Leadership qualities drive effective injury prevention – Technologist

Focused and caring leadership is a significant factor in preventing injuries. It’s hard to measure on the front end, but we can see the favorable outcomes. Here are some ways to make prevention more visible and tangible in a production setting so you can prevent injuries from occurring and build a positive and transparent safety culture for all your employees:

• Develop Strong Leaders: According to the American Society of Safety Professionals (ASSP), a recent study indicated that a workplace’s positive safety climate correlated with workers’ perceptions of authentic leadership. The authors of the study listed four factors of authentic leadership: self-awareness; balanced processing (deliberately soliciting views different from your own); relational transparency; and internalized moral perspective. What do these qualities lead to in a workplace? More trust between employees and their supervisors who are tasked with enforcing and implementing safety procedures daily. Vigilant offers a class to help supervisors and safety professionals build their skills in authentic leadership and safety called Vigilant Safety-Focused Leadership. Beyond classes like this, new hires can learn from mentors and targeted coaching to ensure safe behaviors are passed on to future generations of workers.
• Improve Training: According to a recent article on Manufacturing.net citing the State of Industrial Worker Safety and Well-Being Report from Vector Solutions, safety is the second most important factor for workers to remain in a job, second only to pay. That says a lot! How much effort do companies invest in safety and more specifically, safety training? The study showed that 46 percent of workers believe their employer could be doing more to reduce safety incidents, and 58 percent believe additional training would improve their workplace safety. Some other gaps relate to statistics on non-native English speakers, where 50 percent say their company doesn’t offer training in their native language. And non-native English speakers were 127 percent more likely to say they do not feel comfortable reporting workplace hazards than native English speakers. As employers, we can do better for our employees.
• Foster a Culture of Care: We recently featured a blog series by Linda O’Neill, Vigilant’s Vice President of Strategic Services, on creating a Culture of Care. While the term “care” isn’t used often in production facilities, our safety professionals see the practical results of caring for each other when safety is taken seriously, which translates into accident prevention. By demonstrating this care and taking it further by talking about the care we have for one another as a motive for following safety protocols, our employees gain trust in their leaders and help to create safer work environments.

The word “prevention” can mean many things, and it may seem invisible in our day-to-day work lives. But by developing strong leaders, improving training, and demonstrating care for our co-workers, we can make the invisible visible and easier to replicate toward a more positive and safe work environment for all employees.