or may not even happen.
Aside from the obvious ethical reasons, the way you implement your safety programs can have a huge impact on your company.
Here at KPA, each of our employees has their own reason for caring about safety. We recently did an interview with KPA Regulatory Compliance Manager Zach Pucillo, where he shared when and where he found his own appreciation for the safety field. In the episode, Zach describes a memory where knowing a small piece of safety information saved him from a house fire. Because of an educational school visit from a firefighter, a young Zach knew to put out an oil kitchen fire with a fire extinguisher instead of water.
He then shares how this influences his motivation to be involved with workplace safety trainings, and explains,
“So when I have somebody come up to me after a class and say something like, I never knew that, it takes me back to then. It’s like maybe, just maybe, I might have helped them prevent a fire in their own home. Or, you know, save them somehow, somehow just with a little piece of information.”
Zach realized the importance of education about safety procedures and learned that even the smallest piece of safety information might be enough to save a person’s life.
Listen to the full interview:
From increasing worker morale and productivity to expanding business success, thorough workplace safety programs can change how your whole company functions. It is up to you to decide whether that change is positive or negative.
