Frontline Supervisors: The Key to Safety Culture
Discussions of safety culture improvement often focus on senior leaders, which is appropriate since senior leaders are the ones who must define the desired safety culture, set the vision and values around that culture, and set into motion the strategy to achieve it. But safety culture improvement depends heavily on frontline supervisors. The supervisory level is where vision and values are executed, where strategy is implemented, and where culture change ultimately happens. When supervisors are engaged and working in concert with other levels of management, change can happen quickly. Unfortunately, supervisors often get the least attention when it comes to safety culture. They often receive little or no training on what a good safety culture is and, in particular, how to create one. Their role in culture improvement is often couched in vague terms with little or no accountability associated with culture improvement activities. Such conditions make change difficult at the best of times, but in today’s environment most supervisors are overloaded. They juggle an enormous number of tasks and responsibilities. Unfortunately, as organizations become leaner and leaner, those tasks increase. Many supervisors find it hard to spend time in the workplace with their direct reports as they spend more and more time in meetings and doing administrative work. One thing is clear: it is impossible to improve safety culture without face-to-face interactions, particularly at the frontline.
Optimal safety cultures are those where employees at every level engage in and discuss proactive, preventative safety activities on a daily and/or weekly basis. Being clear about what those preventative activities are is essential. Organizations need to pinpoint behaviors at every level that will improve the safety culture. Common culture-improving behaviors for frontline employees include reporting near misses, looking for and addressing hazards, and providing peer feedback around safety activities. Clarifying safety culture behaviors at the frontline ensures supervisors know what to look for and encourage on the part of direct reports.
But clarifying safety culture behaviors is just the first step. If supervisors are to strengthen those behaviors, they need the skills to do so. What makes safety culture behaviors challenging is that they are often discretionary, meaning, they are not requirements of the job. Supervisors need to be skilled at prompting and then providing feedback and reinforcement around those behaviors. Unfortunately, it is not as simple as saying “please do this” and “good job” when people do. Managing culture behaviors is much more nuanced. Effectively prompting culture behaviors requires helping frontline employees see the value in those behaviors. Effectively reinforcing those behaviors (to ensure they continue) requires helping employees see the positive impact when they engage in the behaviors. Some supervisors have those skills, but many do not.
Supervisors must also have the skills to discourage behaviors that do not support the desired safety culture. This must be done carefully. Heavy use of correcting, criticism, and discipline will undermine safety culture. Supervisors must be skilled at having productive discussions about why certain behaviors are not helpful, and what to do instead. In short, supervisors need training in how to manage desired and undesired behavior in a positive way.
Identifying safety culture behaviors is the first step, training supervisors in how to strengthen those behaviors is the second step, and the third step is creating positive accountability for those behaviors. Managers of supervisors should pinpoint supervisory behaviors that will lead to improved safety culture. How supervisors manage the behavior of their direct reports is a fundamental set of behaviors that managers need to ask about, coach, and positively reinforce to ensure they compete for limited time in supervisors’ days. Without accountability, busy supervisors will inevitably put safety culture activities on the back burner as they attend to operational issues that they are held accountable for.
Supervisors are in the best position to influence the largest number of people (the frontline), so their role in culture improvement is, in many ways, the most important. Investing in helping supervisors learn to positively manage behavior will accelerate safety culture change.
