Safety Leadership

The key to the most dynamic component of employee engagement has been there all along— undiscovered—hiding in plain sight.

Employee engagement is generally defined as having employees who are involved in, enthusiastic about, and committed to their work and workplace. In the last decade, endless research studies have been conducted, articles written, and YouTube videos recorded to clarify what companies need to do to develop an engaged workforce. Unfortunately, the message sent is often incredibly complex. To paraphrase Albert Einstein, it is easy to be complex—to be simple is very difficult. We need a simple explanation of the element that determines whether your employees are engaged. 

The phrase “leadership support” has become a cliché in discussing safety. We always hear about the importance of leadership support and “walking the talk.” The reason we hear so much about such support is because it is important. Yet it is too often poorly defined. Leadership support is often seen as just delivering a series of messages about the importance of safety. However, building leadership support requires the same type of analysis and planning that goes into implementing the behavior-based safety (BBS) effort. Leadership participation and support is so important that a significant amount of time should be invested in planning and building accountability for critical leadership practices.

by Grainne A. Matthews, Ph.D., Vice President Construction and Utilities

The role of management in your behavioral safety process depends on what you are trying to achieve with that process. If you plan to use behavioral safety as part of your efforts to improve your safety culture, then members of your supervision and management teams will be equal partners with employees in the design, rollout, and maintenance of your process. They will not only need to do the same things that other employees do to make behavioral safety a success, they will also play a unique role that only supervisors and managers can play.  Like other employees, they will conduct observations, provide feedback, and serve as members of the steering team that analyzes the observation data to identify barriers to safe behavior.  In their special role as leaders, depending on their position, they may also do the following:

by Daniel Moran, Ph.D.

Worldwide, safety champions and industry leaders strive to maximize their effectiveness on the job. I’ve noticed that no matter what industries these leaders work in, they often complain of having a similar problem: not enough time to get everything completed. Now you might think that there are many other things to discuss in a behavior-based safety newsletter, but time-management skills can certainly contribute to the overall effectiveness of a company’s safety process. When people commit to certain actions to ensure safety on the job, then those actions must be reliably completed every time, on time. And when people make such a commitment, it makes sense to remove disruptions that keep you from completing your tasks.