Managing the Safety Function and Psychology - Essay Example

While conducting the controlling function, managers supervise and make sure that the allocated tasks are being conducted. While conducting the directing function, managers influence the employees to take the necessary measures to ensure the organization’s safety. While conducting the staffing function, managers have to hire human capital for positions in the safety department.

The benefit of employing an incentive program is that these incentive programs motivate employees to ensure that the environment they are working in is safe and secure. These incentive programs function as long as they are operational, these programs lose their worth as soon as they are stopped. Employees start operating as they were operating before the incentive programs were in place. Employees try to persuade managers to increase the time limit of the incentive programs by holding back necessary information and when this information reaches the manager, the matter has gotten worse. Employees even try to extend the deadline of the incentive programs by providing extra statistics or hiding certain statistics if the incentive program is operating on statistical information. Employees even compromise on security to gain various benefits such as insurance.

The Hierarchy of Needs Theory presented by Maslow states that individuals can be motivated to conduct a certain task if their needs are being fulfilled. If we want to motivate employees so they can start implementing safety measures in the organization, we can do so by helping employees achieve their needs. An example of the psychological need will be food, an example of safety needs will be job security, an example for the need of belongingness will be a healthy working relationship with colleagues, an example of esteem needs will be rewarding employees with greater responsibility and once all these needs are fulfilled, the individual will start caring about others. The theory states that the first individual’s basic needs should be fulfilled then only he will strive to achieve other needs in the hierarchy.

According to McClelland’s theory of Need Achievement, all individuals are born with three needs including the need for affiliation, achievement, and need for power (Friend 236). An individual’s need for power refers to his or her ability to influence people. An individual’s need for affiliation refers to an individual’s need to be recognized by others as a relative. An individual’s need for achievement refers to his need for achieving aims and objectives in his life. The theory even states that certain individuals have a higher need for achieving certain needs and a lower need for achieving certain needs. For example, managers have a higher need for being able to influence his or her subordinates to perform a certain task and on the other hand, employees have a higher need of being affiliated with his or her colleagues in the organization.

Hazards exist throughout a workplace or a household, the hazards that exist in my workplace include cleanliness hazards, fire hazards, and security hazards. These hazards can have a very negative impact on an individual as well as all the individuals throughout the organization. Fire hazards can be fatal and can result in loss of lives, cleanliness hazards can cause health issues for the employees working in the workplace and the security hazard can lead to terrorist activities. To counter fire hazards, the workplace needs to install fire alarms. In case of a security hazard, the workplace needs to employ security personals and security devices such as alarms. In case of cleanliness hazards, the workplace needs to hire workers for cleanliness purposes. All these activities need to be implemented slowly and gradually so the implementation n process does not become a hurdle in the functioning of the organization.

Time Table

Hazards

Starting Date

Ending Date

Cleanliness

Every day, before the day started.

Every day, after day end.

Security

14th May 2010

14th November 2010

Fire

14th April 2010

15th June 2010

 

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