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.

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.

How do you train your workers to stay safe around machines? What topics do you need to cover? How do you begin to address them?

Workplace safety laws have come a long way since the early days of worker safety. Once upon a time, workers didn’t have any reasonable expectation of protection or safe conditions, never mind laws geared toward worker safety.

When it comes to machine guarding, you have to know what hazards you’re trying to protect against. Or, rather, you have to know where to guard to prevent hazards.

Your company thinks of safety as your foremost priority. After all, when your employees form the backbone of your work, you can’t afford not to protect your most important asset.

When your employees perform a complex process with a high degree of risk, how do you keep them safe? How do you ensure that they know what to do to perform a task safely?

One of the most important parts of managing a safety program is tracking and evaluating progress toward improved workplace health and safety. Key performance indicators or KPIs allow you to do that consistently and predictably.

Hazards are a part of every workplace. But although hazards are always going to be a facet of your work environment, employers have a responsibility to their employees to provide a workplace reasonably free from harm.