Improve Your Safety Culture.... Make It Personal!
Tell them to make safety a part of our corporate culture, and set the tone from the top. You need to set the standard, take responsibility on a day-to-day basis and ensure your leadership team members role models for these behaviors as well. Safety must involve everyone and it begins with your commitment to it and flows as a continuous improvement process that encourages the entire company to make recommendations for improvement, which produces critical updates to the company’s safety initiative.
Make it visible and set goals and communicate regularly on your progress. Recognize and reward success. Just like other investments, safety, health and environmental performance must be measured, reported, evaluated and continuously improved. It should be part of your company’s regular review process.
Most importantly, it comes down to people and our obligation to them as leaders. We’re successful because safety isn’t just a program; it’s a way of life for us. I know our safety obsession has saved lives.
Listen, communicate and lead by example. Everyone is watching you. The leader must have a strong message and a sense of conviction. Sometimes both sides look for scapegoats. Management blames the individual and the individual blames management. People must understand we are all in this together and you must create a culture of actively caring employees who are committed to performing their job safely and are led by effective leadership. And finally, don’t be afraid to make hard decisions, whether that is setting a policy like distracted driving or taking time to coach employees who made a mistake. Be willing to discipline if necessary for their own well-being and safety.
Change attitudes with key leaders, and hold them accountable to make safety No.1. Start having mandatory safety conference calls, no matter what. All our sites’ leadership must participate. The positive peer pressure it creates is significant. Work at making these meetings positive, and to raise awareness of issues that happen. Sharing current lessons learned can prevent someone else from making the same mistake that could get someone hurt.
Getting everyone on board with the idea that safety does not lower productivity. There is a direct correlation between enhanced safety results and increased profits. Once everyone understands this fact, it is much easier to instill and maintain a proactive safety culture. Educating all levels of employees on the moral and financial reasons to be safe, along with the reasons to protect fellow workers, sends a very powerful and effective message. Continually develop ways to encourage everyone to decide for themselves why they want to work safely.
The biggest obstacle to a safe workplace is leadership. It is all about leadership – leadership of oneself and leadership of one’s team. It is about ensuring we have penetrated the core beliefs of each of our leaders, that safety is not an important thing, but rather that it is the main thing. It’s about capturing the criticality of safety in the heart for that strong, ingrained belief to translate securely and consistently into the mind, hands and feet. It must become a focus and a habit.
One of the most critical behaviors that leaders must promote in the development of a successful safety program is to lead by example. Make it a point whenever you’re talking with leaders and employees to emphasize that there are no compromises on safety. Developing a culture of safety by establishing and utilizing a proactive safety program within the work environment is a key component to any leader’s future success.