Achieving World-Class Safety: The Executive Leader’s Role

In the 21st century, the executive leader leads by example, sets the course, supports the team through time, resources, training and encouragement, and allows the team to function, recognizing successes and ensuring responsibility and accountability go together.

• By Randy DeVaul
• Jan 05, 2024

Achieving World-Class Safety: The Executive Leader’s Role

Executive leadership teams who run world-class operations have to make difficult choices regarding their business and employees while maintaining a competitive edge. But bearing in mind the reality of those decisions and successful outcomes, how do these executive leaders value safety?

For instance, is it really possible to maintain consistency in quality, customer service and satisfaction, hire and retain good employees, and remain competitive with a good reputation in the community and with regulators with a terrible or non-existent safety culture?

Introduction

A successful company expects employees at every level to do what is right: follow good business ethics, perform tasks correctly and engage in continuous improvement. None of those values happen without a proactive, positive and consistent safety culture.

Some examples of how to identify a bad employer with a non-existent safety culture include:

• No defined safety culture
• No effective safety program
• No effective task procedures and little or no direction on task performance
• No effective training for new hires or employees assigned to new tasks
• No training for promoted employees to supervisor or manager roles
• No effective leadership
• No recognition of employee performance
• No employee engagement or participation in continuous improvement
• High absenteeism, turnover and injuries

This leads to poor quality work, poor customer relations and retention, poor compliance, poor maintenance of equipment, poor employee performance, punitive discipline and no trust between employees and supervisors/managers or with other employees.

So, here’s to employers that strive for excellence. Ultimately, what sets them apart is excellence in safety.

Leading the Way

Safety is a team sport. A professional team doesn’t win the championship with a disengaged coach or with players that don’t respect the coach. Safety cannot start at the bottom and work up, nor be mandated at the top and then ignored.

An executive leader must lead by example. The world-class leader demonstrates their commitment to safety not as a priority that changes with circumstances but as a value that remains constant. Wearing the proper PPE when in production areas, asking employees for input on safety concerns or hazards, communicating safe practices through meetings and emails, demonstrating genuine interest in employees not getting injured, and supporting conducting proper incident investigations and action items completed are just some examples of leading the team.

Setting Up for Success

There is not just one thing that separates an excellent leader from the crowd of inadequate leaders. A world-class leader’s management style is one of leading, mentoring, supporting and engaging their management team and encouraging the department and front-line managers and supervisors to lead by example. One who leads by fear or intimidation is neither a leader nor a manager, just a workplace bully who is ultimately a failure at their job.

A world-class executive leader builds trust and rapport with their team, including with front-line employees. This is a leader who says what they will do and does what they say.

Let’s look at what an effective executive leader is all about.

Integrated Safety

A world-class executive leader understands that safety is an integral part of everything that is planned and performed to drive success. When safety is integrated, it ensures safe processes exist, standard operating procedures recognize hazards as well as protective and preventive measures, and tasks are performed safely and correctly. Integrated safety ensures employee practices — what and how employees perform their tasks — follow the safe procedures that ensure both people and processes are protected.

Management

A world-class executive leader knows they are accountable to the leadership team to perform properly. Every leader knows their role is to help the team be successful through making decisions and making their team responsible and accountable for their tasks, ensuring they perform properly.

A world-class executive leader ensures the leadership team surrounding them is aligned with the leader’s goal and the company’s mission and values. There can be no silos between departments or managers. All the seats must be filled with leaders committed to a safe workplace and safe practices.

This ensures each manager understands their role in visibly supporting their supervisors and front-line employees to perform safely along with accountability. This accountability should not be based on punitive actions but on recognizing and rewarding those who perform properly and encouraging those to be aligned with the responsibilities and requirements.

Supervisors

Front-line supervisors oversee the shift or daily tasks of employees and complete production and/or service schedules that include the safety and health of their employees. Supervisors should feel comfortable bringing concerns and solutions to managers and the leadership team and have the authority and responsibility to find solutions on their own, often with an ear toward front-line employees who may have a better way of addressing a hazard or task.

The front-line supervisor is responsible for training their employees in the proper processes, procedures and practices that allow employees to be successful and safe. The supervisor must be a mentor to their team, supporting the team to success. A supervisor who expects team members to make them look good rather than supporting their team will not succeed. 

It is also the supervisor’s role to set expectations and hold the team accountable. When everyone understands their roles and expectations, there is accountability in performing those expectations.

Employees

Front-line employees have the greatest opportunity to make an organization succeed or fail. Managers and supervisors who earn their employees’ trust and support lead their employees to success. Employees review procedures for accuracy and content and should be trusted to recommend revisions when challenges are identified.

Employees who know the game plan can execute it if they are properly trained. Employees who understand the stakes and consequences of their actions, including recognition and reward, will perform to the best of their abilities.

Results-oriented Metrics

There must be measures to indicate how the team is doing. Overall, that can include profits, customer orders, quality of products or services delivered, customer ratings and — in safety— frequency and severity level of injuries, workers’ compensation claims and OSHA incident rates. To attain world-class status, the entire team must be focused on achieving the expected outcomes.

Following are specific leading indicators that suggest an executive leader is “winning.”

Engagement/Participation

Employees at all levels within an organization are engaged and participating in reaching the objectives. When front-line employees are engaged in continuous improvement suggestions, participating in safety functions, and following safe work procedures, they are energized to continue their safety trends. Examples include participating in safety committee teams/meetings, providing safety suggestions, reviewing and revising (as needed) task procedures, encouraging each other to wear PPE, observing peers working safely (following LOTO, wearing face shields with eye protection for identified tasks, etc), and achieving excellence in housekeeping in and around their work areas.

When facing a challenge, employees approach their supervisors with options or solutions in addressing the challenge, often with permanent solutions. Engaged and participating employees assist in incident investigations and will challenge peers to perform tasks that eliminate hazards or reduce hazard exposures to prevent injuries.

Each of these actions is measurable and tracked as proactive, leading indicators.

Focus on Hazards

When focused on correcting hazards rather than compliance, injury risks drop, and employees become part of the solution. Tracking the reporting and correction of hazards is easy with a spreadsheet and it becomes a visual tool for all to see what was identified and addressed, making the workplace safer today than this time last year. Employees see they had a primary role in making it happen. It also provides for another form of recognition to build trust, rapport and accountability.

Recognition and Rewards

Studies show that 75 percent of employees believe simply recognizing them for doing a good job is sufficient. Go public in shift meetings and it reinforces expectations, sending a positive message to the team on the type of performance you expect going forward. A shout-out in a newsletter or website, a gift card for lunch or other forms of appreciation are inexpensive ways to show you want employees engaged and participating.

Building the Safety Culture

These types of activities build a safety culture. Setting up a safety program where you expect employees to “do stuff” without first building a safety culture is just another flavor of the month to be ignored by employees and sabotaged by your managers and supervisors as they see no value or long-term change in actions.

Summary

As a professional team’s coach calls the plays or ensures the team’s readiness to win, the executive leader is responsible for leading the team, providing direction, and then letting the team play. Dictatorship management is dead. Punitive-style management should be dead because it’s just a stupid way to manage. In the 21st century, the executive leader leads by example, sets the course, supports the team through time, resources, training and encouragement, and allows the team to function, recognizing successes and ensuring responsibility and accountability go together.

To be successful — to attain world-class status as a company — you must pursue world-class safety that ripples into trust, accomplishment, employee retention, community reputation and competitive advantage.