In this three-part series, Safety Speaker Mike Hourigan will be examining everyday decisions that affect workplace safety.
Part 3:
Last time, we got into workplace safety and why fostering an organizational culture that prioritizes employee safety and inclusion is one of the best decisions that managers can make. There’s many different facets of safe workplaces like encouraging open communication, following physical safety compliance procedures, and ensuring that employees don’t feel antagonized or harassed by coworkers or superiors.
But an oft-overlooked aspect of employee safety that needs to be prioritized in order to reduce risk, which an experienced safety speaker can help with, is addressing employee stress. 3/4 of employees feel that job-related stress is much worse than it was a generation ago. While the workers in that study cited workloads as being their primary stressor, a negative workplace culture easily contributes to stress levels even more. Personal problems that unavoidably come to work with people factor in as does job security.
Having high levels of stress among your employees is a risk factor that needs to be mitigated and factored into decision-making. Employees who feel constantly stressed out will often end up making rash decisions out of stress and fatigue. Not taking steps to reduce employee stress not only means bad news for morale and the bottom line, but also doesn’t help maintain a safe workplace. It doesn’t matter if your employees wear hard hats or suits: elevated stress levels cause wires to get crossed and expensive mistakes to be made.
A safety speaker can help address harmful employee stress levels at both the organizational and employee levels. By providing an outside perspective on the workplace culture and what seems to be causing stress, managers can get an outside perspective on problems they’re having difficulty solving. Stress goes beyond worries about job security and workload, and good decision-making ensures that battling employee stress is made a priority so the workplace is safer for all.
In case you missed the first 2 parts of this series:
Mike Hourigan is a workplace safety speaker who shares his ideas on creating safer workplace environment all over the country.
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