Safety Leadership: Specific Actions and Programs to Level Up (Part 2)
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 focused on tightening up current processes you likely already have to improve safety. Part 2 will (hopefully) provide some new ideas to demonstrate leadership commitment to safety.
1. Optimize performance management with more proactive focus on safety. To do this, develop and use Critical Leadership Observable Actions with behavioral anchors to measure how each leader is showing their safety commitment. These should be created with input from leaders to ensure key behaviors are identified. Co-creating these actions will drive more personal ownership. This provide more direction, accountability, transparency, and solutions-based activities to drive safety culture improvement at both individual and organizational levels.
Specific steps include: Identify safety and performance standards.Set trackable goals for achievement.Provide behavior-based feedback on performance.Provide guidance with existing gaps.
2. Reward exceptional performance.
3. Develop Risk registers to identify the top 3-4 issues with serious injury and fatality potential, which will help forecast, remediate, and mitigate risks and liabilities and should include tasks with SIF potential or already identified through past incidents. This establishes a comprehensive risk analysis mechanism to help leaders identify risks, determine their priority level, develop mitigation strategies, and identify the risk owner so that everyone is prepared to deal with risks for multiple tasks. This risk register should be established with employee involvement to help buy down risk.
4. Find new ways to attract field talent. Finding suitable and sufficient candidates is difficult for many organizations in the current labor market. To increase the hiring pool, steps should be taken to reinforce the value proposition for working at your organization (career paths, benefits packages). Leaders should also explore new ways to create scheduling flexibility especially with younger employees. This may include job rotations, trading shifts, and more flexible workdays. Best practices also include developing and positioning a career path for employees for future leadership roles, improving realistic job previews prior to hiring which includes prospective candidates interacting with current employees, and increasing messaging around the value and importance placed on safety and family care as part of the employee value proposition.
5. Implement leadership listening tours to increase the quantity and quality of leader time in the field. Establish goals, guidelines, and accountability checks (in senior meetings) for process success. At executive and senior management levels, leaders need to spend more time in the field talking with employees about safety in small groups and one-on-one, which are typically done monthly or on a quarterly basis. This includes asking open-ended questions to better understand employees’ safety concerns and suggestions as well as sharing company-wide efforts to keep everyone safe. Leadership listening tours also demonstrate active caring for employees’ safety and well-being.
6. Create employee learning teams. Employee learning teams should be established where small groups of team members walk the site and talk with coworkers about safety challenges and suggestions. These improvement conversations focus on process improvements (training, procedures, scheduling). These teams then brainstorm solutions based on their team observations, share their findings and recommendations with leadership committees, and then report back to the workforce when improvements are made.
7. Establish Safety Stand Ups for all employees to get together and discuss safety. This is a proactive way to reflect on new efforts to improve safety (unlike a reactive Safety Stand Down). Leaders should take a single day dedicated to safety and bring in speakers, provide food and entertainment, and conduct employee roundtables with a focus on safety. This is an excellent venue for information sharing but also for employees to share their ideas and be included in company safety improvement efforts.
Caring about safety as a leader isn’t enough. Specific, tangible actions and programs are needed to transform good intentions into positive safety results. Please take a few moments and review guidelines from this blog to find new ways to augment the positive things that you’re already doing to improve safety culture and prevent SIFs.
