Safety Leadership: Turning Compliance into a Stronger Workplace Safety Culture

Workplace safety has a lot to do with regulations, inspections, risk assessment, and compliance. However, while all of the above mentioned is vital for any organization to succeed, safety leadership is about more than mere compliance. An effective safety culture is created when safety is fully integrated into the leadership, decision making, communication, and general workplace activity.

The primary mission of any safety professional is to take the organization away from compliance and create a culture of proactive safety, which involves awareness of the purpose behind every rule.

The Role of Safety Leadership in Workplace Safety

A Safety Culture Starts from the Top. The management, supervision, and people involved in safety activities play an essential role in shaping employee attitudes towards safety in terms of their behaviors and choices.

When the top management shows by example that safety is as important as productivity and quality, then employees will also have the same attitude towards safety. On the contrary, if safety procedures are neglected in order to achieve certain deadlines and productivity levels, then the employees will also treat safety as a second priority.

Moving Beyond Compliance

While compliance is the fundamental cornerstone for safety in the workplace, compliance itself is not sufficient to ensure that incidents do not occur.

The proactive approach to safety involves the identification of potential hazards prior to injury, damage, impact, or disruption occurring. This includes effective risk assessment, the reporting of near misses, workplace inspections, analysis of unsafe situations, and the control of risks.

It is the safety professional who ensures that such processes do not remain merely paper exercises.

Building Employee Participation

Employees tend to be the ones nearest to the hazards at the workplace. They could have experience and information which could help organizations to discover those hazardous conditions which do not necessarily come to light during an inspection.

Effective hazard reporting system, near miss reporting system, safety observation, toolbox talks, and safety meetings can be implemented by the organizations in order to promote participation.

But, participation is very much dependent upon trust. Employees need to report hazards without any fear of being blamed unfairly or suffering from any sort of retribution.

The Importance of Competence

Competent professionals and properly trained employees are both important in creating a safety culture.

It is essential for safety leadership to be continually improving their awareness of hazards, risks, accident investigation, emergency planning, occupational health, environmental issues, and safety management.

The professional development of safety professionals is more than just qualifications; proper training would improve skills, knowledge, decision making, analysis, and the confidence required in making safety decisions.

Learning from Incidents and Near Misses

An incident must never be seen as an isolated case. This is because there might be a weakness in process, supervision, training, equipment, communication, or control systems.

A good incident investigation process involves finding out what caused the problem and not who is responsible for the problem.

A near miss is also very important because even though there was no injury or damage caused, it could have revealed a weakness in the current control system.

Measuring What Matters

Evaluating safety performance with relevant metrics is critical. Historical metrics like accident rate and number of lost-time accidents continue to play an important role, yet are reactive in nature.

Proactive indicators like number of completed safety observations, percentage of corrective actions closed, training effectiveness, results of inspections, reporting of near misses, risk assessment analysis, and staff involvement can be included among others.

The aim is not generating more numbers, but assessing whether the controls in place are working effectively.

Creating a Sustainable Safety Leadership

Sustainable safety culture cannot emerge from just one training, inspection, or even policy. Sustainability emerges through consistent activities over time.

Commitment on leadership, effective safety professionals, participation of employees, communication, hazard management, continuous improvement, and accountability need to go hand-in-hand.

As far as safety professionals are concerned, their role should not be restricted to just preventing accidents after the hazard identification. Their larger role is to create a work environment where hazards are identified at an early stage and risks are managed effectively and each individual knows his/her role in creating such an environment.

Safety is achieved only when safety becomes integral to organizational operations rather than just being another mandatory requirement.