Frontline supervisors want to succeed — but they can't do it without their employer. Here are five things your supervisors actually need from you to build stronger teams, better safety culture, and more consistent production.
The safety industry insists that a strong safety culture requires senior management support. This belief has become the favorite excuse for poor frontline performance. The truth is, supervisors create a culture through daily relationships with their crews, not through executive endorsements or corporate policies. The supervisor IS the culture for their crew. Companies that equip supervisors with relationship skills get the safety culture they want, regardless of how visible senior management support appears to be.
Your safety programs are well-designed, but they're missing crucial advocates. While most training budgets focus on safety professionals and managers, the real leverage point is developing the one person who either champions or undermines every initiative you launch. It's time to create safety allies where culture is actually made.
Most industrial companies think their biggest expenses are equipment, materials, and labor costs. They're wrong. There's a hidden expense bleeding millions from their operations every single year—one that never appears on financial statements and rarely gets discussed in board meetings. This silent profit killer is operating right under management's nose, creating chaos in productivity, safety, and morale. The companies that have identified and eliminated this hidden cost are dominating their markets while their competitors struggle to understand why they can't keep up.
You may cover the check-boxes but you need to ensure employees are going to give safety their attention and focus. Is yours a check-box safety culture? Or a check-in safety culture? What’s the difference? A check-box safety culture is just what the name implies. You go through the checklists and check off the items that you have completed.
Have you fallen into the trap of making statements instead of asking questions? Selling safety to crews can seem overwhelming. Getting your people to see and understand what you see and understand can be frustrating, especially when you don’t achieve the success you think you should have.
You need to connect with employees in driving the things that are important to them. You feel like you’re saying the right things in safety. Some days your safety performance is great. Other days, you wonder if your team was listening at all. And it frustrates you that just when you seem to be making steps forward, a dumb little incident shows up. This is where you can change it up. You need a safety message that resonates, at the right time, saying the right thing so that every employee is working toward common goals in safety. And the goals are not numbers. Stop pitching numbers to your people. Numbers don’t inspire better performance.
You need the right message, at the right time, to the right people so that every employee is working toward common goals in safety. You’re planning a safety stand-down, safety event, safety day, whatever you want to call it. I’ll stick with stand-down. So, you’ve set aside your dates, got a budget from your senior managers and you’re busy making plans for what you are going to do for your stand-down. Now, before you plan any further, I want to pass along some advice that will make your stand-down be much more effective.
You have got to set aside time each day for your own tools and skills development. Let’s start by saying that I have dedicated plenty of space to identifying the “traits of safety leaders” in past Blog posts. And as important as the traits of safety leaders are, the tools they use to develop those traits is even more important. Good safety leaders are respected. And safety leaders understand the simple premise that “staff don’t work for you, you work for them.” The point of leadership is to help other grow. So when we see inexperienced or even wrong-thinking supervisors flexing their authority muscles at employees, you wonder how long a disliked and disrespected supervisor or safety person is going to last? Employees want to have a reason to respect the supervisor and the safety person. And, even though that supervisor might now have a lot of experience, employees will respect a supervisor who admits that they are working on it.
What employees want from the job can change your culture. In my last post (When Employees Don't Give You Safety Performance), I presented an overview of what employees want from their supervisors and immediate managers. This time around, we are going to take a look at what employees want from their jobs. Because if they don’t get what they want from their job, why would you expect them to give their best effort, especially in safety?
