Many factors can motivate management to adopt a safety-conscious culture, including humanity, legal, public image and employee/labor relations. Perhaps one of the most successful ways to obtain management buy-in for a cultural change is emphasizing safety’s importance to the bottom-line.

One of the primary areas in which safety can affect a firm's bottom line is Experienced Modification Rating (EMR). The construction industry uses the EMR to qualify a firm's safety performance and to determine whether a company’s claims are greater or less than average. A bad EMR can have numerous financial effects. For example, a general contractor is unlikely to hire a Tilt-Up subcontractor with a bad EMR. Further, a low EMR and a good safety record result in lower insurance costs and less risk of liability.

Communicating Safety Goals
As you prepare to communicate your firm's safety goals to employees, keep your audience in mind. Your audience will consist of people who listen and learn differently, so tailor your safety program to the audience's culture and educational level, as well as the audience's learning style. A person's learning style may be visual, auditory or kinesthetic, so determine whether your audience learns best by seeing, hearing or by doing. Perhaps an ideal approach to communicating safety goals would involve all three learning styles, thereby optimizing the material's effectiveness with a variety of individuals.

Emergency Action Planning
Planning is one thing, but practicing is another thing. A firm must be committed to executing the emergency action plan. How good is your emergency action plan? An effective emergency action plan covers all eventualities.

Incident Investigation
If an incident occurs, respond to and investigate each one. Too often, a firm's employees don't want to involve the company's safety manager, because they want to push the occurrence under the rug. However, if the safety manager isn't involved, then the root cause is never found and corrective actions never taken, thus the lesson and chance to prevent a reoccurrence is lost.