A helping hand from supervisors

When SafeStart conducted a hand safety survey, respondents outlined the top four activities they think are most effective at reducing the frequency of hand injuries. They are:

• One-on-one conversations
• Audits/walkthroughs/observations
• Training
• Toolbox talks/pre-shift meetings

What do these four measures have in common? Frontline supervisors have a hand in all of them.

Unfortunately, supervisors don’t often seem to be doing a particularly good job of supporting safety, as the same survey found that they are the group that could most improve at managing daily hand safety, beating out organizational leaders, safety culture and even individual employees themselves.

Supervisors can be effective advocates for hand safety. But first, they need three key things: a strong set of safety and human factors knowledge, communication skills and the trust of employees.

Turning supervisors into safety champions can be a major undertaking. But it’s well worth the effort, and there are many quick wins that can result in remarkable improvements. Here is a collection of the best resources for both immediate gains and long-term transformations in your supervisory safety abilities:

The Safety-First Supervisor. There are six common ways that supervisors influence safety—and they can make or break your company’s safety efforts. This guide explores the skills, knowledge and techniques that supervisors need to effectively manage the safety of their crew.

Safety and the Supervisor: Developing Frontline Leadership Skills to Improve Safety. This webinar by Chris Ross, CSP, CPLP, gives EHS managers and company executives practical insights into how they can make targeted improvements to their supervisors’ safety capabilities.

7 Essential Soft Skills For Hard Workplace Safety Problems. This guide takes a look at the transformative interpersonal skills and techniques that turn engagement tactics from mediocre to magnificent, and allow supervisors to establish more trust with workers.

SafeLead Skills for Leaders. When you need to step beyond free resources, this top-notch program is designed specifically to address gaps in frontline leadership and round out safety-related skills at all levels of leaders by providing new perspectives on human factors, safety conversations and how to lead by example.

Getting a grip on culture

Safety culture has a sizeable influence on hand safety. Safety professionals were presented with seven different statements about hand safety, covering common topics like PPE and line of fire and supervisors. Out of all of them, the statement they agreed with most was: “A strong safety culture can offset physical/human factors that cause hand injuries.”

Above all else, the one thing that everyone agrees on is that safety culture matters. You can see it in your own workplace too. Ask yourself a few questions:

• You provide gloves but is there a culture of wearing them?
• You have supervisors but are they actively supporting hand safety culture?
• Workers know about human factors but is there a culture of responding to them?
• Workers know about habits but is there a culture that reinforces them until they stick?

Culture change is a major undertaking. It can be difficult, long-term work. It is also an essential component of hand safety.

Culture is an organization-wide issue. Many people think it’s a leadership-only item, and yes, it starts and ends with leadership. However, a great deal of workplace culture is determined by the patterns of thought and behaviors of workers themselves in response to leadership. It starts at the top and moves down the organization to the bottom, where it once again emerges and returns to the top. It’s a never-ending loop. This is why culture can be so hard to shift—and why it can be so powerful once it does.

In fact, safety culture change is such a challenging endeavor that it’s best not to try to change it directly. Instead, you should focus on safety climate, which, as Pandora Bryce, PhD says, “is how [employees] feel about safety right now. One can think of it as the organization’s current mood about safety.” If safety culture is like an entire forest, then safety climate is each individual tree.

You can’t plant or cut down a forest overnight. But you can plant a couple of seedlings every day. Or, if your safety climate is sliding in the opposite direction, then you can think of it as cutting down a few trees every day. It may not feel like much from one day to the next. But over time, you’ll start to recognize whether the culture forest is growing or shrinking.

The message here is to focus on what you can control: setting a consistently positive tone, communicating openly with your team, showing a personal commitment to hand safety and upholding hand safety expectations fairly and without blame. If you’re in a leadership position, you can also empower supervisors to play a larger role in safety performance. Do these things long enough and you’ll see the culture start to change—and better hand safety outcomes won’t be far behind.

Fortunately, there are compounding effects and efficiencies associated with these hand safety solutions. Human factors apply to all types of activities, so learning to manage them improves a range of safety outcomes. When people learn how to stay out of the line of fire it applies not only to their hands but the rest of their bodies in a wide variety of settings, including:

• Eye injuries (flying debris, chemical exposures)
• Foot injuries (stepped on, crushed under)
• Burns, cuts, contusions, fractures (anywhere on the body)
• Pinch point or caught between injuries (tools, equipment, material)
• Forklift collisions (with people or objects)
• Dropped tools (from heights)

It takes time to build a great culture, but that means that once you shift a safety culture it can be resilient and maintained in the face of any day-to-day challenges. And once you embed human factors management principles in your safety management system, you’ll have set yourself up for long-term success.

Workers don’t avoid hand injuries by accident. Good safety outcomes require a dedicated commitment to reach beyond compliance. The benefits of doing so can be widespread and long-lasting.

How safe will your employees’ hands be tomorrow, next week, next year? The answer to that question is in your hands.

This blog post is an adapted excerpt from the safety guide Show of Hands: Insights and Strategies to Prevent Hand Injuries, which examines robust research and survey data on the most effective ways to reduce hand injuries. Read the guide today for more research, insights and essential hand safety pointers for your workplace.