Pop quiz: who is responsible for health and safety in the workplace?

Approaches to health and safety in the workplace are as many and varied as the safety issues your workplace may encounter. After all, workplaces are diverse, and they need to find a safety approach that works for their needs.

Like a quiz in school, a health & safety quiz is a great way for an EHS team to test what employees know about safety. But at a deeper level, it’s also a great way to get your workers thinking about essential safety issues.

Your company considers health and safety a core value. You’re committed to making safety part of everything you do, and you want a health and safety department that reflects that level of commitment.

Going to work can be really stressful but it shouldn’t be made more stressful by dangerous working conditions. While some basic health and safety measures are regulated by the Occupational Safety and Health Administration or OSHA, those may be considered the bare minimum, and they may not address all the risks present at a particular company.

Zero harm: it’s a new safety culture movement that focuses on what it says: providing a completely safe environment for workers, contractors, and visitors on a daily basis.

Building a positive safety culture, like building a reputation, takes time. In the words of Warren Buffett, it takes 20 years to build a reputation – and five minutes to ruin one.

EHS is an incredibly diverse, rewarding field. You can have a group of safety professionals in the same room who all work on completely different things. And if you’re a brand-new professional, one of the first steps in your career is figuring out your focus area.

How and when a company allows employees to return to work after experiencing an injury or illness is something that many companies don’t plan for until the situation is actually happening, which is unfortunately the wrong time to start thinking about it.

You track a lot of safety data. So much data you could build a lake and swim in it. You know there are answers somewhere in all those numbers, but you don’t know how to find them.