2021 Safety Culture Virtual Master Class: Using Safety Culture and Leadership Behavior Assessments to Guide L&D

Overview

Achieving an ideal safety culture must actively involve all employees, and leaders play a particularly important role in influencing an organization’s safety culture, including the development of shared ownership for safety. Further, you can’t manage what you can’t measure. Reaching a world-class safety culture requires reliable tools to gauge your current strengths and weaknesses, direct your improvement efforts, and assess results.

Although most employees feel leaders truly care about safety, there is still much that employees expect of leadership to help build an ideal safety culture. To show real support for safety, what leaders say about safety is not enough; what we do is most important. But what behaviors best demonstrate actively caring for safety? A number of assessments and cultural development projects have revealed what employees want to in order to show safety is important to leaders personally and for the organization as a whole.

For example, employees want their leaders to:

1) Show up by visiting site/work locations in person and talk to the people on the job;
2) Get their hands dirty by getting out of the meeting rooms and into the production/operations areas to see firsthand the conditions, equipment, and procedures employees must deal with;
3) Bring the checkbook, not simply to throw money at the problem, but rather to demonstrate a willingness to provide the appropriate resources for tools, equipment, personnel, and scheduling to support safety; and
4) Not blame people for system problems.

The identification of at-risk behavior should be the beginning of the analysis, not the end. Consider how employees might currently be inappropriately rewarded for risky behavior. Consider all contributing factors (e.g., training, production pressure, excessive overtime, formal and informal rules and procedures, and tools and equipment) when analyzing safety incidents.

This presentation will focus on the importance of building an ideal safety culture, with a focus on leadership behaviors that improve the safety culture and demonstrate safety as a value, as well as behavior and cultural assessments that can help guide leadership and organizational training and development.

After this class, the audience will be able to:

• Describe the components of an ideal safety culture
• Identify key leadership behaviors that show employee safety is important to leadership and to the organization
• Describe how safety culture surveys, focus group interviews, and safety systems assessments, can be used to refine existing safety management systems to improve their overall effectiveness as well as their influence on the organization’s safety culture
• Describe how leadership assessments can be used to guide leadership training and organizational development