effective safety leadership

Five critical components must be present in order to implement effective safety leadership.

1. Your company must first establish a field presence. The best way to measure your company’s safety culture and its effectiveness is for managers to obtain feedback from their workforce. This not only shows your workers that you care about their well-being, but also establishes the importance of demonstrating safety leadership.

2. Effective safety leadership requires effective communication skills. Failure of management to effectively communicate with workers after an incident, allows false and misleading information to spread—which can be detrimental to your organization’s safety culture. The most opportune way to effectively communicate safety expectations and gain the trust and respect of your workforce is to utilize newsletters, as well as toolbox meetings to get the word out.

3. Establishing a feedback mechanism opens up a direct avenue of communication between your workforce and management. Creating a safety committee that includes representatives from the workforce can contribute to a better understanding of your organization’s safety culture. Additionally, routinely scheduling field walks is a good way to solicit direct feedback on workplace health and safety perceptions and issues.

4. A lack of accountability for the organization’s safety program can result in silent rebellion, especially if it is a phenomenon of “does as I say and not as I do”. Therefore, all members of your organization, regardless of job title and role should follow safety rules at all times. Everyone must be held accountable for his or her actions, starting with Management.

5. Finally, benchmarking with your competitors or joining industry groups that openly share the best-known methods, is one of the best ways to assess the contents of your organization’s safety program, as well as its overall performance. Thus, continuous improvement is the key to a successful organizational culture of safety.

Kurina Baksh

"Why Safety Leadership Matters" Huffington Post. 4/4/2016