Workplace safety cultures are complicated. A wide range of different inputs can affect people’s individual and collective attitudes towards safety, and just as many factors influence corporate safety outcomes.
But not all factors carry the same weight, and it’s clear that supervisors have a massive impact on safety performance. Shift supervisors and other frontline leaders are a bridge between senior management and workers. They are in constant communication with workers. And they’re ideally positioned to notice emerging safety issues and intervene before they turn into a major problem. So it’s not surprising that they play a big role in a company’s safety efforts.
A recent article in Safety+Health magazine makes a compelling argument that skilled supervisors can be a catalyst for better workplace safety. The article takes a tour of data on the issue to outline three key skills that dramatically affect the impact that frontline leaders have on safety outcomes: communication skills, the ability to engage employees and make them feel happy, and a good understanding of human factors.
A review of resources on supervisors and safety, including the research cited in this study, shows a consistent emphasis on the importance of communication. It doesn’t matter how smart or capable a frontline leader is if they can’t effectively convey their knowledge and experience to the workers under their supervision. Communication skills can be surprisingly hard to develop because they encompass everything from building rapport with people to distilling information to being able to read how information is being received in real time. This is why the most effective way to build safety communication skills is with targeted training.
The S+H article notes that employee engagement and happiness are similarly important. Plenty of research has found direct links between employee happiness, engagement levels, and safety outcomes, including a study in Multidisciplinary Reviews and a detailed review of the subject in EHS Today. In fact, as New York Times-bestselling author and safety researcher Rodd Wagner says, “engagement and happiness are virtually identical” phenomena, making the two terms essentially interchangeable.
Wagner goes on to state that “happy employees are safer employees.” And Wagner and other researchers make clear that frontline leaders are ideally suited to influence the happiness of their crew, which means that training supervisors to more effectively engage employees and make them happier (and thus safer) can go a long way toward improving company-wide safety results.
The third contributor to supervisory efficacy is a strong working knowledge of human factors. Having communication and engagement skills is well and good, but they are only useful if you have the right information to pass on to employees at the right time. And as the S+H article argues, that means being able to spot human factors in the moment—such as when employees become fatigued or momentarily start rushing—and then intervening before an incident occurs.
As the article points out, “A key piece of research on the major causes of slips, trips and falls discovered that human factors such as rushing or distraction are the biggest contributor of incidents.” Because human factors play such an outsized role in injuries and fatalities, a supervisor’s ability to recognize and respond to those human factors is a critical component of any workplace safety program.
The conclusion from the article, and from the wider research on the subject of supervisors and safety, is that skills development in a few key areas—including communication, engagement, and human factors management—can have a major influence on worker safety. And training that is tailored to frontline leaders is by far the best way to quickly elevate supervisory capacities in those areas.