What safety leadership strategies have you adopted in your company, and how do you know if they are effective?

Yes. The lack of response is indeed interesting. This suggests that companies [a] do not have a 'clear cut' Safety Leadership strategies; [b] Companies do have clear cut strategies, but they are not sure of their effectiveness as they have no means to monitor outcomes, impact, etc; [c] people are 'shy' at coming forward; or [d] it is the weekend and they are out enjoying themselves! The reason for asking the question is that [a] in 1988 Blackspot Construction (HSE Doc) the 'root causes' of 70% of incidents were firmly placed at the managements door; [b] During the 1990's, James Reason at Manchester University also showed that Executive level decision-making and line-management implementation were involved in many major disasters (aka the 'Swiss Cheese' model); [c] Modern Safety Culture approaches (via Maturity Models, Culture Change processes, etc) emphasise the 'supreme' importance of safety leadership; [d] Managerial commitment to safety has been emphasised throughout the history of the 'safety discipline. Given this backgound, I would have thought 'Safety Leadership' strategies were high on the 'Safety professionals' agenda, when implementing HSE systems, improvement intiatives, etc. I would also have thought the impact of various strategies (e.g. leading Safety Committees, Walking the talk, Reviewing incident Statistics, etc) would have been assessed and known. I realise that some Safety Leadership strategies are 'woolly' (e.g. Executive Coaching of Safety Leaders, etc, Attending Safety leadership Workshops, etc), but even so, time, money and effort are spent on these activites, but to what effect? Colleagues and I at UMIST during the 1990's did look at the impact of Safety Leadership on Behavioural Safety in construction, where indications were around a 50% impact on the success of behavioural Safety. Since then I have done similar work in a Nickel refinery (around 35% impact on employee safety behavior), Pharmacueticals (around the 45% mark on employee safety behavior) , and Construction (around 86% on empoloyee behavior and 37% on the TRIR). In trying to extend this work, I am interested to know if others have obtained similar results, using a variety of strategies, process or outcome indicators.

Hoosier I assume from your last posting you are based in the US, so not sure how familar you will be with UK health and safety initiatives, that said, you seem well informed. Safety leadership as a topic has been represented in various forms ie Revitalising Health and Safety, 18001, HSE/IoD Directors' Duties, failed private member's Bill in Parliament, to mention but a few. The notion that safety should be driven from the top is well developed and sometimes practised. However, in my experience very few senior officers within organisations actually take the matter seriously. They may meet staff through h&s tours, attend safety meetings, reviw perfomance data and so on. Whilst the aforementioned are not insignificant measures to adopt, this is not really taking an holistic approach to h&s in my opinion. Call me cynical if you like but profit still remains the principal goal for senior company officers and probably always will. Incidentally, a few years ago I arranged for h&s notice board to be located in a new head office. When I questioned why it was put behind a stair case I was told that the MD did not want it as focus point in the reception area! Says it all really. Ray

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."fear culture" .says it all ......... i like that description

Hoosier, What a refreshing change, an interesting and thought provoking thread! I'm surprised that there hasn't been many respsonses however I suggest this may be due to the post date. It is clear that safety leadership is extremely important, and should be one of the core fundamentals of safety management along with employee involvement, competence, production vs. safety, perception of risk and, of course, an effective SMS. Unfortunately, it is often apprent that lip-service is paid to management commitment and in organisations with ineffective SMS's it is often the Safety Manager who 'owns' safety as opposed to the employees, or at least the management. It is also common that the extent of senior management commitment is the signing of a safety policy without backing this intent up with action. At our place of work we have put in the common strategies for management comitment including: involvement in safety tours / inspections, chairing of saftey meetings, ownership of the SMS (i.e. conducting risk assessments, investigating accidents), involvement in training etc. etc. These are all the basics really and I would be very interested to hear from other IOSH members of any new and interesting methods that get management involved. The second point you make is also an interesitng one, as I'm not sure that many people actually MEASURE specifically if these strategies make a difference. We have started to do this using a combination of an employee saftey culture questionaire and an audit program - both with sections specifically designed to measure management comitment (or at least the workforces perception of it!). Hopefullly over the years, this should give us quantitative data on whether these actions are effective. Best Regards, Ian P.S. Incidentally Business Link in the Midlands were, up until recently, offering training grants for Director Development which can also be used for senior management. These can be used for any training - not just safety - and might be a good point to start (if you are UK based) your commitment drive.

