Nurturing a safety culture
Pietro Gasparrini, Director of Environmental Health and Safety (EHS), is adamant that he wants safety to be a conscious project, rather than a subconscious worry.
“It's all about trying to create a strong safety culture within the organization,” he says. “In order to keep that culture going, it needs to be nurtured and reinforced, otherwise it’ll just fizzle out.”
Training on Safety
Over the past year, EHS has worked hard to keep safety at the forefront of people’s minds across the university. Principal among their accomplishments was the Health and Safety Responsibilities Training, aimed at academic and non-academic supervisors.
The goal of this course was to make supervisors aware of their legal responsibilities for the health and safety of their staff and students. Reviewing job roles and legal duties, supervisors were trained in due diligence and the importance of promptly dealing with non-compliance issues. They were also reminded about the important roles they play in promoting safety culture within their groups.
“Within every organization, the culture surrounding safety in the workplace should come from the top,” says Gasparrini. “If safety is important to supervisors, it gains legitimacy and spreads.”
Gasparrini was pleased to discover an enormous willingness from senior leadership to embrace and participate in the training. It was their example that helped EHS get every supervisor on board.
"When the President of the university and the senior management make the time to attend safety training because of its importance, it encourages people to get involved,” he says.
This top-down eagerness to participate in safety is one of the things Gasparrini pinpoints as an influential factor in Concordia’s safety culture.
The last mass safety education campaign was a decade ago, when the criminal code made supervisors legally responsible for health and safety. Now, requirements have been put in place to renew safety training every five years.
New Occupational Health and Safety Program
Along the same lines, in March 2017, EHS officially launched the Occupational Health and Safety program. In development for over two years, this program looks closely at risks associated with certain jobs to protect the overall health and wellbeing of employees.
A common practice in manufacturing and industrial work environments, Gasparrini explains that conducting this type of evaluation is more difficult in a university setting.
“If we were all working in a noisy factory, everyone would have their hearing evaluated and we would all receive protective equipment, the end,” he says. “At Concordia it isn’t so cut and dry, we’re making thousands of different things, in different environments, with different equipment, everyday.”
From hearing protection to programs for those working with blood, the vastness of the new program is a necessary reflection of a campus with so many ongoing activities and a key to maintaining the health, safety and well-being of Concordians.
