Take a good look around your facility. If yours is like most American or Canadian workplaces, you're looking at a mini-U.N., with people born in different nations who represent diverse cultures. Go to your children's schools or the waiting room at your doctor's office and you'll observe the same phenomenon. Diversity is wonderful. But it also poses challenges to your health, safety and environmental efforts.

The Diversity Challenge

Diversity in the workplace is an exciting development. New people bring new ideas, new sounds, new friendships, new beliefs and even new tastes. (Have you noticed the many ethnic foods on your grocery store shelves lately?) But as you strive to develop and implement a strong health, safety and environmental program, diversity can also be daunting. In a diverse workplace, you must deal with a range of attitudes, beliefs and values or your efforts may be impeded or even set back.

However, diversity also poses opportunity. You can harness diversity to your advantage and use it to build stronger safety process and a more unified workforce.

Uniting Diverse Employees through the Shared Goal of Safety

Essential to any effective safety initiative is a workforce that:

• Understands the risks;
• Sees the steps management is taking; and
• Comprehends its own responsibility in preventing accidents, injuries and health/environmental incidents.

Taken together, these things contribute to achieving a common vision. Whether that vision is identified as "zero accidents," "accident elimination" or "no one hurt," the point is the same.

Visualizing and striving toward a common goal can be an enormously unifying experience for employees, especially those employees who have little else in common in terms of background and shared cultural ties.

How Cultural Diversity Affects Safety

When your employees look and sound different from one another, it's important that you gain an understanding of their backgrounds, values and beliefs, and how these affect their work style.

For example, through our experience at Topf, we have learned that often people who hail from some South American countries possess a degree of fatalism not typical of North Americans. Similarly, some Mediterranean and Mid-Eastern peoples exhibit a riskier approach to life and work - one we might call "macho."

Believing their safety is in the hands of God, these employees assign responsibility outside of themselves and may therefore ignore hazards. It's an attitude that can result in shortcuts that appear more "manly" than taking the slow, safe way. Depending on their cultural patterns, some workers may even refuse help because it suggests weakness.

Assess the Cultural Diversity of Your Workplace

The first step in turning cultural diversity into a tool to improve safety is to conduct a thorough cultural assessment. This step necessarily precedes any safety or environmental program development.

At Topf, when we do the assessment, we do not ask questions that might open up legal issues for the client, such as uncovering prejudices, for example. We tend to ask questions in the survey or interviews to get at teamwork and cooperation regarding safety in general.

For example, we would ask employees to rate the following comments on a scale:

• Management and non-management employees will intervene and encourage each other to use PPE regardless of the person's position; and
• All employees cooperate with each other in order to prevent incidents.

It's useful, as well, to involve some of your ethnically diverse employees in the design of the questionnaire. Through the Topf process, additional input comes from a series of structured interviews with a cross-section of the population. The data then helps support the information gained through assessment questionnaires.

Include All Forms of Diversity

Diversity goes well beyond national origin. All employees arrive at your gate molded by a unique combination of influences - parents and family, socio-economic background, education, religion, sports, the military, etc. Each person's approach to risk-taking, tendency to comply with rules and degree of concern for their co-workers varies greatly as a result of these factors, not merely cultural background. Your assessment document must capture these differences as well.

Conclusion

Once the assessment is complete, the really hard work begins: Designing and implementing programs that bring your workforce - despite its diversity - together in common purpose.

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