Safety Role Modeling 101

By Brie DeLisi

“Leadership doesn’t walk the talk” is one of the most common complaints we hear from employees during assessments with organizations that have less mature safety cultures. Many leaders need to understand a couple of critical components of their culture if they want to improve safety:

1. Employees are always watching.
2. Actions speak louder than words.

We understand that you want your employees to be more accountable and be responsible for safety, but they are always playing ‘follow the leader,’ which is why the culture starts with you. If you truly want to improve safety culture within your organization, it is of the utmost importance to take a hard look in the mirror first. Here are a few tips to check yourself as a safety leader and role model:

Are you walking the talk?

Are you aware of how your actions are viewed by employees? Do you follow all of the safety rules and requirements? Are you keeping an eye out for safety hazards and reporting/fixing when you see them? As leaders, we should not be taking any unsafe actions that we wouldn’t want to see employees doing. Otherwise, they will believe that the safety requirements don’t actually matter.

Are you holding everyone equally accountable?

Leaders of any rank should never get a free pass for a safety violation if an employee would be punished for the same violation. Employees will experience feelings of injustice and inequality, and that will create a divide in the culture in which employees do not want to support management, because management doesn’t support them.

Do you talk about safety as much as other priorities?

All too often we hear from leaders “well it goes without saying”. Unfortunately, no, it does not go without saying when it comes to safety. If you want your safety performance to improve, you need to talk about safety as much as you talk about operations and quality. If the only message employees hear all day is about production numbers, their priority will be production numbers and whatever it takes to make the numbers (like taking shortcuts and skipping safety steps) – that once-a-week message to ‘work safely’ is not going to be top of mind.

Does safety come from a genuine place?

Employees hate feeling like a number. If your only concern is safety rates and costs, they will believe that is all you care about. If you express genuine concern for employee safety – so that they go home to their families and can come back to work, they will start to believe that they are worth it, that their safety is worth the time and effort.