Focus on Safety Benefits, Not Numbers

 

As a safety person or senior manager, what keeps you up at night? Are you concerned that your current communication efforts aren't getting you the results you want? Are you worried that you should be training your people more, spending more time with them, guiding them, coaching them, motivating them, communicating with them, encouraging them? Are you worried that someone is going to make that one decision that does not end well? 

Maybe you even feel guilty for not doing more. That if you were more effective at doing your job better, they would be able to do their’s better.

Truthfully, there’s never enough time, or energy, or money to invest in your people. And then when events like COVID happen, well all bets are off. Everything you were working on got tossed aside in favor of the urgency of a pandemic.

Now, you are starting to settle into new routines and into a new reality. You are trying to find the most efficient ways to create better safety buy-in by leveraging the most influential people in your organization.

But, do you know where to start?

Take The Assessment

checklistIf you do not know where to start, let me help. Start by taking an assessment of:

• where most of the activity is in your organization,
• where most of your people are,
• where most mistakes are made,
• who makes most of those mistakes (I’m not talking about individuals, I’m referring to position),
• who influences the people who either make or break your safety performance?

You will come to one conclusion. The largest amount of activity, people, mistakes and incidents occur at the frontline. As a result, no one has more of an influence on frontline employees, safety performance, production, morale, motivation, communications, or coaching than a frontline supervisor.

Frontline supervisors or lead hands, foremen, team leads, anyone who oversees another person or group of people. Especially the people who oversee your frontline crews. The frontline supervisor has the largest influence on frontline crews.

And that includes having influence in safety and buy-in to the safety program.

So, why is it so important to accept that supervisors carry so much influence?

Because employees do what supervisors do.