On and Off

You need to keep your people safe on the job. But it’s nice if they’re careful at home, too.

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At many a plant gate you’ll see a sign: “Safety Begins Here,” or something similar. It’s a reminder to people to take proper care on the job, and that the company cares about them. But what about a sign on the other side of the gate: “Be Careful – We Want You Back”?

Because, you see, more accidents and injuries happen off the job than on. Maybe it’s not your responsibility to protect people when they’re away from your jobsites. And maybe it’s none of your business what people do with their personal time.

Still, when your people leave for the weekend, don’t you want them back hale and hardy on Monday morning? Of course. So while you can’t order people to behave safely outside of work, you can encourage them.

That’s tricky, but the National Safety Council (NSC) has some ideas you can use, based on the experiences of member companies. You can find them in an article, “Selling Off-the-Job Safety,” that appeared in the council’s Safety+Health magazine in 2009.

An off-the-job safety program isn’t some big, costly initiative that only large companies can afford. It can be very simple, and if the message takes, it can pay dividends, in large part by reducing the days employees miss work because of injuries. If nothing else, such a program shows your people that you care about them all the time, not just when they’re on your clock.

How can you encourage people to take good care in their personal activities? Here are examples of what a few companies have done:

Cite statistics. The NSC’s 2009 Injury Facts publication reports that there were 4,689 on-the-job deaths in 2007, as opposed to 52,500 accidental deaths off the job (17,000 of them at home). As for injuries, there were 3.5 million on the job and 9.4 million attributable to accidents outside the workplace (4.1 million at home). Statistics specific to your company are surely more compelling than national facts and figures, but collecting them is probably not practical for small businesses.

Ask for input. Some companies survey employees to find out what off-the-job safety issues concern them. The results allow them to tailor their safety messages. For example, if you operate in a rural area, you might find that hunting safety is important, whereas traffic or pedestrian safety might be more important to big-city employees.

Build it in. It can be both efficient and effective to include off-the-job safety messages with the job safety programs you already have. For example, you could include a section on at-home safety with a formal safety training module, or discuss off-the-job safety from time to time in regular informal tailgate sessions.

Use case studies. In the same way they use real-life examples to stress safety at work, some companies allow employees to tell about near misses they have experienced in personal life. These first-person accounts bring home the reality of risk and help co-workers appreciate the possibility of being injured off the job.

Stressing safety away from work costs little, and it just might help save a valued employee from a serious injury. Donna Stein-Harris, executive director of the NCS Home and Communities Partnerships and Initiatives, observes, “The perception is that off-the-job programs require additional resources,” such as staff time and money. “I am convinced that whatever that is, it is offset by what could be saved.”



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