Safety truly is a 24-hour job, 7 days a week, including holidays.

Safety officers feel this way about their jobs, but often the workers do not share the same mentality. Often it is understood in workplaces that safety is all about the workplace, so many safety initiatives, rules and protocols are left at home when workers go home after their shifts.

[Image courtesy of Flickr user winnifredxoxo via a Creative Commons license]

[Image courtesy of Flickr user winnifredxoxo via a Creative Commons license]

However, even the most blissfully ignorant worker knows that injuries and deaths can occur at home as well as at work – and even on the way to or from work. Yet, many workers seem to not be willing, or not motivated, to apply some of their safety practices from work to their home activities so they remain safe and healthy to check in for work the next day or after a productive weekend with family.

Robert LaMarsh wrote in Professional Safety magazine about the work/life balance in safety, imploring safety officers, supervisors and others to encourage the safety culture in the workplace to be carried home with the workers. In other words, he maintains that while safety is promoted and encouraged at work, safety is not about the workplace or the company – it should always be about the workers.

Do you get that sense in your workplace? Do you feel lke the efforts that supervisors and safety officers put into safety are truly for the benefit of workers, or is there a perception that it’s more about the company’s liability and bottom line?

LaMarsh took to the pages of PS to drive home the point about the importance of safety throughout a worker’s day, whether he or she is at home, at work or somewhere in between. Part of the safety culture that helps your company is taking a more personal approach to safety with your workers, giving them tools and advice that can be applied in environments outside of the workplace.

A couple of examples of implementing these kinds of safety features would be the use of eye or ear protection. If a worker has a workshop at home and works with various tools such as table saws, acetylene torches or the like, then the worker should be trained and encouraged to use similar protection at home that they use at work. In fact, LaMarsh even goes so far as to suggest that a worker has two sets of protection, one for the worksite and one for use at home.

Another example can be in working around electrical circuitry, and conducting proper inspections of outlets, switches, fuses, cords and plugs to ensure they are safe and functional. Another could be working with ladders. If your worksite has ladders used by workers, there should be safety protcols in regards to use and inspection of these ladders, and those same protocols should be encouraged at home with ladders used for working in attics or on roofs.

The key to this idea, LaMarsh wrote, is to develop a Work/Life 24/7/365 safety program, complete with take-home literature, a logo and/or slogan to promote the concept, and regular  education and reinforcement of translating worksite protocols into practical steps in a home environment.

We all know safety of workers is not constrained to the workplace. Workers who get hurt at home are just as likely to miss work as those who get hurt on the worksite. Safety is truly about protection of workers, not about protecting the company – and that should be the mindset promoted and nurtured in every workplace.