3 Elements to Develop A Strategy for Staff Safety

Safety Employer's Responsibility

Safety as the employer's responsibility cannot be crammed into the current corporate brand strategy. Therefore, to succeed in ensuring the safety of employees, safety must be inclusive, carefully handled, and driven primarily by the idea of the brand. It is not just a foreign policy designed to attract more consumers but a critical element of each brand's internal policy, approach, and culture.

Safety can - and should be - one of the Board's priorities and a key advantage to attracting and retaining the best talent.

So, what do we mean by safety? Being “okay” extends to everything, from dealing with situations where you or any other employee is physically or mentally ill to maintaining a healthy lifestyle to prevent such situations from happening in the future.

It is not as easy as offering free fruit or discounts on a gym membership. For small and large businesses alike, the focus should be on creating a work culture where employees succeed while recognizing the equal importance of mental and physical safety.

What does that mean? Brands need to develop a safety strategy that empowers and supports employees, attracts and maintains outstanding talent and reflects their personality and brand identity, both internally and externally.

Elements to Develop A Strategy for Staff Safety

When developing your safety strategy, it is important - and perhaps more important - to include mental safety; Take into account these three elements:

1. Encouraging openness

Safety means developing and formulating a culture that gives employees time and space to think about their sense of safety and promote it. It is important not to underestimate safety. Therefore, the reason behind the importance of yoga and fruit classes instead of doughnuts in the office and similar activities is to develop a culture that protects employees from the most serious problems resulting from stress and fatigue. However, this culture can only provide protection, not achieve full prevention.

Mental safety issues can happen to anyone at any time. Whatever you do, there will always be some people with mental safety problems. So it's important to ensure you have trained the people you expect employees to communicate with if they have a mental safety issue at work, who can provide support in a crisis. As well as encourage ongoing programs to remove the stigma of mental safety illnesses and make the entire organization talk about them like any other physical illness.

We spend many of our lives at work, and companies must realize that they can be the first to discover any disruptions and perhaps the first to support a colleague at a difficult time.

To encourage openness, follow the following tips:

1.1. Make safety a basis for every day

Think about your daily ongoing safety activities, and make sure they reflect your brand and personality attractively. Spend time and effort thinking about creating a culture that makes people comfortable talking about sensitive personal topics. This highlights the importance of mental safety through the company's open discussions.

1.2. Be a role model

Organize conversations about personal experiences to be conducted by senior management officials. Demonstrate that mental illness can happen to anyone, including senior leaders; this makes it easier for employees at all levels to speak openly about their experiences.

1.3. Take mental safety seriously

Keep in mind that some first aid-trained candidates with mental integrity could be the first to be contacted by their colleagues. Make your organization's policies clear and straightforward, and ensure colleagues aren't worried about asking for help.

2. Follow a practical plan

More than anything else, a safety culture requires attention to practical details. Sure, posters are a great way to advertise something, but where do you put them? Consider how employees feel when you write the helpline number in the kitchen, for example!

From here, you had to put it in places where people would go alone. After all, this is why some stickers are placed on the back of the bathroom doors.

Human resources HR can be a great resource. Still, when employees talk to their 'official' HR representative about their mental safety concerns, many are concerned about the potentially harmful impact of this on their careers and simply choose not to talk to anyone.

Create a group of Safety Heroes, volunteers at all levels and areas within your organization, to act as  a safety interface. They coordinate and lead ongoing activities and can also be the first shelter for any employee who needs help or support or someone to listen to them.

This is a great way to create an open and supportive workforce culture without direct employee governance and management and without being linked to human resources.

Brand Appropriate Plan

Create a plan that fits your brand and culture. A plan that works in an old financial firm may not work for a start-up technology company. Weekly lunchtime yoga classes may not work under much pressure and a company's overcrowded building with employees, a staff assistance program could be required.

Make your offer fit your culture, not the other way around.

Make it easy; holding sessions in the office with employees who help customers and suffer from time pressures and inviting them to come and talk about their concerns will never work. So think about your employees' lifestyle: is their work limited to the office, or do they meet customers? Are  working hours routine, or do they range up and down? Think about what their role requires of them, and see your plans.

3. Ensure that safety efforts reflect the organization's identity

Make sure all your safety efforts are based on your organization's personality and identity and reflect your personality.

Safety is, at its core, a serious topic; failure to care for our bodies and minds puts us at risk of more serious long-term illnesses, psychological and physical. But that does not mean that the way things work, every day must be as serious.

Instead  - and conversely - the method should reflect the organization's character and what makes it unique.

Is this about your employees? Or  the relationships you develop with customers? or  with the service or product you provide? Build  this perception into everything you do, then make sure that the experience you provide to your employees matches the experience you offer to your customers.

Think about your brand personality. Is it Interesting and fun? Or  is she serious and committed? Link these questions to your safety strategy.

It may be a timeline of events and conversations and a strategy based on more flexible technology. Whatever you do, make sure it reflects culture and personality, look at your goal, re-employ it, and then think about how to push and expand your current brand goal to focus on safety, internally and externally.

Corporate Experiences

Boot, the UK's most well-known pharmaceutical company, responds to the issue of physical awareness and mental well-being for teenagers by benefiting from the experience they have gained after 170 years of work in safety and beauty.

“Our mission has always been to defend everyone's right to feel good,” says Kirsty McCready, director of public relations at Boots. This campaign begins our journey to reaffirm the brand's goal, transforming our connections to show how we can help different groups and communities feel better and do so”.

Today, mental safety and public safety are more important than ever. We work longer than ever before, with more of what we expect to achieve during those hours. Social media and the emergence of a culture of "permanent work" have led to new demands in all aspects of our lives: work, family, and friends. We spend a third of our lives at work.

And if we spend another third sleeping, and we distribute the last third somewhat thinly among our friends and relatives and our children and our husbands and so on, suddenly those people that you sit across from and see every day are the people you see the most, and most importantly, the people who see you the most.

This means that we are in the best position to identify any behavioral changes and to detect problems as they arise in our colleagues.

In conclusion

Developing a workplace culture promotes awareness of public safety, mental integrity, and openness; it is essential. So to ensure that it is effective, it covers ongoing support and provides crisis support as well, is practical for your employees, and most importantly, reflects your brand and personality.