I recently posted the question on safety leadership strategies and their effectiveness on 30+ forums, comprising some 107,000 potential respondents. Of the responses received to date, Safety Leadership was defined by one respondent as "The process of defining the desired state, setting up the team to succeed, and engaging in the discretionary efforts that drive the safety value," which broadly boils down to "engaging in and maintaining behaviors that help others achieve our safety goals." The common Safety Leadership strategies appear to be: [1] Encouraging people to take personal responsibility for safety by setting expectations for each layer (Senior, Middle, Front-line management, and employees) linked to clear goals. These should be created at a dedicated session where the CEO outlines his/her vision and senior managers determine how to translate that into concrete actions. It is important to ensure the strategies and interventions adopted are aligned to their strategic intent and do not just boil down to a simple signing of the safety policy. A reinforcement strategy is for all board members to hold a weekly conference call where plant managers are required to discuss incidents occurring in the previous week, root cause analysis results, corrective actions, best practices, etc. At plant / operation levels, morning meetings are held to discuss any and all pressing safety issues. Effectiveness assessments are held with 360 reviews of managers, an organizational wide safety climate survey and further diagnostics around organizational systems. [2] Putting a robust Risk or Safety management system in place encompassing (but not limited to) preventive maintenance, operation procedures, inspections, permit to work systems, safety talks, Safety committees, risk assessments, near miss reporting, training, management of change, risk management plans, etc. In terms of effectiveness, the monitoring focus is primarily on incident rates (lagging indicators), safety surveys, and Gap Analyses via Internal Audit functions (leading Indicators). [3] Education & Awareness: Providing safety leadership training so that safety leadership becomes a corporate value. Effectiveness assessment of the training strategy revolves around employees visibly observing the leadership commitment to a safe workplace, and leaders in the organization being more knowledgeable on safety with line management accepting safety responsibilities. However, a comment was made that realistically education is not effective for more than a few days post course. This implies that some type of monitoring system is required to ensure attendees are held accountable for demonstrating the behaviors taught (leading Indicator). [4] Encouraging the management team (from the most senior down) to exhibit visible leadership commitment to a safe workplace. This visible demonstration appears to take the form of chairing of safety meetings, ownership of the SMS (i.e. conducting risk assessments, investigating accidents), involvement in quarterly reviews & training, two-way dialogues about safety, going around site, looking around and talking with people. Effectiveness is assessed by monitoring the number and quality of managerial observations / conversations (leading Indicator). Again, this implies that some type of robust, but easily accessible tracking system is required to monitor the outcomes of the observations and discussions. Do you agree with this summary, or do you have anything to add to push the debate? One issue that springs to mind is the difficulty some encounter in obtaining the required resources to successfully drive interventions. How should this be tackled? Another is the notion of measuring safety leadership behavior. It has been done successfully in some organizations to great effect, but it is not widespread. Do you think this is a viable option in your company? Do you think it useful to record and analyze Safety Leader’s observations / discussions to highlight current strengths and weaknesses in the safety effort? What safety leadership measures do you think could be easily adopted by most companies?

Dominic (Hoosier), One additional strategy is to define and encourage 'leadership' behaviours at all levels and to find out the extent to which they are observed via a regular employee survey. A subset of that is to have slightly different behavioral expectations for different positions within the organisation (e.g. one set for everyone, some additions for supervisors, and some different additions for senior people). I'm not involved in this myself, but know others who are. Keil Centre in Edinburgh are the common link and held an event in June to share learnings. At least one organisation I know can show correlations between survey results for different sites and their injury/incident rates.

For osme reason the link above does not work. I have copied it again directly from web, so should be good http://www.behavioral-sa...n-oil-a-gas-construction If it does not work just go to http://www.behavioral-safety.com and hit the link to the slides on the front page (bottom r/h corner) in the 'Most Recent' box Dominic