Building a culture of health and safety within your company is important not just to keep employees safe, but to keep them engaged. Safety programs are one tool commonly used to formalize a culture of health and safety and to create opportunities for peer leadership by naming safety champions. Safety champions are employees who are not just responsible for their own safety but become peer leaders to promote health and safety across your workforce.
Since this is an opportunity to elevate top performers, it is important to reward safety champions and create safety recognition in a systematic and effective way. In this blog we will discuss the importance of a safety-first culture, how to reward safety champions, and how to use safety programming to engage all employees.
Ensuring safety for all employees should be a core tenant of how your company operates and how you build camaraderie and engagement among employees. Whether you are running a business where employees use heavy equipment or you are in an office where you want to be sure there is a culture free of harassment, a focus on safety is paramount.
While safety programs can often feel like top-down initiatives, motivating employees to take responsibility for their own workplace safety and those of their peers is an effective way to drive peer leadership and engagement. This is also a strong tactic to connect employees to the company and its mission in a personal way, with individual and collective safety at the heart of everything both individuals and the whole organization accomplishes.
Identifying safety champions is a foundational step toward peer-to-peer motivation in safety programs. These peer safety captains drive the safety program forward, encourage engagement from all employees and can even nominate or give out safety recognition awards to peers. Safety champions should be non-management peer leadership positions, where they can motivate employees from within their own ranks and drive a culture of safety across a team, department, or the whole company.
You might be thinking to yourself, who should these safety champions be? What is their profile? And how can you create a repeatable, scalable pipeline of these important peer leaders? Identifying safety champions should be done carefully and should be reserved for high-performing employees who may not be quite ready for a promotion but are looking to take on extra responsibility.
Safety champion candidates should be similar in profile to people who you might identify for a leadership training program. These champions provide a leadership pipeline and engage high performers in a special program that benefits the organization and the individual. Benefits to these programs often include opportunities to access management and executives, provide feedback, and to qualify for safety rewards specific to their leadership and peer engagement. Companies should always fill safety champion positions based on performance rather than favoritism.
From a peer perspective, safety champions should be someone that people want to follow and genuinely enjoy being around and being motivated by. They should feel genuine to peers, and not a conduit for management. This will help cultivate true employee engagement and success for safety programming.
Safety champions play a crucial role in promoting a culture of health and safety within the workplace. Here are the key duties and responsibilities of safety champions:
Safety champions serve as peer leaders who are dedicated to fostering a safe and healthy work environment for all employees, contributing significantly to the overall success of safety programs within the organization.
Rewarding volunteer peer leaders needs to be focused on driving value for the recipients. Since these peer leaders are not getting paid extra wages for their extra effort, it is important that the rewards are flexible, timely and valuable to every safety champion.
Providing public safety recognition not only motivates the champions, but it exemplifies high-performing behavior for all employees and shows the whole workforce that hard work does get rewarded.
The Engage2Reward™ Choice Card makes an ideal safety reward. Redeemable for over 250 eGift card brands on the platform, the Engage2Reward Choice Card offers complete flexibility for recipients to redeem rewards wherever they find the most value. Especially if you have a diverse set of safety champions across your organization, the Engage2Reward Choice Card is a wonderfully streamlined and meaningful way to reward all your safety champions.
Safety program managers can effectively reward and incentivize workplace safety champions using the Engage2Reward™ Gift Card Ordering Platform. Here's how:
By leveraging the Engage2Reward Platform, safety program managers can effectively recognize and incentivize workplace safety champions, fostering a culture of safety and engagement across the organization.
Safety programs can often seem separate from traditional employee engagement programs, but in fact they are a fantastic way to drive employee engagement around a shared purpose. Safety programs build connections both between employees and between employees and the organization. Creating these types of connections can serve as a foundation to company culture and a broader engagement strategy.
Safety champions are a key component to driving universal employee engagement as they lead programmatic efforts across the organization.
Safety champions are a key component to safety programming, which can drive employee engagement for your whole staff. Ensure that safety champions are identified through a performance-based merit system and are rewarded as part of a safety recognition component to your program. By doing so, you can keep these peer leaders motivated and focused on their critical role in a broader employee engagement strategy.
Ready to reward and incentivize your workplace safety champions? Learn how you can incorporate the Engage2Reward Platform into your safety rewards today.