07 Nov How to Become a Leader in Safety
What is your company’s most valuable resource?
If you said the people, good job – you’re correct!
As a supervisor, you take part in many critical roles in the success of your business.
However, protecting the company’s most valuable resource, the people is the most critical role of the supervisor and/or manager in the success of all company health and safety programs.
Let’s move on to define what safety leadership is and how you can encourage safety leadership in your organization.
What is Safety Leadership?
Safety leadership is defined as “the process of interaction between leaders and followers, through which leaders can exert their influence on followers to achieve organizational safety goals.”
A supervisor who does not fully commit to improving the safety culture or their workplace can, in return, expect the same from their workers.
Therefore, you must incorporate safety into every aspect of the job.
How to Encourage Safety Leadership
Management must become a role model for employees.
And management must develop a positive attitude in employees and change their behavior, so each job is achieved in a “correct, safe, and productive manner.”
You can exhibit safety leadership in a variety of behaviors that can, often intentionally, influence coworkers to improve their safety performance such as:
Discipline & Accountability
Great leaders have safety ingrained into their daily routines.
As a safety leader, you are accountable for preventing hazardous situations and taking responsibility for mistakes that may occur in the field instead of passing blame or hiding errors.
When workers don’t follow safety instructions consequences should follow.
It’s the safety leader’s responsibility to guarantee that workers realize there are consequences for violating safety regulations and not let the desire to be liked overcome the need to implement penalties.
Training Opportunities
Continuous improvement is a must in any organization looking to improve and grow.
And this is no different with safety.
Be sure to provide your safety leaders with development opportunities so they can learn additional ways to engage their coworkers about safety.
Remember safety leadership is not a singular role.
Keep in mind that the more safety leaders you have in your organization, and training opportunities you provide, the more likely you are to achieve your safety goals.
Encourage Ideas
It is important for safety leaders to be positive and welcome new ideas to improve the work environment.
Often, the people within your organization that are not in managerial roles have a deeper insight to the day-to-day activities and know which areas could use improvement.
Encourage fellow safety leaders and staff to share their ideas and implement them.
Conclusion
Creating a safe work environment requires leadership from executives and among the people performing the day-to-day tasks.
Safety leadership requires management to educate their workforce that a safety leader can be anyone who cares enough about the organization to take the actions that will keep themselves and their co-workers free from danger and injury.
As the organization becomes more educated, safety awareness in the workplace will heighten.
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