Safety Committee Meeting Purpose
If the safety committee is able to effectively accomplish its purpose, it can serve as a catalyst to improve the safety management system and transform the safety culture.
Management and labor must work together.
Lets see how the safety committee meeting can help do that:
- The meeting brings management and labor together. Management and labor must be talking to each other. The more they talk, the more they understand each other. Why is it important to talk? Think about this principle: "If you keep people in the dark, they think the worst." If management and labor are not talking, they will be thinking the worst about each other.
- The meeting naturally promotes trust. It builds a cooperative working relationship between management and labor. It's essential that the safety committee build trust between labor and management; we call this the prime directive. W. Edward Deming, in his book, Out of the Crisis, states that to achieve true operational quality, the employer must drive out fear in the workplace. Increased cooperation, not competition, between management and labor is a crucial goal in every action the safety committee takes.
- The meeting fosters ideas for improvement. It can be the place to design and implement ideas and activities that can increase employee awareness, improve attitudes, and make improvements in operations as well as safety.
- The meeting promotes continuous improvement. The meeting is important in each phase of Deming's Plan-Do-Study-Act process.
Knowledge Check Choose the best answer for the question.
2-5. Why is it important to bring management and labor together in safety committee meetings?
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