Safety Engagement

Improve Engagement in Safety

Aubrey Daniels International improves safety performance by creating engagement at every level.

No matter how you define your ideal safety culture, there is one prerequisite to achieving it—engaging your employees. Consider the impact on your safety performance if leaders and frontline employees all went beyond basic safety requirements. Imagine if:

• operators truly looked for and addressed any and all hazards rather than just pencil-whipping hazard assessment forms
• supervisors had frequent, meaningful safety interactions with their direct reports rather than spending most of the shift doing paperwork
• executives used safety tours to learn and improve what they do around safety, rather than just to point out what is wrong.

When all employees from the c-suite to the frontline relentlessly pursue safety improvement, exceptional safety performance is possible. This kind of engagement might seem elusive, but ADI’s practical strategy makes it a reality.

Engagement is Discretionary

ADI begins by helping clients understand that true engagement in safety is not a job requirement. There are many employees who work hard, follow safety rules, and have good safety records. By most measures, they are excellent employees. But if those employees don’t actively participate in safety meetings, report near misses, and provide feedback to a peer on safety behavior, then they are not fully engaged in safety, and there is lost opportunity. The fact is, engagement in safety is discretionary, and no one helps organizations capture discretionary effort better than ADI.

Relationships are Key

Earning employees’ discretionary effort requires developing work relationships built on trust, mutual respect, and positive reinforcement. When leaders let workers know they are valued, not just for the work they do, but for all the ways they contribute to safety, trust begins to develop. ADI works with leaders to approach incidents, near misses, and other mistakes as opportunities to learn and improve rather than as behavior to be punished. As a result, workers open up, reveal what is really going on in the workplace, and freely participate in cooperative problem solving.

Changing Safety Management Strategies

ADI can help you move away from outdated, reactive management strategies that undermine engagement and limit safety performance. These default strategies require deliberate effort to change, but ADI’s training and positive accountability process helps clients develop a coaching culture that encourages and reinforces engagement.

If you are looking for improved safety engagement, contact an ADI safety consultant today.