As I have written in the last couple of posts, safety is something where I can educate individuals, but it is a collective exercise to ensure proper safety for all workers and employees at a worksite or within a company structure. Each individual has his or her own accountability for safety in tersms of knowing, understanding and demonstrating the safety protocols and procedures that are on the worksite. And the higher in the company hierarchy yu are, the more accountabilities you have. After all, as you are at a level of supervision and oversight of other workers, not only do you have to be accountable to yourself for safety, but you also have a duty to watch out for those you supervise to make sure they are being safe and making safe decisions as they are working.
[Image courtesy of Flickr user Stuart Cole via a Creative Commons license]While senior executives may be the furthest from the floor of a worksite, their engagement is safety will make or break the entire safety protocol at a company. There are some accountabilities that senior management should embrace if safety is truly to be top priority at a company.
Working Up to the C-suite
In previous posts in this series about safety accountability, I started with the assumption that the rank-and-file workers will be doing their due diligence in securing their own safety, and went to the next level of accountability – the supervisors. We first looked at some important questions to ask to ensure that proper accountability is in place, then I spent time writing about some specific actions that supervisors should take to ensure safety on the worksite. Next, I spent some time writing about middle management and their important role as a liaison between the floor and the upper management, and the duties and responsibilities that are entailed in regards to safety.
Now, I will look into the upper management, known as the C-suite (the CEO, CFO, etc.). While this level is generally pretty distant from the worksite and thus is often not engaged with safety issues that may be occurring on the floor, it takes the C-suite to have buy-in on all safety procedures. If the upper management does not model or have any real engagement with safety protocols, then the chances of those protocols remaining intact and workers staying safe is very low.
Get Out of Your C-suite!
In order to get real buy-in from the C-suite, the goal will be to convince those executives (especially the CEO and the chief operating officer, or COO) to get out of their cushy offices on the top floor at least once in a while and come visit the supervisors and/or the rank-and-file employees and have conversations about safety. If you truly make safety a No. 1 priority, this is the best way you can demonstrate that. The ultimate goal for the chief executives should be to ensure that employee health and safety goals are met and that any issues are addressed in a timely fashion – at this level, it often comes down to money saved or earned. Selling that point can make safety a top priority pretty quickly and should get quite a bit of buy-in.
But, there are also some other responsibilities (nee, accountabilities) that the C-suite needs to be able to embrace, not just do:
* Have a least two safety-oriented meetings with your middle managers every year. Ideally, four (one each quarter) would work.
* Be an active participant in any planned worksite inspection (does not have to be all of them), model safe behaviors and actions and have some one-on-one contact with the rank-and-file while you are visiting. And have a conversation. A real one. (Read this blog post to get the drift.)
* Take a look at the safety performance reports of rank-and-file and supervisors. They are the ones closest to the “action” when it comes to risk, and much can be gleaned from those reports. Don’t ignore them just because they don’t involve middle management.
* Speaking of middle-management, make sure you get copies of the safety reports that middle management submits to supervisors. This will help the executives stay on top of what is happening on the floor and how the safety protocols are being handled or adjusted as needed.
* Make sure all subordinate managers (down to supervisors and team leads) understand at least basic safety management and develop those skills all down the chain.
* As needed, provide safety performance feedback down all levels of the chain. This is not only those issues you are made aware of, but also to hand out kudos to those worksites that are performing well.
How to Measure Accountability
There are some things to have in mind when figuring the best ways to measure whether a chief executive is meeting the responsibilities to safety. This can be found through looking at the frequency of inspections and/or reports and/or meetings. Another way could be looking at audit scores overall and at individual sites to see if goals are being met (this can depend on whether the executive has oversight of certain sites or of the overall company operations). There could also be a goal of reduced dollar amount in losses due to damage, or a goal of reduction in safety incidents, lost time off and/or injury severity.
So yes, even though the C-suite executives are furthest away from the floor, they should be every bit as engaged in safety as the supervisors and team leads, at least as much as they can be. A failure in this area could collapse the entire house of cards. And who wants to be the one to draw the Joker out of the deck when it comes to employee and worksite safety?