Walter Eichendorf
Deputy Director General of the German Social Accident Insurance (DGUV) and Director of DGUV’s prevention division
Title: Establishing a culture of prevention
Biography
Biography: Walter Eichendorf
Abstract
As digitalization continues, work forms and locations will change. Promoting a culture of prevention in companies
and organizations can encourage greater self-responsibility for one’s own safety and health at work, as well as support
the leadership and motivation of employees. Raising awareness of safety and health as important values for all people, all
organizations and for society as well as integrating safety and health into how we think and act will become crucial. Safety and
health must become the benchmark for all our actions. If safety and health become a mandatory established as values in every
school pupil, student, employee, employer and manager they can act as a benchmark for all their actions. Individuals would
be empowered to automatically make those values an important factor in all their thoughts and actions. At that point safety
and health could be seen to represent values that are both actively lived and perform a beacon function. This would represent
the completion of a significant process of cultural change. Therefore the DGUV has decided to start a ten-years-campaign to
promote the culture of prevention in Germany which will be launched on October 18, 2017. The target groups will range from
young children to elderly people. The evolution of a culture in which safety and health are firmly established as integral, lived
values requires companies and institutions to adopt a holistic approach spread across six fields of action. The six fields of action
are leadership, communication, participation, error culture, social climate/organizational climate and prevention which are
as an integral part of all tasks. The latter field has a special role to play as it is ideally to influence all other fields of action. The
conceptual concept will be presented as well as the communication structure of the campaign.