Safety Leadership
What Does It Look Like?
The supervisor, without a doubt, is the direct link between management and employees. To inspire employees to higher level of safety and productivity requires the supervisor to apply good leadership skills on a daily basis. In the absence of good safety leadership, only a handful of employees will put their heart and sole into the safety effort and willing set high goals and objectives.
Getting Back On Course
Over the past two decades, many safety-minded organizations adopted either an OSHA compliance approach and/or a behavior based safety (BBS) program which focuses on the unsafe acts of employees.
But as early as the late 60’s, the National Safety Council (NSC) promoted the “The Key Man Development Program for Supervisors,” a training program that focused on the first line supervisor as the “key man” in accident prevention. Training topics included: machine guarding, electrical safety, accident investigation, and communication.
About the same time, the DuPont Company, known for its world-class safety programs, began marketing its own, highly successful “STOP for Supervision” program to the public. The STOP program trains managers and supervisors to observe employees performing their work to eliminate unsafe acts and take corrective action. It’s the DuPont philosophy that the responsibility for safety is solidly placed on managers and supervisors and not the safety department.
Supervisors
are the Company!
“Never underestimate the influence supervisors have on your workforce,” says Buckingham and Coffman, authors of “First Break all the Rules.” This business management best seller documents a survey of 80,000 supervisors and managers and a million employees. “In the eyes of the employee, the supervisor is the company,” says Buckingham and Coffman. “Even if your organization has generous pay and a renowned training program, the company that lacks great supervisor leadership will suffer.”
What
does World-Class Safety leadership Look Like?
Would you know good safety leadership if you saw it? How do your supervisors communicate “safety” to their employees? How do they look for hazards in the workplace? How do they prevent unsafe acts? How do they motivate employees to “want” to be safe? Can they coach employees to maintain essential fitness to perform their job assignment? Are they part of the daily safety activity at your facility, or do they leave safety to the safety department?
Consider this scenario:
Every day, 100% of a natural workgroup meets for a 10-minute safety
meeting. They start with a head-to-toe flexibility
and strength routine designed to help improve physical conditioning of an overweight
and out shape workforce. During the routine, the supervisor delivers a safety
message (this time on proper biomechanics for lifting), then asks his team if
they have any unsafe conditions, unsafe acts, near misses, or safety
suggestions to report. One employee
reports that a forklift almost ran into a door swinging into a truck lane in
the warehouse. No body got hurt, but the
team decides to do a root cause analysis on the incident. They enter their Near
Miss report into their computer tracking system, flag it for RCA, and find that
with this entry, they are now in first place for the number of safety
improvement reports submitted for the month.
The supervisor leads a hearty applause. They are eligible for lunch in
the Executive conference room at the end of the month—if they keep their number
one status. Energized and motivated, they head out to their respective tasks,
focused on staying safe.
“Not
at our facility,” you say. “Our people
would never to that.”
That’s exactly what management at a 3M plant said when the safety manager proposed an integrated fitness, safety, and supervisor leadership approach to help them pull them out of an injury and workers comp cost nightmare. With a 14.8% Recordable Incident Rate (RIR) and $730K in workers comp in the past two years (mostly musculoskeletal injuries), this plant had moved itself to the bottom of 3M’s safety performance chart .
A year later, their safety scorekeeping systems showed what the right combination of safety leadership and employee participation can do. They reduced their RIR to 3.6%, moved to the top third of 3M’s plants in safety performance, and had zero musculoskeletal injuries for the entire year.
Executive management called the plant’s comeback safety initiatives “best practices” in safety at 3M plants. Currently, 70% of the employees are participating in the strength and flexibility exercises (SAFE). The year end employee satisfaction survey showed that 42% of the employees had made positive lifestyle changes, such as weight loss, quit smoking, exercising more, etc. which will no doubt have a positive impact on their overall health care costs as well.
How did they do it?
“We trained their supervisors and
team leaders in six basic leadership skills,” says Fred Drennan, President of
Team Safety, Inc. Supervisors and team leaders underwent four, intensive,
half-day training classes spread throughout the program year, to learn and role
play the skills: Supervisor as Trainer, Scorekeeping, Giving Positive
Recognition,
They set up daily, ten-minute safety meetings that included a strength and flexibility exercises (SAFE) to condition workers, a FlipBook Training System™ to deliver the safety training and prompt leaders to apply their skills, and a bi-quarterly audit system to score leaders on how well they applied the skills they learned in the classroom on the job. The auditors observed the flexibility and strength training to ensure the workers performed the stretches safely and got the benefits, and they observed the leaders and scored them on application of the leadership skills. Supervisors who accumulated 75% or higher total points throughout the year were certified in Safety Leadership by Team Safety, Inc.
The overall impact of the integrated approach was a significant culture change. They went from little or no positive safety communication to the first truly effective safety reporting system at the plant in years. While they had implemented a BBS observation system a couple of years before, it took the daily safety meetings, flexibility and strength conditioning, a team-based approach, and supervisor leadership training to begin to see results.
What
are the key elements of effective Supervisor Leadership training?
With so many options available today, how do you know what leadership training will translate to successful safety leadership and injury reduction at your facility? How will the leadership skills be transferred to the shop floor or field? Will your investment actually pay dividends of reduced injuries, and higher quality and productivity or simply empty your wallet? Team Safety, Inc. has developed a list of the top ten characteristics of effective safety leadership programs.
- Supervisor classroom training must include: Supervisor as Trainer, Scorekeeping,
Giving Positive Recognition,
- Provide a daily forum for safety activity. Team Safety, Inc. uses strength and flexibility exercises (SAFE) routine to assemble the team.
- Provide a “script” for leadership skills application, such as the Back Synergy FlipBook Training System.™
- Audit the supervisor frequently to provide feedback on application of the leadership skills and deployment of the safety systems.
- Senior managers must review the safety scores and supervisor audits with the supervisor on a regular basis to demonstrate management commitment and support supervisor efforts.
- Design a scoring system that measures supervisor engagement, and use it to certify your supervisor safety leaders.
- Set standards for supervisor performance and hold supervisors accountable for their team’s safety performance.
- Publicly display team performance data.
- Reward supervisors for leadership excellence.
- Make the safety leadership certification program part of the supervisors performance evaluation
As a facilities manager, you must ensure your supervisors meet the challenges of OSHA compliance, eliminating unsafe acts, and keeping employees healthy, while upholding plant wide performance in quality and productivity. While you are ultimately responsible for any failures in this area, your employees view the supervisor as their first line communication with the company. Training supervisors in these six safety leadership skills and ensuring they apply them on the job is a proven “best practice” in injury prevention, and can also pay big dividends in quality and productivity improvement.
“With skilled safety leadership, the simplest safety programs can produce great results,” says Dr. David Richey, Industrial Psychologist. He is a recognized expert on quality, safety, and productivity improvement. As a partner in developing Team Safety, Inc.’s Back Synergy Integrated Fitness, Safety and Supervisor Leadership program, Dr. Richey urges management to push for supervisor leadership to improve health and safety.
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Team Safety, Inc. is a safety and performance management firm working
to build organizational excellence.
Visit their web site at www.teamsafetyinc.com