Safety Leadership: Specific Actions and Programs to Level Up (Part 1)
By Josh Williams, Ph.D.
Previous blogs have focused on core leadership competencies to fuel felt leadership and drive safety excellence. There are also key actions and programs that leaders should implement to improve safety culture and reduce the potential for serious injuries and fatalities (SIFs). Part 1 of the blog focuses on tightening up current processes you likely already have. Part 2 will (hopefully) provide some new ideas demonstrating leadership commitment to safety. Here are some guidelines for activities you’re likely already doing:
1. Improve near miss reporting. Many organizations struggle with getting close call information from the field. This often occurs because the reporting process is complicated or employees fear that they might get in trouble for reporting. Near misses are teachable moments that help keep people safe because hazard awareness increases and necessary system improvements are identified. When done correctly, near miss reporting is a powerful tool to improve safety culture and prevent serious injuries and fatalities. In creating this process, there should be a focus on keeping reporting simple, effectively analyzing and prioritizing reported near misses, making system improvements based on findings, and advertising these changes to all employees to encourage future reporting.
2. Gather more employee input for safety. Leaders need to develop a pre-defined approach for gathering employee input for safety and change management processes. Also, follow-up assessments with changes should be done more often to make necessary adjustments with new efforts. Additionally, leaders need to encourage employees to escalate safety issues to ensure that safety information is flowing up the organization and not just cascading down from the top. Field leaders also need to actively solicit employee feedback for safety to elevate important issues and innovate with new ideas from the people closest to the job. Leaders should also encourage employee testimonials with incidents and near misses in group settings, tailboards etc. to stimulate powerful discussions about potential hazards and the importance of operating safely.
3. Provide more safety leadership support for supervision. More soft-skills safety leadership training and development are needed for many organizations. This should focus on specific behaviors like acknowledging safe work, redirecting risky work, delegating safety, and engaging teams for safety. Steps should also be taken to free up time for supervisory time in field in organizations where supervisors may be overloaded with other responsibilities (paperwork, meetings).
4. Create and use safety questions to start meetings. To support and embed a broader vision of safety, leaders should start meetings with a short safety moment to set the tone for safety. This should be led by senior leadership and cascade through all levels of the organization. These questions, developed by leaders, field employees, and EHS, should provide thought-provoking reflections on safety leadership themes. Examples include questions such as “What’s one new safety habit you want to create? Why?” and “When was a time you spoke up about a safety concern, and what was the result?” or “What risks would you point out to your son or daughter to keep them safe if they began working here today?” These questions should be used with leadership discussions, meetings with employees, and tailboards to generate thoughtful discussions of safety.
5. Establish town halls for leaders to get more employee feedback for safety and close the loop on identified concerns in both the field and office (on a quarterly or bi-annual basis). When possible, these should be done in larger group settings along with smaller Q&A sessions, which will help combat common perceptions (with many organizations) that employee safety concerns go into a “black hole.” Leaders should then establish a system for prioritizing, addressing, and disseminating issues based on these suggestions and concerns.
6. Increase high hazard safety inspections. These inspections should supplement current inspections and audits. However, high hazard safety inspection focus more on SIF potential and mitigation strategies. Findings from these inspections should influence risk register content (to be addressed in Part 2 of this blog). Field employees should also be given time (and training) to conduct these inspections.
7. Develop a leading metric dashboard to assess proactive safety performance. Concrete, proactive safety behaviors should also be included more in performance managementwhich should impact hiring and promotions at senior levels. This should include items like the percentage of leader time in field, quantity and quality of safety suggestions from the field, percentage of action items completed, safety training completed etc.
8. Increase safety recognition. Too often organizations focus solely on what needs to be fixed or the enforcement of policies and procedures. As a result, many interactions with workers tend to be about what they need to correct and not what they’re doing well. Genuine one-on-one recognition should be the default “incentive” for activities like reporting quality close calls, providing safety suggestions, mentoring new employees, etc. Small, tangible rewards (pizza, caps) may also be used to reinforce specific safety behaviors.
Improving and tightening up these activities will help in your efforts to improve safety culture. Part 2 of this blog will address less commonly used activities which will also help bolster safety leadership.
