In a manufacturing environment, there’s little more important to keep front and centre than the importance of health and safety. Health and safety governs your workplace in so many ways; it even trickles down into your overall productivity and output as a plant. And, as an employer, it should be your priority.

But how to make it a priority for the workforce at large remains a difficult challenge for many employers today to approach. What constitutes a business-critical concept for the senior management team doesn’t always hold the same pull for individual employees or, sometimes, even the department they work within as a whole.

Knowing how to make health and safety a priority for staff in manufacturing will not only improve your overall bottom line – it will also show you’re a business with its heart in the right place.

Here are our top tips on how to how to make health and safety a priority for staff in manufacturing.

Connect health and safety with the goals of your employees

One way to motivate your workforce to prioritize the important aspects of work is to connect them to their own goals and objectives when it comes to their career. A business running an efficient operation with regards to health and safety is one which will be outpacing its competition. That means growth, which means the opportunity for progression and development for your staff.

By interweaving the ways that maintaining impeccable health and safety practices contribute to this, you can be sure they’ll take notice. Perhaps they could be kept in the loop with incident numbers, or the speed at which they’re responded to; maybe you could maintain that concise reporting is an attribute you look for in future leaders of the business.

However you go about it, make health and safety personal. Then watch as your employees make it their personal responsibility.

Make health and safety quantitative – then use it as an incentive

Health and safety is, without a doubt, all about your employees’ wellbeing at work. But, unfortunately, with a busy and committed team, you can find that oftentimes this isn’t enough to keep it at the forefront of their minds all the time. By making health and safety more about successful business outcomes, you make it relatable to their professional nature.

Break “health and safety” down into numbers. The number of incidents, to begin with. The average time it takes to respond to an incident. How many incidents are solved on site, how many require further medical attention, and so on and so forth. Once you have your data, you have a tangible target – so use that as a means to incentivize your staff to improve on it.

Whether you set company-wide rewards for reaching goals or individual targets for a more personal incentive, it could be the driving factor to make healthy and safety a priority for staff.

Use regular toolbox talks and meetings to keep it current

How to make health and safety a priority for staff in manufacturing? Talk about it, a lot.

When you reiterate its importance again and again, it’ll become more important to them. We’re not saying you should be having “meetings about meetings”; that’s not what this is about. But what we’re saying is, one key way to keep health and safety at the forefront is to… Well, practice what you preach. Keep it at the forefront!

The unique exposure and longstanding experience in the manufacturing industry is what makes NLG a recruiter of choice in this sector. To talk more about staffing services, or to simply chat employee engagement and talent trends, get in touch today.