What is safety engagement?
Safety Engagement is everyone in the organization going beyond basic safety requirements, making decisions and taking proactive steps to make work safer every day.
Consider the impact on your safety performance if leaders and frontline employees all go beyond basic safety requirements. You would see…
operators truly looking for and addressing all hazards rather than pencil-whipping hazard assessment forms,
supervisors having frequent, meaningful safety interactions with their direct reports rather than spending most of the shift doing paperwork, and
executives conducting safety tours to learn and improve what they do around safety, rather than to point out what is wrong.
What are foundational truths about safety engagement?
Engagement is discretionary
ADI begins by helping clients understand that true engagement in safety is not a job requirement. Many employees who work hard, follow safety rules, and have good safety records. By most measures, they are excellent employees. But if those employees don’t actively take part in safety meetings, report near misses, and provide feedback to a peer on safety behavior, then they are not fully engaged in safety. That is a lost opportunity. Full engagement in safety is discretionary. No one helps organizations capture discretionary effort better than ADI.
Relationships are key
Earning employees’ discretionary effort requires developing work relationships built on trust, mutual respect, and positive reinforcement. Trust begins to develop when leaders tell workers that they are valued. Valued not just for the work they do but for all the ways they contribute to safety. ADI works with leaders to approach incidents, near misses, and other mistakes as opportunities to learn and improve rather than as behavior to be punished. As a result, workers open up, reveal what is really going on in the workplace, and freely contribute to cooperative problem solving.
How can ADI improve your safety engagement?
ADI can help you move away from outdated, reactive management strategies that undermine engagement and limit safety performance. These default strategies require deliberate effort to change, but with ADI’s support, you can develop a coaching culture that encourages and reinforces engagement.
ADI uses its Safety Leadership implementation process to improve safety engagement. We start by assessing the level of safety engagement at each level in your organization. We identify and correct any design and application issues in your safety systems that suppress engagement. We specify leading indicators of engagement so that we can track and monitor improvements. We then define the behaviors you expect to see from engaged frontline employees, supervisors, managers, and executives. This produces a Behavioral Roadmap that establishes a common understanding of what the organization means when it says that it wants higher engagement in safety. Finally, we prepare your leaders to implement a positive and cascaded accountability system to ensure that the Behavioral Roadmap behaviors are motivated and sustained.
When all employees from the C-suite to the frontline relentlessly pursue safety improvement, exceptional safety performance is possible. This kind of engagement might seem elusive, but ADI’s practical strategy makes it a reality.
