Supervisors Impact Safety

In today’s competition and climate, companies are increasingly evaluating their safety procedures and their effectiveness. However, all too often leaders have a narrow scope in which they look at during these evaluations. That scope typically only includes the individuals or teams within a titled EHS function. 

What if we were to focus outside of that department? How does looking at our front-line supervision and their expectations and abilities affect safety and performance overall? 

The Supervisor Dilemma

Currently, we are seeing an increase in individual contributor’s becoming supervisors. We promote our top performers and high potential individuals into supervisor positions in response to the current staffing shortages. In these situations, we ask them to rise to the occasion and we reward their ability to get the job done no matter what which leads to continuous firefighting. While this step is a promotion for the individuals and a chance to be developed, that is often where the development stops. Why? We feel we can’t run the operations without the supervisors being on the floor to firefight. 

We can’t invest in their learning and development off of the floor because we’ve relied too heavily on their ability to be the hero. If instead we focused on teaching newly promoted supervisors how to problem solve, identify the root cause, and giving them the confidence, clear expectations, and autonomy to make decisions and grow their operators, they would yield results that far outweigh the results a sole EHS Department would produce. Our supervisors can be our strongest link to their associates or our largest failure modes. The difference relies solely on our ability to invest early with time and education in our supervisors, especially when it comes to health and safety training. 

Improved Safety Starts with Empowered Supervisors 

Starting with safety training when developing our supervisors earns us the trust to work on performance and operational excellence activities. The safety skills that we teach and demonstrate with our front-line supervision directly corelates to performance improvements. Problem solving, data analysis, confidence in giving and receiving feedback, setting the example, teaching supervisors to see when something doesn’t look “right”, and knowing how to create a team to fix the issue further than a band-aid are all imperative for not only management and process improvement individuals, but every associate. We see the greatest results when we focus these teachings on our people leaders that are closest to the process. 

Imagine a world where a supervisor is confident in their hazard recognition abilities. They take their associate team and together they work through root cause analysis and countermeasure resolution activities to come to a solution where all are involved in the implementation of the new safety practices. They continue to receive buy-in from their teams and the implementation of new processes and procedures are more efficient and effective while securing their sustainability to ensure success for the long-term, despite the turnover challenges. The idea is not to teach our teams tools and skills without the practical knowledge of how to apply them in their department and facilities. The objective is to ‘win’ by teaching the tools and then taking it a step further by allowing them to apply them practically, when and where it makes sense. We must develop knowledge, competence, and confidence in our workforce so that instead of two problem solvers, or a department of problem solvers, we have an entire plant population that has these abilities, thus helping us continuously improve our safety metrics and performance.

Continuous On-the-Job Safety Training

By developing our people, who are our greatest asset, we can drive results from a safety and performance standpoint, instead of putting them in a position where there are no, or very few, clear expectations or knowledge. There is untapped potential in every facility and a portion of that untapped potential is right where the process takes place. We reference the quote where a CFO asked a CEO “what if we develop our people and they leave”? to which the CEO responds, “what if we don’t, and they stay?”. World class companies develop their people at every level because the results are there to support investing time, resources, and money in these individuals so that they can in turn, give back to the organization through tangible results and high team morale. 

Invest in Your Supervisors

Successful supervisors need to communicate, coach, and problem-solve effectively, while understanding their safety responsibilities. These soft skills are often the most overlooked yet probably the most critical. They provide tactical abilities for running meetings effectively, resolving conflicts, and giving and receiving feedback. Our Critical Skills for Successful Supervisors can provide the foundation your supervisors need to hone their leadership knowledge to drive performance results and in-turn create a safety culture that builds trust and engagement.