It’s no surprise that frontline supervisors can play a notable role in workplace safety performance. After all, they are in constant contact with workers and thus have a firsthand perspective of the many safety issues that can affect individual workers’ risk of injury, including human factors, general safety knowledge, and larger cultural influences.
While supervisors are well understood to be a major leverage point for EHS outcomes, it’s not always clear how safety professionals can make the most of frontline leaders. Fortunately, a new webinar—initially hosted by the American Society of Safety Professionals—called Culture Catalyst outlines six crucial areas where supervisors can have an outsized impact on worker safety.
The webinar makes a compelling case that improvements to safety climate can lead to stronger safety results and, beyond that, to better production outcomes, operational quality, employee morale and retention, and worker engagement. But in order for all of that to happen, supervisors need to effectively influence safety climate, which is the day-to-day workplace attitude towards safety. Over time, consistent positive influence on safety climate can have longer-term improvements on safety culture and lead to lasting organizational benefits.
The presentation begins with a research-based review of how safety culture and safety climate function in most industrial workplaces. It then examines six key factors that have been demonstrated to move the needle on safety climate and lead to longer-term improvements in workplace culture. In particular, the webinar focuses on how organizational leaders can use these factors to improve the workplace safety climate.
Because almost every workplace requires at least some people present, the Culture Catalyst webinar goes on to examine how effective human factors management can help safety professionals and other organizational leaders augment how they manage and communicate with their teams in order to cultivate a greater sense of employee engagement. This makes it a particularly useful resource for safety folks who already feel like they’re well-versed in the concept of safety climate, as it demonstrates how a human factors management approach can transform safety management systems and the wider workplace culture.
Presented by Pandora Bryce and Peter Batrowny, the webinar can be seen as a follow-up piece that complements their recently published white paper on safety climate and culture. As experts in safety education and adult learning, Bryce and Batrowny are the ideal pair to give safety professionals a peek under the hood at the inner workings of safety culture. Bryce and Batrowny have also conducted research that proves how supervisors can make an outsized mark on safety climate, and they share that knowledge in a manner that’s easy to digest.
As far as safety webinars go, Culture Catalyst is worth watching if you’re an EHS professional looking to get your company’s supervisors to have a greater impact on safety outcomes, or if you want a clear and concise summary of how safety culture can be influenced through small but decisive daily actions in the workplace. The webinar is free to watch and can be found online here.