Employee Engagement. Company Culture. Establishing a positive company culture matters. A company’s culture can be an incredible asset…but if not given the proper attention, it can become your greatest risk.

Culture is the values, beliefs, and the norms of a company. It’s not your policies and procedures; it’s the way you do things. It has many facets. Safety, employee wellness, employee wellbeing, and even the overall organizational health. And in order to establish a positive culture, you must engage your company leaders AND your employees.

We understand the steps to fire prevention and protection for our home. We teach our kids the importance of smoke detectors and why they need to be checked regularly. We establish an escape plan and determine a meeting place. In school, our kids learn what to do and where to go in case of a fire. And they participate in numerous drills.

But what about our workplace? Are we properly prepared to handle a fire? Have we trained our employees and practiced our action plan?

Just as with your family or at school, taking time to plan BEFORE a fire can be critical to survival. Here are four basic steps to help you create a pre-fire plan

As the use of social media continues to grow exponentially, the line between professional and personal life tends to blur. Most likely, many of your employees are using social networks for personal use. They have connected with coworkers and clients. They may also help share posts from your company’s social networks to their own personal ones. The employee’s network of friends and followers probably begin to associate the individual with your company. This can be great. Employees can become some of your most effective brand advocates.

However, being aware of the potential risks is important.

According to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, approximately 250,000 serious injuries occur each year to hands, fingers, and wrists. About 8,000 of these result in amputations. A worker’s hands are so incredibly critical not only to their career, but also their personal lives. Action can be taken to help minimize the hazards to hands, especially through the use of equipment safety mechanisms, personal protective equipment (PPE), and proper training.

What Is The Mark Of A Proactive Safety Culture?

Early in my career I spent time working in manufacturing as a safety director. After an injury occurred, we would complete the accident investigation and root cause analysis. We figured out what happened, when it happened, why it happened, and how it happened. From there we determined how to keep the injury from occurring again. But why weren’t we doing this before the injury? Why weren’t we doing inspections, reviews, and managing processes BEFORE an injury to prevent it? Why were we waiting until an injury occurred?

Over 300 million people use LinkedIn. And the membership is constantly growing. In fact, there are 2 new users every second!

Are you using your LinkedIn account to its fullest potential? There are a multitude of resources available to help you learn about LinkedIn. We’re highlighting 5 tips we find incredibly valuable to effectively develop your professional network.

If you are just getting started on LinkedIn or are a seasoned veteran, it is still important to keep your profile updated and stay fresh with best practices.

According to the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health (NIOSH), about 30 million workers in the U.S. are exposed to hazardous noise. One of the most common occupational diseases is noise-induced hearing loss. With this many workers at risk each day, it also means very high risks of workers’ comp claims, which can be very costly to companies. What can be done? How can you protect your workers against hearing loss?

Every minute of the day, Facebook users share 2,460,000 pieces of content. Twitter users tweet 277,000 times. YouTube users upload 72 hours of new video. Over 120 users sign up for LinkedIn. That’s a lot of action!

The benefits of social media use for businesses have become clear. It helps with building brand and awareness, managing reputation, crowdsourcing, customer service, gathering customer insights, recruiting, driving website traffic, and the list goes on. But with these benefits come risks. The first step to managing the risks is to recognize them.

At Gibson, we are proud of the company culture we have established, but in order for our culture to stay strong, we must pay attention to how to we handle the integration of new employees. This is the onboarding process.

The goal of onboarding is to have engaged employees who feel valued and become a part of the company culture. Not only does onboarding teach an employee about the company and their role, but it helps them feel like a part of the organization, which in turn makes them a more engaged, empowered and productive employee.

How do you accomplish this? How do you successfully integrate new employees into your company culture?

This post summarizes Matthew Moore and Thomas O’Neill’s presentation titled “To Arm or Not to Arm” from the August 6, 2014 Securing & Surviving The Active Shooter Epidemic Seminar. It is meant to convey his ideas and opinions without endorsement or criticism. Therefore, the ideas and opinions in this post are not necessarily those of Gibson.

As active shooter events become more prevalent—not just in schools but in workplaces too—we need to do something to make where we work safer. One idea schools and businesses are considering is arming their employees. It’s an option that elicits strong and passionate arguments both pro and con. But those arguments often fail to consider the risks associated with arming (or not arming) employees or the controls necessary to undertake arming employees properly.

Ultimately, there is no “right” answer; there is no “easy” answer. It’s a decision each organization must make on its own. But when an organization weighs the option to arm its employees, it must consider all the risks and controls to make sure arming is the right decision for its workplace.