Information goes a long way toward combating the sort of ignorance or lack
of awareness that is responsible for the majority of occupational injuries.
Moreover, educating your people constitutes the foundation of the culture
change that needs to transpire in your organization if its employees are to
successfully participate in the transformation from a business that is brown,
or yellow, or even pale green to one that is decidedly emerald-colored in
terms of its environmental friendliness (more on this in Chapter 11).
Here is a list of procedures we suggest you follow to begin a program struc-
tured to help minimize employee risks:
Establish safety committees. Committee members may include facility
managers or administrators, various department heads, and employee
representatives. The main goal of the committee is to assess all
employee safety risks at the facility, keeping an eye on the most
common areas of employee exposure to harm. After risks are identified,
the committee can determine how to reduce those risks.
Encourage employee involvement and safety awareness. Safety com-
mittees ought to encourage employees to actively participate in making
decisions that affect them. You can talk to them about what problems
they encounter in performing their duties that could contribute to injury.
You can also solicit their suggestions. To promote further employee
awareness, you may consider introducing a safety education program.
Reward safe work practices.Developing an incentive program can help
to motivate employees to more effectively follow workplace safety prac-
tices. The program might reward teams whose efforts result in a reduc-
tion of on-the-job injuries, or better yet, zero-based injury periods. Pick a
perk, any perk. You may be surprised at how far these sorts of things
can go to make people happy. You can also establish an employee safety
goal each year for your facility, which can be expressed, for instance, as
a target number of workers’ compensation claims that are benchmarked
against the average number from prior years.
Healthy benefits equal employee recruitment retention ..............
Employees are your most valuable assets. In addition to focusing on their
health and safety, rewarding them with additional benefits demonstrates the
depth of your commitment to their well-being. Needless to say, strong bene-
fits also make it easier to recruit and retain talented employees.
Health care, paid time off, and retirement plans are the most common types
of benefits employees receive, but some companies are increasingly offering
more types of benefits intended both to improve the quality of life of their
176 Part III: Going Green
