Short term goals are easy. You have something to aim for in a small amount of time, maybe a week or a month, and you work toward that goal the entire time. It’s tough to forget about it when the deadline is so close. But what do you do when you have long term goals to reach? How do you keep at it? Additionally, how can you even be sure you’re setting the right goals for such a long period of time? Take a look at these 3 basic steps for setting and meeting your company’s long term safety culture goals today.
1. Involve the right people in goal-setting.
When the time comes to sit down and plan out your goals for your company’s safety culture, make sure you’re involving the right people. Often, these decisions come from the top or from a small safety committee. But in order to create realistic goals that will actually make a difference in your workplace, you need to form a team of employees who can understand the current culture and strive for future improvements. From the bottom to the top, your team can bring together a variety of perspectives and experiences that will help to bring multiple dimensions to your new goal-setting strategy. With team members from every level within the company, more concerns can be addressed and more improvements can be made within the safety culture.
2. Maintain constant communication.
Communication is one of the most important components of nearly every aspect of company success, and your safety culture is certainly no exception. A great deal of communication is utilized in the first step, when you bring everyone together to collaborate on goal-setting, but continued communication is essential every step of the way.
Keep everyone in the loop.
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Let them know about their progress toward those goals on a regular basis. It can be so easy to forget that the goals are even there if you’re not making an active effort to promote them and share progress details.
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Send out regular reminders. Whether you’re reminding employees of why your long term safety culture goals are so important or you’re sending out helpful tips that can help employees maintain safety and goal progress, mental refreshers can be an easy way to promote safety every single day.
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If it looks like you’re way off course on some goals, communicate that to everyone as well. Explain what’s going wrong and offer some solutions to get back on track.
It just isn’t plausible to have brief safety meetings every day to promote the goals of a positive safety culture, so you want to be able to send out your communications electronically. With a tool like Ving, you can send text, video, audio, and even survey questions to your entire team instantly. These messages can be sent as text messages or emails, or you can even post a link to them online where employees have access.
3. Track your progress.
Working toward goals isn’t very helpful if you’re not actually doing something with them. Your goals aren’t arbitrary numbers that employees are trying to reach for a prize, like a game. Your goals are set to improve your culture of safety and to create a reliably safe environment for everyone. Along the way, you may notice that you’re not even coming close to reaching the goals your team has set, or maybe you’ve already surpassed some of them with plenty of time to spare. In either case, you want to adjust your goals for the next period so that they’re both challenging and reachable.
By not achieving certain goals, you don’t necessarily have a failure. Maybe you need some time to adjust to new strategies before you can reach them. For now, set the bar a little lower and track how you’re doing. Rome wasn’t built in a day. Slow and steady wins the race. You get the picture. A strong start is not indicative of a strong finish, so take the time to analyze and adjust your goals if you need to.
If you’re reaching your goals too easily, you can definitely aim higher next time. There’s always room for improvement. When you’re constantly raising the bar, your safety culture is constantly moving up to the next level, and that’s exactly what you wanted to happen when you sat down and made goals in the first place!
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