Speaker 1: Hello and welcome. Alright, so are you struggling to enforce your safety program with your employees and not sure what to do about it? If so, don't worry because this is a very common problem. In this video, I'm going to tell you everything you need to know about how to effectively manage enforcement of your safety program so that your employees actually listen and follow your safety rules and stay safe. But before getting into that, if you haven't already, please make sure to subscribe to our channel and make sure to hit that notifications bell so that you're notified every time that I upload new content to help you understand and navigate the most important environmental health and safety issues that impact small manufacturing and industrial facilities. Hello, my name is Russell Carr and my consulting company has been helping small manufacturing and industrial companies to manage environmental health and safety issues for almost 20 years now. And that includes helping them to build and then enforce safety programs to help protect their employees and their company from harm. And before founding the consulting company, I owned and operated three small contracting companies with major safety risks and learned firsthand just how tough it can be to enforce and manage safety with my employees. And in this video, I'm going to share with you all the most important things that I've learned over that time and again, most importantly, how to manage enforcement so that your employees will follow the rules and stay safe. Okay, so let's get started by talking about why enforcing your safety program with your employees is so important. So first of all, it's the law. OSHA actually requires that employers actively monitor and enforce their safety program. And if you don't do that, you expose yourself to major liabilities. Second of all, if you end up getting inspected and fined, for example, for employees not wearing PPE or doing some sort of unsafe act, and if you can't prove to the inspector that you're actively enforcing your safety program, then those citations are probably going to stick and you're not going to be able to defend against them. And third, if, you know, God forbid, you have a serious injury or a fatality, if you can't prove that you've been enforcing your safety program with your employees, that's going to leave you exposed to major civil liability and sometimes even criminal liability if an employee ends up getting killed. So in other words, enforcing your safety program is your first line of defense in the event that something bad happens to your company. So really important to understand why enforcing safety is so important. Alright, so now that you understand why it's so important to enforce your safety program, let's talk about how to actually do that. And the first step in that whole process is, you know, to build the foundation of a strong safety program at your company. If you don't have that in place, you know, that your employees aren't going to know what the safety rules are. They're not going to understand why safety is so important and so forth. So let's talk about some of those foundational pieces. Number one, at the very top of the list, without a doubt, the most important key to this whole process is what's called management commitment. Alright, so this is top-down commitment from the owner of the company, the CEO, the president of the company, you know, fully supporting that safety program and making that very clear to the employees. How do you do that? Well, number one, you want to consistently message about the importance of safety. So when you maybe include KPIs, safety KPIs, in your other KPIs when you're reporting to your company, when you have team meetings and company meetings, talk about the importance of safety, create a safety policy, sign it, and put it up in important, prominent places throughout your company so that your employees know that, you know, senior leadership really is committed to the safety program. The other thing that's really important to do is to make sure to consistently lead by example. So for example, if you have a policy that you got to wear safety glasses in the manufacturing floor, you know, when the owner of the company walks through the manufacturing floor, he's got to, he or she has to be wearing safety glasses. So in other words, if the ownership of the company, the leadership of the company isn't following the safety rules, then why would the employees follow the safety rules? That's pretty simple. So that management commitment is key. Number two, you have to have, you know, a sound and complete employee training program. That employee training program has to include all the OSHA standards that apply to your company. All your employees need to get trained on all those topics. Otherwise, they're not going to understand, you know, how do you actually live and follow the safety program if you haven't actually been trained? And that training has to be consistent. You know, you want to start when your employees, new employees get hired, that you train them on all the safety hazards that exist. Then you want to have consistent training throughout their employment, at least monthly. If they see that consistency over time in training, they're going to understand what the safety rules are and they're a lot more likely to follow those safety rules. The other thing that's really important to understand is that you have to provide all the PPE, all the personal protective equipment, the safety glasses, hard hats, and so forth. That's an OSHA law, but it's hard to enforce safety of your employees if you don't give them, you know, the PPE that they need to wear and make that readily available to them. That's really important to understand. The other thing that's really important to do is to conduct routine inspections to quickly identify and then fix safety hazards. So your employees need to see that you're committed also to the process by doing these inspections, identifying these hazards, and quickly fixing them. If they see that, they're going to understand how important safety is and they're more likely to follow the rules. And not only that, but also help to correct those problems proactively. It's key to the, you know, to