Part 3: Creating a Safety Culture at Your Marina – Actions Always Speak Louder than Words

Editor’s Note: This is the last article in a three-part series about creating a safety culture at your marina. To read the first two articles in the series, go to marinadockage.com and search: Safety Culture.

Regular marina site safety inspections are essential for building a culture of safety. Safety first means protecting everyone and everything at the marina, preventing accidents and ensuring a safe customer and team environment.
Addressing site flaws through team meetings, physical inspections and organized actions can further efforts to protect and provide a safe environment for everyone at your property.

Four Steps to Building a Safety Culture
The following four steps can serve as a starting point in driving safety across your property:
1. Evaluate risks. To understand how to create a safer marina, you must first understand the risks you face every day. Each task and associated risk should be evaluated, and safety-based changes should be considered. Analyze past incidents (Your insurance carrier can help here.) Understand that past incidents can help you identify root causes and identify risks and exposures that threaten the safety of everyone on site and the success of your business.
Identify the risks before they result in loss. Review how your customers use the marina and the exposure their behaviors may create for themselves and your team. Determine how actions can impact your work policies/procedures, buildings and equipment and employee work practices. Can a change in behaviors or even where actions take place on your property prevent or mitigate loss?

2. Design a safety plan. A good plan is the best place to start, but it is only the beginning. Once you have a plan, you must act to eliminate or minimize risk. To create a plan, start by getting a commitment from owners, upper management and the entire team to build a culture of safety.

Stay focused. Keep focused on the risks and exposures identified during your evaluation.

Prioritize your efforts. Focus on the risks that pose the greatest threat. You should consider the frequency and severity of the loss potential and/or the opportunity to prevent or mitigate risks.

Identify solutions and resources. Your solutions can vary from implementing engineering controls to creating administrative policies and procedures.
These steps can help create positive changes in safety attitude, commitment and culture.

3. Implement your plan. Implementation entails communication of the plan and its details, training, regularly scheduled practice and drills and ongoing review. A thorough plan will cover several potential risk areas, including buildings and equipment, the environment, employees, customers and vendors.

4. Communicate and train. The real test of a safety program and culture is not what is written down on paper, but rather how well it gains traction and works out in the marina. How well your plan works is often dependent on what your employees know and what they do when faced with a hazard. Regular walkabout property inspections are the final step in the process. This is the point where the rubber meets the road. Every step taken so far leads to this junction. Identify potential hazards before they become an issue, and act to correct and protect. Follow OSHA guidelines, and the property will benefit in all areas of the marina. OSHA’s regulation “General Safety and Health Provisions (29 CFR 1926.20)” covers job site inspections. It states that “Such programs shall provide for frequent and regular inspections of the job sites, materials and equipment to be made by competent persons designated by the employers.”

By prioritizing general marina site safety, managers can not only guarantee the well-being of all at the property but also ensure business continuity and protect their organization from costly liabilities. Insurance companies love this approach. It can save money.

After developing your property strategy for marina safety and compliance, figuring out who will be the team leader, defining risk hazard exposures and making a draft checklist list to write down and plan action steps, it is now time to act.

Your first action should be to meet with the safety and operating teams, review and explain the plan and then venture out into the marina where you will convert all your planning into actions. Show the team you mean what you say and say what you mean. This activity will instill confidence in the property management by both teams and the customers. Customers will spread praise for your actions taken to keep them and their loved ones safe while having fun.

When you meet with the team, explain basic steps using a script like this: “As we seek to improve our marina safety culture, we will be conducting and recording a physical review of all areas of the property – docks, buildings, sales and service shops, retail and boat rental operations.”

Then focus on these three items:
Pre-Gaming – Do a quick review of the plan identifying potential hazards to look for on the ground like trip and fall, dock safety, electrical services, fire safety and fuel dock operations to name a few. Be careful not to overload your team on the first pass.
Review a draft checklist – Hand out a checklist that will have space to list problems identified, the location details, a score of 1-5 on how critical the problem is and space for any follow-up notes.
Field Trip – Go out into the marina on a quest. Make it fun by planning the field work around lunch. Head out after morning tasks have been addressed and return to a public area for lunch with the whole crew. On the first trip, limit time to a fast-paced two hours.

Following the field trip, discuss the hazards found, asking these sample questions to facilitate a planning session with your team:

What should be done to correct the issue?

Who should be responsible for implementing these corrective actions?

When and how often should the corrective actions be conducted?

Where should the corrective action documentation take place?

How can we make sure that these corrective actions prevent recurrence?

Creating a corrective action plan can seem to be a daunting task at first. A corrective action plan is a document that outlines a set of steps for addressing issues and gaps in marina operations and processes that could negatively impact your marina. It describes the approach for resolving an issue that interferes with reaching goals.

The corrective action plan should be S.M.A.R.T. (Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Relevant, Timebound) and includes timeframes, costs and signatories. Developing a corrective action plan means going through corrective action identification activities. Training your teams to be able to correctly identify the need for a corrective action is a worthwhile endeavor that sets them up for success. Collaborate with your team in determining the root cause and the elements that need to be considered when developing the corrective action plan and implementing corrective action management.

Be sure to monitor, evaluate and improve your plan. As your business environment changes, so should your safety program. Regularly test your plan to determine if it fits the changing business environment and reflects changing accountabilities. Don’t forget to recognize success. Be sure to communicate and celebrate your safety team successes.