Safety-conscious Supervisors

Here is a collection of the best resources for both immediate gains and long-term transformations in your supervisory safety abilities:

Guide

The Safety-First Supervisor

Do your frontline supervisors reduce injuries and increase safety awareness among workers? Discover the key skills and knowledge that will turn your supervisors into safety champions.

Guide

7 Essential Soft Skills For Hard Workplace Safety Problems

You can check all the right boxes and still feel like your safety program is stalled out, and that no one seems to believe in the value of safety. That’s where soft skills come in.

Webinar

Safety and the Supervisor

This webinar offers EHS managers and company executives actionable advice on improving safety through leveraging the role of frontline leaders.

SafeLead Skills for Supervisors

When you need to step beyond free resources, this top-notch program is designed specifically to address gaps in frontline leadership by providing new perspectives on human factors, safety conversations and how to lead by example.

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Free webinar

Culture Catalysts: 6 Safety Success Factors for Supervisors

Years of research and fieldwork have identified six key skills that can improve your workplace safety climate today. And that means a stronger safety culture tomorrow. Discover how super-charging these skills can positively change the narrative about safety and spark EHS improvements throughout your organization.

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Supervisor blog posts

3 Keys to Keeping New Workers Safe From Injury

Hazards vary greatly from one industry to the next. But one thing almost every job has in common is that new hires—that is, people who started a new job within the past three months—are at a heightened risk of injury. Many safety experts view the first ninety days at a new job as an incredibly…

3 Surprising Insights Into New Worker Safety You Can’t Afford to Miss

It’s critical that companies get new hires off to a good start in safety. It can not only prevent injuries but also set up a good relationship between employee and employer, and set everyone up for long-term safety success. Here are three crucial and often overlooked contributors to new worker safety. Safety as a verb…

3 Key Hidden Factors That Enhance Lone Worker Safety

Lone worker safety is a perennial concern for every EHS manager who has at least one employee working on their own with any degree of regularity. Plenty can happen out in the field, and if an incident occurs, a lone worker needs to have the means to be able to call for help. They also…

2 Underleveraged Contributors to Hand Safety: Supervisors and Culture

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…

3 Ways to Squeeze More Value From the Distracted Driving Safety Guide

Anyone who sits in the driver’s seat of a vehicle is at risk of becoming distracted while driving. That means distracted driving is a potentially major safety issue in workplaces in almost every single industry. The problems of distracted driving are well known, and safety professionals have run countless anti-distracted driving campaigns in an effort…

4 Resources to Get Better Safety Performances From Supervisors

Supervisors and other frontline leaders are one of the biggest determinants of the overall success of your workplace safety program. After all, they have a key role in executing the high-level direction set by management. Supervisors are also where the organization’s systems meet individual employees. This means that they are ideally positioned to monitor individual…

Where Should Safety and Culture Come From, the Top or the Bottom?

CEO is a big title—and it comes with responsibility for a company’s overall operations—but what does it really mean?  In addition to being the highest-ranking executive manager, the CEO has to make big corporate decisions that will result in the company’s success or failure. But one common misconception is that CEOs need to be autocratic.…

4 Essential Reports and Safety Articles on Human Factors Management

Learning how to manage human factors can be a tall order—especially if you aren’t used to thinking about the concept on a daily basis. Human factors management can be an incredibly valuable part of your safety management system, so it’s worthwhile to become more familiar with the principles behind it. To that end, here are…

3 Key Groups in Managing Human Factors in Construction Safety

It’s a well-known fact that managing human factors is currently the biggest challenge in safety. And that couldn’t be more true than in the construction industry. Because construction sites are so dynamic, there’s an increased emphasis on the dangers posed by workers’ mental and physical states. But human error management isn’t simply a matter of…

3 Ways to Use This Free Supervisor Safety Guide

Supervisors play a vital role in workplace safety outcomes. Like it or not, there’s no getting around the fact that supervisors have an outsized influence on how workers think about safety, pay attention to hazards, and build or abandon critical safety habits like wearing PPE. And while “supervisor support for safety may be essential, it’s…

Why Open Lines of Communication Create Safer Work Environments

This is a guest post by Jori Hamilton. Did you know that even though 25% of workers have been injured or seen someone hurt at work, at least 17% of your employees still won’t report a hazard? For safety leaders, those are frustrating statistics. But business leaders should be equally concerned by the increased risk…

5 Misconceptions That Get in the Way of Good Mentorship

The majority of Fortune 500 companies have a corporate mentorship program—and with good reason. Mentorship programs strengthen the workplace culture, promote professional development and growth, reduce training costs, improve employee retention and provide effective succession planning. You don’t need to be a detective to deduce that successful companies have great leadership. Often those leadership qualities…

