Safety Communications In The Workplace: 10 Best Strategies For 2024

Creating a safe workplace for your employees isn’t something that just happens by osmosis. Instead, it takes a concerted effort from management to set and maintain safety standards and guide and educate employees. Workplace safety communication is a critical part of this – there’s little point in having policies and procedures if people don’t know about them and don’t know what’s expected of them.

Table of contents

Why is communication important in workplace safety?

10 strategies for workplace safety communications

Communication barriers

How to improve employee safety communication with DeskAlerts

FAQ

Why is communication important in workplace safety?

As an employer, you have legal and moral obligations to provide a safe workplace to your employees. Employees themselves, however, have a role to play in making sure they keep themselves and their colleagues safe, which is why communication is so important.

There are many negative consequences for businesses that don’t invest in employee safety communication. This can include injuries, accidents and illness, fatalities, lost workdays, high workers compensation and insurance costs, corporate reputational damage, a failure to comply with government regulations, decreased productivity, delays, lost revenue and damaged equipment.

As a business, it makes good sense to reduce the risk of accidents and injuries. 

According to the USA’s National Safety Center, work injuries cost US businesses $171 billion in 2019. Source

This includes losses to wages and productivity, medical expenses, administrative costs and out-of-pocket costs that employers cannot claim on insurance.

On the other hand, the USA’s Occupational Health and Safety Administration (OSHA) has reported that companies that implement effective workplace health and safety strategies have a return of between $4 and $6 for every dollar that is spent. Source

There are many different types of safety issues that need to be addressed, and these will vary depending on the industry that you operate in. This will include:

• The safe operating of equipment
• Safety around chemicals and hazardous substances
• Safely working at heights
• Ergonomics and occupational health and safety
• Identifying and reporting hazards
• How to report incidents
• Keeping employees safe in a COVID-19 context
• Mental health and wellbeing.

Workplace safety communication isn’t just about telling people something once and expecting them to remember it. It should involve ongoing communication that is easy to understand. 

It should also try to change behaviors that will, in turn, boost employee engagement levels, increase awareness of safety issues, prevent accidents and make safety a part of your company’s corporate culture.

10 strategies for workplace safety communications

These are our top tips for effective health and safety communication at work:

1. Create a communication plan

To maximize the effect of your safety communications, having a clear plan to follow is the best place to start. This will give you strategic, actionable goals rather than just sending out ad hoc information at random. Your plan should identify potential communication safety topics and how and when you will communicate them.

2. Target information to the right audience(s)

When people receive too much information, they can quickly tune out or ignore future messages from the sender. This is particularly true when people are sent irrelevant information. If you have specific health and safety messages for different groups of workers, it makes sense to only target those employees with that information. 

For example, employees working with chemicals in a plant may need

 specific chemical safety information, which is irrelevant to people working in a corporate office in another location.

>> 10 messages to send to employees in case of emergency (free download) <<

3. Schedule shift overlaps

If you have continuous manufacturing or other operations that happen in shifts across the day, it’s crucial to ensure that there is a mechanism to share information between the different work teams, particularly if there have been any safety concerns, hazards, near misses, or accidents. A lot of companies schedule shift overlaps of anywhere from 15 to 30 minutes where employees and managers working different shifts can share important information.

4. Put safety on the meeting agenda

If your employees have regular team meetings – weekly or monthly – make safety a standing item on the meeting agenda. In my workplace, we include a health and safety tip on the agenda every fortnight to ensure people remember what they need to do to be safe and remind them of various health and well-being resources that the company offers.

5. Use marketing strategies for your internal team

A great way to communicate health and safety messages for the workplace is to deploy the same methods and tactics that you would with an external marketing campaign but focus on employees as your target market instead. Marketing campaigns are often visual (think videos, displays, wallpapers, posters, signage and more) with catchy, easy-to-remember slogans and messaging.

6. Put safety signage where it needs to be seen

When you have potential hazards and risks or you need to remind people how to safely use equipment, you should have signage placed where it needs to be seen. This is one of the last changes you have to remind people to be safe before a potential accident takes place.

7. Training sessions count as communication

When you’re training staff, you’re actively communicating with them, so getting the communication right is important. When it comes to safety messaging, you need to explain to them clearly what the risks are to their safety and the safety of others if they fail to observe protocols or report hazards. Make sure the information you are providing in training sessions is clear and easy to understand.

8. Use a range of communications channels and tools

Communicating regularly using a range of different channels is the best practice in a workplace safety communication. It helps ensure that your messages will be seen so you can keep employees safe. People have different communication preferences and the logistics of when, where and how they work can also influence how they should receive communication which means you should never rely on a one-size-fits-all approach to your safety communications.

9. Listen to your employees

Communication is a two-way street. It’s important to have mechanisms in place to capture the feedback of your employees. This can include surveys, polls, face-to-face consultations, workshops, focus groups, and question and answer sessions. After all, your employees are the ones on the front line so will likely have views on how well safety is going. It’s also critical to have mechanisms where hazards, near misses and incidents, can be reported in real time.

10. Inject realism into your communications

Sometimes safety messaging can be high-level and abstract messaging that doesn’t really cut through with employees. Share real safety communication examples (from your own company or others in your industry) about what happens when things go wrong – case studies and incident reports can help you to illustrate this.

Communication barriers