Safety Update

Safety Update: Safety Leadership

With more and more Baby Boomers entering their fifties and sixties, employers are feeling the impact of an aging workforce and there is a growing concern about the loss of experienced, qualified supervisors as they reach retirement. The question facing many companies is how to fill this gap and what can be done to ensure that less experienced supervisors have the right training and leadership skills to become effective safety leaders?  The importance of having strong safety leadership in the workplace cannot be understated and it is clear that although an organization's "safety culture" is everyone's responsibility, supervisors are in the best position to influence a safe worksite.

When it comes to managing change and creating a culture of safety, supervisors must have the right leadership skills and knowledge to garner respect and inspire workers to achieve higher levels of safety and productivity.  Some supervisors do not realize the influence that they have and when co-workers see them doing a task incorrectly or "not by the book," or they see potential safety risks being overlooked the wrong message is being sent. These "do as I say, not as I do" attitudes are magnified as the workers pass them on to their co-workers and new hires. Over time, these practices are reflected in statements such as, "This is how we've always done it" or "This is how we did it at site X" which have been proven to be the root cause of many worksite incidents.

Buckingham and Coffman, authors of 'First Break all the Rules' (A business management best seller which documents a survey of 80,000 supervisors and managers and a million employees), said, "Never underestimate the influence supervisors have on your workforce, In the eyes of the employee [worker], the supervisor is the company. Even if your organization has generous pay and a renowned training program, the company that lacks great supervisor leadership will suffer."

Traditionally, the focus on supervisor training has been more task and output focussed rather than behaviour focused; i.e. transactional (managing) versus transformational (leading). In order to achieve a level of continuous improvement to reduce errors (incidents) and to substantially drive the idea of "every incident is preventable", safety leadership training should be provided to all supervisors so that they can drive the message of optimum safety down to the lowest possible levels of the organization.
Integrating safety leadership, as part of supervisor training, will have a positive impact across all areas of an organization and the skills a supervisor uses to achieve record-breaking safety performance are the same skills required for improved productivity, improved quality, and waste (error/incident) reduction. 

Although the benefit of providing supervisors with safety leadership training for supervisors is obvious, this training is often overlooked, particularly in small to midsized organizations'. Within Canada there is a distinct lack of effective training programs to deliver knowledge,  appropriate safety skills, tips and tools for supervisors within the Canadian context. Enform has taken initiative, with industry input, to develop a comprehensive Guideline on Supervisor Competency which was recently published. This publication discusses Leadership and Communication guidelines and provides a good framework for overall training requirements in this regard.

In line with eCompliance's ongoing commitment to improve safety in the workplace and provide value added solutions we  would very much appreciate it if you could take the time to assist us with your views and feedback regarding the value of "Safety Leadership for Supervisors" in Canada by clicking on the link  HERE (you can also copy and paste the link below into your browser) and completing the short 10 question survey.

http://survey.ecompliance.ca/perceptionsurvey/Survey.aspx?s=232d1cdff7e2409bbd5af4f267f654d1

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