We’ve dealt with a lot of organizations at SCM, helping them
get into compliance and build positive safety cultures and in this process
we’ve talked with a lot of supervisors and managers. A consistent theme seems
to come up in these conversations – why don’t employees know how important
safety is to me? The specific comment or concern may vary, such as wondering
why employees don’t report near-misses, or why employees do something “unsafe,”
but the basic question is the same and the underlying assumption is that if
only the employees knew how important safety was they would do the right thing.
The question we often ask our clients in situations like this is how their
employees could know that safety is important to the organization generally,
and to the supervisor/manager specifically.
Think of someone you know who’s a big football fan. How do
you know they like football? Likely because they talk about it a lot and have
other pieces of evidence that you can point to that lead you to that
conclusion. You can’t just look at someone and assume that they like football -
you need evidence.
So where’s the evidence that safety matters to you? Sure
safety should just implicitly matter to everyone, but your employees also have
other concerns when they come to work, such as being efficient and doing a good
job. Unfortunately sometimes the concerns of efficiency conflict with safety,
and employees have to make a decision. One of the strategies they’ll use in
making that decision is to make a conscious or unconscious (usually
unconscious) assessment of how important efficiency and safety are to you and
your organization based on how often each one is emphasized. If you talk a lot
about productivity and quality, but not about safety, it won’t matter how
important you feel safety is in that moment. Your employee will be very likely
to put safety second.
So how can we avoid this? Its simple – if you want your
employees to know how important safety is to you then you need to tell them…and
then tell them again. And keep telling them every chance you get. In every
planning meeting, ask them if they have identified relevant hazards and what
they are doing to reduce the risks. At the end of the job ask them if they
encountered any hazards that they didn’t foresee or if they had any
near-misses. It doesn’t take that long but your employees will begin to notice.
And when employees notice that their supervisors and managers really care for
them based on real evidence that’s when you start to see changes in the culture,
towards a strong safety culture.