the whole enforcement process. That found one of those key foundational pieces. And then to begin to wrap up this section, when you do see situations where employees aren't following the rules, you always have to take action and hold them accountable. That's really where the rubber meets the road. In this final section of the video, I'm going to explain to you how to actually enforce the safety program after you put all these foundational pieces in place. Before getting into that, if you have any experiences that you'd like to share about enforcing safety at your company, any successes that you've had, you know, tips that you might want to share, make sure to leave them in the comments below and I promise to respond to all your comments. All right, so let's get into the nuts and bolts of how to actually enforce your safety program now that you have all those foundational, all those foundational pieces in place that we just got done talking about. So what you want to do is you want to implement, you know, what we call a graduated enforcement process. So the first step in that process is, you know, a verbal warning. It's okay to give a verbal warning. Again, like I talked about before, make sure you use an educational approach rather than a stick approach. Explain to the employee why it's so important that they follow the safety rules. Now, if you see that same employee consistently not following the rules, then at this point in time you have to do some sort of a written write-up. All right, so you want to sit them down. You actually want to document what it was that they were doing that was unsafe. Have a corrective action in there, you know, make it clear to the employee that they follow the safety rules in this way or that way depending on what their problem has been. So it's very clear to them what is wrong and how to fix it and make sure to put that writing. Make sure to have them print that document, sign that document, and keep that as record that you're actually enforcing your safety program. That's going to be critical to what I talked about earlier in the video. If you get inspected and you get cited for somebody not wearing PPE, but you can demonstrate to the enforcement officer that you've been enforcing, you know, your safety program, that's a fantastic first line of defense. And if you can prove that, you can often get these citations thrown out, even if your employees aren't wearing, you know, PPE, for example, and the inspector's there. If you can demonstrate you're enforcing, that's a great line of defense. And of course the third step, if you're consistently getting problems from any problematic employees that refuse to follow your safety programs, now you have to institute some kind of disciplinary action. So that might look like sending them home for the rest of the day. That might mean, you know, sending them off on an unpaid leave of absence for a few days or maybe even a week to send a message, a very clear message, and include, you know, discipline with that and some sort of punishment with that, repercussions, that they're going to feel that pain of understanding that you're serious about the safety program. And I know that's easier said than done, especially when you have employees that are trained and productive and so forth. But this is really where the rubber meets the road. Your enforcement program has to have teeth, so to speak. You actually, there actually has to be repercussions and discipline if your employees aren't following the rules. Otherwise, the whole thing kind of falls apart because everybody else will see that they're getting away with that. They feel like they can get away with it and then you're going to have a real problem on your hands. So you have to be committed to that discipline. So there you have it. Those are the three components of your graduated enforcement program. Make sure that you're consistent about that so that all your employees get the message that you're serious about enforcing the safety program. If you're not consistent about, you know, those verbal warnings, those written write-ups, and that discipline, you know, the whole thing is going to fall apart. Your employees are going to understand that you're not serious about it and they're going to take advantage of that. That's just the way it is. So make sure to be consistent about that enforcement process. All right, so hopefully this information has helped you to understand why enforcing your safety program is so important, how to build those foundational pieces, and how to implement that graduated enforcement policy. But having said that, it's really important to understand that if you don't already have a functioning and compliant health and safety program, then really you have nothing to enforce. In other words, a lot of companies make the mistake of trying to enforce safety rules when they don't even have a functioning safety program to begin with. So even if you think you have a safety program but you're not sure, maybe it's time to check that to make sure that it's update and complete. Or maybe you already don't know that you don't have a safety program. I have the perfect resource for you and that's our free ebook that's called How to Build a Manufacturing Safety Program from Scratch. This is based on our number one Google-rated blog post that's been out there for many years now. It's literally been downloaded by hundreds of people just like you who want to learn how to build a safety program to ensure that their company and their employees stay safe. I put a link below the video where you can download that ebook now. I strongly encourage you to do that. It'll walk you step-by-step through the process of how to build a custom tailored safety program for your company so that, again, you can keep your company and your employees safe from harm. Alright, so thanks again for watching. If you liked what you heard today, please make sure to subscribe to our channel. Make sure to hit that notifications bell so that you're notified every time that I upload new content to help you understand and navigate the most important environmental health and safety issues that impact manufacturing and industrial companies. Alright, thanks again for watching and I'll see you next time.