A recent study suggests that CEOs and senior management play the most critical role in creating and developing their organization’s safety culture, which they role model and pass down to middle management and supervisors. This emphasis and focus on safety eventually permeates throughout the entire organization, directly influencing the number of frontline employee injuries.
The study, published in the Journal of Applied Psychology, found that safety should be considered a shared responsibility throughout senior management, holding them accountable for the health and safety of their frontline employees. This shared focus on safety sets the tone for making a safer workplace, and shapes the pro-safety values and behaviours of frontline workers.
The CEO is responsible for driving safety culture by having conversations with senior management to give safety top billing throughout the company. While having conversations about safety is important, it is also critical that management observes how people are working. They can then ask questions and engage employees in thinking about health and safety practices. They must also follow up when performing safety audits, and review the results and what they mean with front-line managers and workers.
The study emphasises that training must go beyond the frontline workers, and up the organizational chain to senior leaders. These leaders and supervisors have influence over the behaviour and attitudes of frontline employees. The use of technology is an essential component of maintaining a proactive safety culture that no organization should ignore. Using QHSE/EHS software and incident management software such as iTrak to manage health and safety makes safety information more accessible, shareable, and actionable, while also making the process more transparent throughout the organization, from frontline workers up to management. In a workforce equipped with the software to access and share safety information, employees are engaged and actively participating in making the workplace safe.
We hope to see mass adoption of safety technologies across industries. With a combination of innovative QHSE/EHS technologies and a strong and proactive safety culture, companies can ensure the safety of employees and worksites. With the detailed logic and technical capabilities to streamline safety processes across the spectrum of connected devices, iTrak allows organizations to manage every facet of their quality and safety processes, from hazard identification, performing inspections, workflows, and audits.
To read more on “CEOs have vital, but indirect, influence on safety, finds research”, please go to: http://www.cos-mag.com/safety-leadership-culture/31992-ceos-have-vital-but-indirect-influence-on-safety-finds-research/