WORKPLACE SAFETY LEADERSHIP; A TIMELY REFLECTION.

Study these SEVEN (7) questions:

Would you know good safety leadership if you saw it?
How do your supervisors communicate “safety” to their employees?
How do they look for hazards in the workplace?
How do they prevent unsafe acts?
How do they motivate employees to “want” to be safe?
Can they coach employees to maintain essential fitness to perform their job assignment?
Are they part of the daily safety activity at your facility, or do they leave safety to the safety department?

Consider this scenario:

Every day, 100% of a natural work group meets for a 10-minute safety meeting. They start with a head-to-toe flexibility and strength routine designed to help improve physical conditioning of an overweight and out shape workforce. During the routine, the supervisor delivers a safety message (this time on proper bio mechanics for lifting), then asks his team if they have any unsafe conditions, unsafe acts, near misses, or safety suggestions to report. One employee reports that a forklift almost ran into a door swinging into a truck lane in the warehouse.

No body got hurt, but the team decides to do a root cause analysis on the incident. They enter their Near Miss report into their computer tracking system, flag it for RCA, and find that with this entry, they are now in first place for the number of safety improvement reports submitted for the month. The supervisor leads a hearty applause. They are eligible for lunch in the Executive conference room at the end of the month—if they keep their number one status. Energized and motivated, they head out to their respective tasks, focused on staying safe.

“Not at our facility,” you say. “Our people would never to that.” That’s exactly what management at a 3M plant said when the safety manager proposed an integrated fitness, safety, and supervisor leadership approach to help them pull them out of an injury and workers comp cost nightmare.

With a 14.8% Recordable Incident Rate (RIR)and $730K in workers comp in the past two years (mostly musculoskeletal injuries), this plant had moved itself to the bottom of 3M’s safety performance chart .

A year later, their safety scorekeeping systems showed what the right combination of safety leadership and employee participation can do. They reduced their RIR to 3.6%, moved to the top third of 3M’s plants safety performance,had zero musculoskeletal injuries for the entire year.

Executive management called the plant’s comeback safety initiatives “best practices” in safety at 3M plants. Currently, 70% employees are participating the strength and flexibility exercises (SAFE). The year end employee satisfaction survey showed that 42% of the employees had made positive lifestyle changes, such as weight loss, quit smoking, exercising more, etc. which will no doubt have a positive impact on their overall health care costs as well.

How did they do it?

“We trained their supervisors and team leaders in six basic leadership skills,” says Fred Drennan, President of Team Safety, Inc. Supervisors and team leaders underwent four, intensive, half-day training classes spread throughout the program year, to learn and role play the skills: Supervisor as Trainer, Scorekeeping, Giving Positive Recognition, Team Building, Setting Tolerance Levels,Giving Constructive Feedback. “The real key to getting results,” says Drennan, “is to effectively transfer the classroom training to the shop floor.

The strength of the Back Synergy integrated approach shows its muscle. Set up daily, ten-minute safety meetings that included strength and flexibility exercises (SAFE) to condition workers, a FlipBook Training System™ to deliver the safety training and prompt leaders to apply their skills, and a bi-quarterly audit system score leaders on how well they applied the skills they learned in the classroom on the job.

The auditors observed the flexibility and strength training to ensure the workers performed the stretches safely and got the benefits, and they observed the leaders and scored them on application of the leadership skills. Supervisors who accumulated 75% or higher total points throughout the year were certified in Safety Leadership by Team Safety, Inc.

The overall impact of the integrated approach was a significant culture change. They went from little or no positive safety communication to the first truly effective safety reporting system at the plant in years. While they implemented a behavioral based safety (BBS) observation system a couple of years before, it took the daily safety meetings, flexibility and strength conditioning, a team-based approach, and supervisor leadership training to begin to see the results.