3 Steps To Engaging Workers In Your Safety Program: Management Leadership

Dec 28

3 Steps To Engaging Workers In Your Safety Program: Management Leadership

When I started as a safety professional, I did it all backwards and failed and I don’t want you to make the same mistakes. This article will show you why management leadership is vital to a healthy safety program and will share practical tips that will help engage leaders at every level of the company to embrace safety through management leadership.

When I was new to my first job as a safety manager, I immediately started trying to connect with the field employees. I was excited about safety and as I was doing field audits I would go up to people and share with them my perfect compliance plan. I made some progress as I got to know the workers better, but my compliance plan clearly wasn’t working. Incidents continued to happen. It was beginning to feel like what I said didn’t matter and my “awesome” audits were because the culture of our company needed to change.

When I’d check in on the workers, they would usually tell me “Apolonia, you're hammering the JSA, but the supervisors are telling us we have 1 minute and then we have to get to work.” They would tell me their supervisor is the one who dictates their day. When I heard this, I knew something had to change.

This caused me to change my approach and I sat down with the owner of the company and painted a picture of what an effective safety program would look like. I shared what would be possible for the company with a better safety score and less incidents. I shared that if we wanted to continue to grow, our safety program had to improve, I needed his help getting there.

I was honest with him and mentioned if I didn’t have his support and the buy in of the supervisors, the safety program was going to sh*t and what I said to the workers wouldn’t matter.

He was in. Shortly after, we started having leadership meetings. The owner explained to the supervisors that they were changing the incentives and raises for the company. I had to be blunt with the leadership that if we wanted to improve our safety score, it needed to be something everyone was on board with from the top down. We all needed to embrace management leadership.

That was when we realized having a good safety program was about getting leadership from managers, supervisors, as well as the CEO and executives. It is about leadership across the board and showing everyone cared about safety.

We started seeing improvements in our safety program quickly but I realized the problems we were facing were extremely common and I was beginning to wonder why these same problems popped up at so many companies. I began to see that when our workers were promoted, they often weren’t trained in leadership, making it hard for a safety culture to stick.

Maybe this scenario sounds familiar...Oftentimes, someone who is a supervisor or in leadership was the best at their job before the promotion. Maybe they were the best foreman, driver, or welder, they were the best at a specific skill and so they were promoted because of that. They were promoted based off of their production, and they wanted to do a good job in their new role, so they focused on production. They got a pay raise and more responsibility, but oftentimes, there wasn’t additional training related to the new responsibilities such as management leadership.

This creates a gap where OSHA is giving safety guidelines that need to be implemented through relational leadership while the majority of managers are solely focused on production, speed, and revenue. The result was a culture based on results only, instead of getting results the right way.

If you have a culture that values safety coming from the CEO, that will trickle down to managers, supervisors, and the workers.

So what can we do to transform the mindset of the managers and leaders in our organizations? Here are three steps we’ve seen create a culture of management leadership within your organization.

Have Regular Manager Meetings

The task of changing the culture at your company can be daunting but attacking it head on will be worth it. The first thing I recommend doing to change the culture is having regular manager meetings where you can help get leadership on the same page. These meetings are a great place to find out how supervisors are doing, how are top management incentivizing projects, and what are the KPIs they are looking for?

Once you figure out what is important to your managers, I don’t want you to replace those with safety, add safety to them. Help them to understand that safety can be prioritized with those things they care about and begin to get their ideas on ways you can communicate the importance of safety to the workers as a unified team.

2. Change How You Reward Your Workers

Now that you have a good idea of how your managers and supervisors are doing and how they communicate and reward workers, get creative with how you reward your employees for a safe workplace.

We have seen that simple recognitions at safety meetings or company gatherings go a long way. Recognize people for getting involved, recognize people for speaking up.

At a recent safety meeting for one of our clients, the owner of the company stood up with 6 crisp $100 bills. You should have seen the looks on the workers faces. Nothing gets people’s attention like a good crisp benjamin. He went on to recognize 6 workers for their involvement in creating a safety culture and identified what they did to help the company. All 300 employees in that meeting were locked in while he was talking. Everyone sat taller in their seats. They saw that was what their boss cared about and the energy in the room shifted.

3. Include Managers In The Safety Process

Now that you are having regular manager meetings and have figured out more creative ways to reward your workers, I recommend including managers and leadership in every step of the safety program.

I told you how engaged everyone was when they saw the CEO stand up to reward their behavior. You will get similar responses when you begin to include managers and supervisors into every step of your safety process.

It is easy to feel as the safety manager that you need to do everything involved with safety. I get it and I have done it. Here is the thing though, you are not the expert at all the jobs, the workers are the experts. The supervisors, managers, and employees are the experts at what they do so include them in the process.

Safety meetings will be significantly more effective when a supervisor is in each group. If you are doing safety training, even if it is Safeland, LOTO, or a forklift class, have a supervisor talk about how things are done on the field and make sure they are on the same page.

Include management with every step of the safety process and your workers will see safety as a team sport.

When you implement these steps, you are going to see more of your team engaged with the safety process and the more people are thinking about safety, the more they will be implementing their safety training.

All of this contributes to you having a safer workplace that produces more results and better results. When that happens, everyone wins. You will have a better safety score, less TRIR’s, and a healthier company that is better positioned to grow.

Safety can change your company but you may have to work on changing the culture of your company first before seeing that happen. If you want help knowing the best ways to improve the quality of your safety program, we’d love to talk with you. You can schedule a call with our team by clicking here.

True Safety Services is a safety training and consulting company based in Greeley, Colorado. The True Safety team has worked with oil and gas, construction, and a variety of other companies around the US and have helped them to improve their safety programs through world-class virtual safety training as well as helping safety managers and owners improve their safety programs through hands on solutions and consulting.

To schedule a no-pressure meeting with the True Safety team to learn how you can get less incidents through a more engaged safety program, schedule a call here.