Best Safety Articles of 2020

This past year has brought an unprecedented look at some aspects of safety. But while 2020 seemed to be all about PPE and other safety issues related to COVID-19, there was also a wealth of safety writing that had nothing to do with the coronavirus. Here are four of our favorite articles about safety from…

Think Safety and Supervising Are Separate Jobs? Think Again

Safety is one of many job requirements for shift supervisors and other frontline leaders. Though most of their daily tasks may have very little to do with safety, they are directly linked to the wellbeing of the employees they supervise. It might not be easy to see this link between frontline leaders and employee safety,…

How To Handle Supervisors Who Lack Safety Communication Skills

This is an excerpt from our free guide on improving supervisors’ safety skills. The guide reviews six challenges with supervisors and safety and provides practical ways to create more safety-conscious frontline leaders. This excerpt reviews one of the most common challenges—supervisors who lack safety communication skills. The challenge: Supervisors are poor communicators, especially when it…

Avoiding Blame and Inspiring Positive Communication in Safety

Many leaders understand the need for positive communication but struggle with establishing and maintaining it throughout their organization. And simply deciding that positive communication in safety should now be employed in the workplace is hardly going to work, as there are too many people and too many established habits involved. Luckily, Safety and Health Magazine…

Chris Ross Has the Answers for Supervisors, Safety and the Human Factors in Between

Chris Ross recently conducted a fascinating webinar called Safety and the Supervisor: Developing Frontline Leadership Skills to Improve Safety Outcomes. In the Q&A at the end of the presentation, Chris was asked a number of questions. We’ve consolidated some of the most common questions and Chris’s responses below. His answers are well worth reading for…

5 Ideas To Transform Your Toolbox Talks With This Incredible (And Free) Guide

Toolbox talks are a cost-effective way to influence worker behavior and improve safety results. They work for any industry—and companies of all sizes—and they are a relatively straightforward and potentially transformative element of any safety program. The only trick with toolbox talks? They only work if you get them right.  As this detailed guide on…

How Safety Assessment Services Can Breathe New Life Into Your EHS Program

The Beatles famously sang, “I get by with a little help from my friends.” And sometimes, the best friend that safety and operations folks can have is someone who can conduct a proper safety assessment or audit.  A thorough safety assessment and diagnostics program can reveal unexpected insights and offer new life to a safety…

4 Ways That Supervisors Influence Workplace Safety

In many organizations, frontline supervisors occupy a unique position. They work on the shop floor, which means they know what happens on a daily basis. They often have a personal connection with frontline workers. But they also have certain managerial responsibilities, and as such they play a role in the execution of higher-level company functions…

Why Every Company Needs a Safety Framework to Manage Human Factors

The concept of human factors has wide-ranging implications, especially for safety. For anyone in charge of plant operations, safety, or production, it’s incredibly important to understand what human factors are, how they affect worker safety, and how they tie into your company’s structures and processes. There’s lots of research on human error, lots of industry-wide…

4 Workplace Safety Issues Caused by COVID-19

Everybody has the coronavirus on their minds. But no one else is thinking about the COVID-19 pandemic quite like safety professionals. Safety folks have to figure out how to prevent the spread of the coronavirus among workers on their job sites. But because the virus outbreak is rapidly transforming how workplaces operate, EHS managers also…

Is Your Safety Calendar Meeting Its Potential?

Safety is more than just a single plan that is rolled out to achieve a simple result. A company’s primary end goal with safety is to keep its employees safe. But there’s a lot that goes into achieving that goal. Ask any company that’s had success in safety how they got there and they’ll tell…

What You Need to Know About Refusing Unsafe Work

Refusing work may feel out of character for some people.  Growing up, many of us are taught there’s value in respecting authority and in getting a job done. So when it comes to the workplace, employees often believe that their employer has their best interests in mind and that their sole focus should be on…

3 Overlooked Safety Skills Vital to Supervisor Success

Supervisors can have a dramatic impact on a workplace’s overall level of productivity—and on workplace safety too. But the degree to which shift supervisors and frontline managers influence safety depends on whether they possess some key skills and knowledge.  There are three vital areas that supervisors need to master in order to positively affect safety…

Why Don’t Workers Intervene When They See Unsafe Acts?

There’s no question that employees know the difference between right and wrong and when it comes to safety interventions it often has nothing to do with that. So why don’t more employees intervene when they see someone exhibiting at-risk behavior in the workplace? There are a number of factors that influence whether a person will…