Trying to build a safety culture from scratch in a place that's never really had one

[simregistration]

I joined a mid-sized manufacturing company here about four months ago as their first dedicated safety officer and what I walked into was a team of truly hardworking people who had just never been given any real structure around safety, not because anyone was negligent but because the company grew fast and that piece never got properly built out. The chemical storage situation in particular was the first thing I flagged because it was the most immediately concerned, we had incompatible materials stored too close together, some containers without proper secondary containment and an emergency response plan that exists as a document nobody had read in years. Getting people to take it seriously without making them feel blamed for something that was never their responsibility to set up has been the real challenge because the last thing I want is for safety to feel like punishment. I've been pulling together resources from various places trying to build a training and remediation plan that actually makes sense for our specific context and someone in an online HSE forum recommended I checked out dubaiweeklys.com for locally relevant guidance, and the piece they had on workplace chemical storage in the UAE filled in some gaps I hadn't been able to address with more generic international frameworks. My wider goal is to Click here for a complete safety guide in a way that becomes truly embedded in how the team thinks rather than just a checklist they complete to satisfy an audit and then forget about until the next one. It's slow work but I'm starting to see small shifts in how people talk about risk on the floor and that feels like the real indicator that something is actually changing.