Work Safety Day Ideas

Encouraging safety at work will directly benefit a company and its bottom line. More safety awareness leads to better practices, which will ultimately reduce lost time for employees, worker's compensation claims and cost of insurance premiums. To draw attention to workplace safety, designate a safety day to present new ideas about making the company a safer place to work and to recognize previous accomplishments regarding safety.

Play Safety Bingo

• Starting a game of safety bingo is a way to get employees actively involved in the improvement of safety practices. The game cards are handed out to all employees who try to get a bingo. Anyone familiar with the classic bingo game should get the idea. The employees fill in their card spaces by accomplishing one of the many safety tasks listed and having it confirmed by a member of management. These tasks may include cleaning up a spill in a restaurant, wearing the proper safety belt for lifting or placing a wet floor sign at a mop site. When any employee completes a bingo, he should be rewarded with recognition and a prize.

Safety Role Play

• Role-playing may not always be the most popular training method implemented by management, but sometimes it can be an effective way to communicate to the staff the importance of certain topics for the company. Use safety as the basis for a role-playing exercise. Divide the staff into teams of two, three or four people and ask them to spend time thinking about a safety issue that concerns them within the business. It can be anything they have witnessed and feel should be addressed. Ask them to loosely script the situation into a skit and have part of the team act out the safety violation and the other half come in to stop them and explain what they are doing wrong. Maybe one employee regularly sees people in the stock room stacking merchandise boxes on top of one another to reach the upper shelves, instead of using a ladder. It can be anything. The results of this exercise may shed light on problems management is unaware of and it can be fun for the staff, too.

Begin Safety Days Program

• One way to gauge the effectiveness of your safety program is to keep track of safety days. Make a chart that shows how many days it has been since a safety incident happened, such as an injury that caused someone to leave work. On Day 1, make a speech about the importance of safety in the workplace and say that your goal is to go six months without an incident, then a year. Whenever the staff hits these benchmarks, be sure they are immediately rewarded with meaningful outings or prizes to keep them interested in maintaining a clean safety record.