Safety professionals spend a great deal of time and effort thinking about keeping people safe in the workplace. They run training sessions, conduct investigations, review data and carry out countless other tasks in an effort to prevent injuries.
But there isn’t a single safety pro who can take care of a sizeable workplace on their own. There are simply too many people to look after, too much ground to cover and too many shifts to oversee.
Because supervisors have regular contact with workers, they’re in the perfect position to help safety pros by reinforcing key safety messaging, monitoring whether workers are following safety protocols and intervening promptly if they notice an emerging safety issue.
However, frontline supervisors can be a double-edged sword. An adept supervisor can make their entire crew safer, while an ineffective supervisor can have the opposite effect. As I’ve noted in the past, “It’s exceedingly difficult to achieve sustained safety success in a workplace where supervisors and other leaders lack the skills and knowledge to support the company’s safety efforts.”
A safety-conscious supervisor should have several crucial qualities:
- Good communication skills
- The ability to engage employees in safety
- An understanding of human factorss
Fortunately, these competencies can be learned. So, even if many of the supervisors in your workplace lack some or all these abilities, they can be developed in relatively short order.
One effective way to hone these supervisory skills is via targeted training, such as the SafeLead Skills for Leaders program. These types of focused interventions can rapidly strengthen supervisors’ abilities to communicate and connect with employees, while also helping them understand and react to the human factors that put workers at risk.
Data-driven development
Numerous studies have noted that communication, engagement and human factors are key components to safety outcomes. A comprehensive review of research discovered six critical leadership factors that influence organizational safety outcomes. Each of the factors – from systems management to trust and engagement – are meaningfully affected by supervisors’ communication skills.
On the topic of trust and engagement, New York Times-bestselling author and safety researcher Rodd Wagner found that employees who report higher levels of happiness also have better safety outcomes. Wagner’s report, titled “Why Happiness is the Secret Ingredient of Worker Safety,” revealed that engagement and happiness are highly correlated, and it’s clear that supervisors are in an ideal position to influence key factors that contribute to engagement and happiness, such as inducing feelings of reciprocity, fostering a sense of individualization and making employees feel heard.
The story is the same when it comes to human factors. A key piece of research on the major causes of slips, trips and falls discovered that human factors such as rushing or distraction are the biggest contributor of incidents. The same is true of almost every other type of incident, too, with human factors playing an outsized role in the frequency and severity of incidents from minor hand injuries to serious injuries and fatalities.
The data is clear: For supervisors to be effective safety advocates, they need strong communication skills, the ability to build employee engagement and good working knowledge of human factors.
Targeted training for frontline leaders
In an article in Safety+Health magazine, SafeStart CEO Barb Tait points out that supervisors don’t spontaneously become more safety-minded. “If you want supervisors who can effectively disseminate and reinforce safety knowledge, you’ll have to train them to do the job,” Tait says, and the best way to get better safety outcomes from supervisors is to give them training specifically designed for frontline leaders.
Keep in mind that not all training is the same. It’s hard for busy supervisors to acquire these types of skills using traditional classroom, local college or online learning methods. A better option is to bring in experts who can teach in small groups and do one-on-one coaching on the shop floor to give each leader individualized support while minimizing disruptions in frontline production.
Programs such as SafeLead are built to train supervisors quickly and effectively, based on insights gleaned from decades of data and based on adult learning best practices. As you evaluate which vendor to rely on to develop frontline leadership skills, be sure to ask if they focus on areas including communication, engagement and human factors – and whether they offer the personal coaching that can level-up supervisory capacity in no time at all.
Ray Prest is the director of marketing at SafeStart, a safety company focused on human factors solutions that increase personal safety awareness and skills. Ray’s been helping people learn about safety and training for more than 20 years.
