Page 10 - OHS, October 2020

FACILITY SAFETY
The Supervisor’s Crucial Role in Safety Performance
Are your frontline leaders and shift supervisors helping or hindering your workplace safety efforts?
TBY RAY PREST
here’s an unofficial rule of safety management that goes like this: a safety program will only be as strong as the least- effective shift supervisor. Every rule has its exceptions, but 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.
Supervisors may not set an organization’s direction but they’re the ones who are ultimately responsible for translating a company’s policies and intentions into action. Even when a new safety initiative is driven by the safety officer, at most workplaces it’s up to team leaders to oversee it on a daily basis. To put it simply, supervisors are where the rubber meets the road.
If you’re skeptical of the impact that supervisors have on safety, try this quick thought experiment.
The most commonly cited workplace safety challenges include recurring injuries, a lack of worker engagement and buy-in, employees taking shortcuts or not following rules, a lack of personal accountability for safety, and competing organizational priorities. Pick any one of these issues and consider how the problem’s impact would change if every supervisor in the workplace had strong communication skills, understood advanced safety concepts like human factors, and had experience with empowering their team to improve on the issue.
It’s not hard to imagine that safety-oriented supervisors would
result in employees taking fewer shortcuts and more personal accountability for their own safety. Workers would feel more engaged and more capable of focusing on production without casting safety by the wayside. And, essentially, supervisors could be an effective liaison between the safety manager and workers in an effort to root out repeated injuries.
Now picture the opposite: a set of supervisors who lack the ability to have difficult safety conversations with workers, who aren’t able to spot safety issues (let alone anticipate them before they occur), and who are unpracticed in leading with a safety-first mindset. You don’t need me to tell you what will happen to almost every single type of safety outcome, from the number of near-miss reports to the frequency and severity of injuries, in this scenario.
Supervisors aren’t magicians, of course. They’re only one of many factors that determine a workplace’s overall degree of safety success. The best team of supervisors in the world can’t overcome a flimsy organizational safety program. But the inverse is also true—it’s hard to see how an otherwise strong safety system can succeed at the highest level with frontline leaders who simply don’t get safety. In effect, supervisors represent an invisible ceiling on safety outcomes.
Once we acknowledge supervisors’ importance to workplace safety, big questions arise. Which specific traits determine a supervisor’s impact on safety? And how can safety managers
10 Occupational Health & Safety | OCTOBER 2020
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