The business benefits to be obtained from employee engagement are huge. Studies have shown that

(a) where employee engagement was low, companies had 62% more safety incidents (Harter, Schmidt, Killham, & Asplund, 2006); and

(b) where employee engagement was high, engaged employees were five times less likely to experience a safety incident, and seven times less likely to have a lost-time safety incident (Lockwood, 2007) than non-engaged employees.

Employee engagement is an approach designed to help ensure employees are committed to an entity’s goals and values while motivating people to contribute to that entity’s success. Such entities tend to possess a strong and genuine value for workforce involvement, with clear evidence of a ‘just and fair’ culture (Reason, 1997) based on mutual respect between the entire management structure and the workforce.

The key aspect is ensuring an understanding by all concerned that engagement means two-way dialogues that lead to joint decision-making about the best way forward while also acting together to make things happen:

• managers deliberately reach out to engage with employees to focus on issues of importance e.g. safety), who in turn proactively and positively engage with management. In sum this means creating a genuine safety partnership between management and the workforce to improve safety performance.

Source: Safety Cultures, Safety Models, Taking Stock and Moving Forward, 2018, Claude Gilbert, Benoît Journé, Hervé Laroche, Corinne Bieder