Most occupational health and safety professionals know there are gaps in traditional corporate safety programs and are always on the lookout for innovative ways to boost PPE use among employees.

Here are three of the major areas where safety managers can make improvements to PPE use throughout the company.

Revise PPE program
The most frequent place safety managers look to improve PPE use is the safety program itself. Standard approaches include adding new policies, increasing monitoring measures and sometimes resorting to progressive discipline for workers with multiple PPE-related safety violations.

Purchase new PPE
There are frequent developments in the comfort and protection provided by almost every type of PPE—and if you haven’t updated your safety equipment in a while then you could be missing out on a new model of PPE that could improve effectiveness and ongoing participation/compliance.

Provide human factors training
It doesn’t matter that you have all the right safety policies if workers don’t follow them. And providing the latest PPE is only effective if employees use them properly.

Human factors training can improve PPE compliance by giving employees a better awareness of how injuries can occur, motivate them to wear their PPE and remember it at critical times to ensure that your PPE and safety policies don’t go to waste.

Which of these three options will provide the greatest benefit? Almost every company already provides workers with PPE as a part of an established safety program, and focusing on these areas will statistically only provide small, incremental improvements in compliance.

If you want real improvements in your PPE program then you should consider the third option to dramatically reduce injuries.

This free Human Factors and PPE Program guide explains how to address human factors and bring about lasting advancements in your safety culture.

Or maybe you’d like to sit back and listen, our webinar on PPE does a great job at showing that human factors affect more than PPE compliance. Learn how you can deal with your safety issues by addressing human factors.