Showing employees that your SMS is effective is simply building your case for the SMS. That being said, there are several prerequisites for being able to show employees that your SMS is effective:
If your safety management system cannot demonstrate most or all of these points, then you cannot show that your SMS is effective.
If you can show that your SMS is effective, then you have an extremely powerful tool for:
As said, you simply need to build your case for effectiveness. You always have to keep in mind that when you are building your case, you are:
This is an important point because it means that you need to build your case for the SMS-based things that every employee will care about: namely, how does their involvement affect their own safety? There are 4 steps to building your case, in this order:
What you are communicating to them with these steps is that:
Step one is to show a chart of reported issues. Your chart should show:
Without this chart, it’s hard to make a case for the effectiveness of your SMS. You need to show that employees are participating. Otherwise, it simply sends the message that safety is being improved for other reasons besides the individual employee’s involvement.
This data isn’t entirely necessary, but it is a powerful way to show that SMS is growing in popularity. Ideally, you will have a chart showing an increase over time in survey questions regarding employee positive regard for the SMS.
Most people care not so much about what their peers think right now but in the trends. Showing a trend of the popularity of your SMS is a great way to give employees pause and reconsider any misgivings they might have about the safety program.
Furthermore, an increase in popularity only further justifies your case that individual employee involvement in the SMS has a direct benefit on safety.
Necessarily, being able to show this chart entails that:
Surveys with explanation-based answers (such as “fill in the blank”) will not allow you to create a chart.
Having a chart showing the percentage of reported issues over time based on risk level (data comes from initial risk assessment) is without question the most effective way to show the level of exposure in your operational environment over time.
Consider the example:
If you can show a chart that demonstrates numbers with improving Green issues, and decreasing yellow and/or red issues, then you easily prove that employee participation is making their workplace safer to operate in.
Finally, ultimately what each employee cares about is his/her own personal safety. Showing increased workplace safety is good, but also being able to show increased personal safety is the real seller.
Ideally, you would have a chart that shows:
You might even supplement this chart with an actual story from one of your employees showing a situation where the SMS helped them operate safely where they would have otherwise been injured.
Obviously, not all service operators have departments that are inherently dangerous in terms of bodily harm. In these situations, you may substitute other key safety charts, such as:
The point is simply to demonstrate how SMS improves an individual’s life in the workplace.
Last updated October 2024.