Leveraging Communication, Collaboration, and Connection for Meaningful Safety Strategies
UG2 identifies and embraces industry-leading safety practices—but the very best policies are useless if they aren’t rigorously implemented and regularly re-enforced. National Safety Month’s second week features Employee Engagement, which underscores the importance of our front-line talent in our safety success—and in yours.
UG2 engages our employees in a myriad way
- Hiring the best. Our safety partnership with our employees starts before they even appear on site with a customer. We intentionally recruit talent from a wide range of backgrounds who share an enthusiasm for learning and growing. An eagerness to excel and openness to improving are key factors in an employee’s inclination to stay engaged and not only thrive within our culture but contribute to it.
- Asking for input. We view mentoring and development as a two-way street. We continuously learn from our employees, and their feedback enables us to tailor our services to the needs of every customer and to build on safety practices that are practical, workable and helpful to the team members most directly impacted. We not only welcome employees’ input, but we also routinely solicit it and rely on it to inform us of our evolving safety practices.
- Recognizing and rewarding achievement. Reinforcing safety practices by publicly calling out excellence helps everyone involved maintain the focus on positive outcomes. Such actions also underscore management’s commitment to putting safety before all else. Any discussion of a successful project or relationship has a safety angle, as we pose questions such as, “How did we ensure this task was completed without injury?” and “What practices contributed to its safe completion?”
- Bridging the language and communication gap. We recognize that, as many of our employees, partners and customers speak a primary language other than English, the burden is on us, particularly on supervisors and management, to ensure materials and instructions are provided in the appropriate language. We work to ease the way for every stakeholder to engage fully in safety-related discussions, inspections and protocol reviews.
- Teaching soft skills. Soft skills are important to success in the workplace generally, and they can have a real impact on how information about safety is received and acted upon by employees. Soft skills that can help encourage the adoption of safety practices include team building, problem solving, self-confidence, work ethic, cultural sensitivity, leadership, and listening.
- Making safety fun and creative. As UG2 Director of Environmental Health and Safety Adam Rabesa often points out, when safety training and related conversations are engaging and enjoyable, employees are much more likely to absorb, retain, and act on the information. One strategy we like involves making a game of safety with activities like safety-related bingo and trivia. Fun, rewards and good-natured competition are helpful reinforcements for different types of learners.
Connection and authentic relationship-building are at the heart of our success when it comes to engaging employees to buy in to and help advance a culture of safety. We create space for formal and informal two-way mentoring relationships from an employee’s first days with UG2, because we know that one way we have remained leaders in safety is by deeply listening to and learning from our front-line talent.