It’s by far the most common question we hear from
readers: “How do you get people involved in the
safety program?” Of course, there’s no one answer.
In fact, we asked several dozen experts for their tips.
What works? They offered tips and shared personal
experiences — 50 ideas in all. You’re sure to find a
few here that will fit your needs.
1. Provide the key elements of
knowledge, control and support.
Employees use knowledge of their environment
to understand what things are putting people in
risky situations. Employees need control to
make appropriate changes to the system.
Finally, workers’ ideas and suggestions need
support from management to enable
employees to feel they can truly make a
difference in the lives of their coworkers.
Chuck Pettinger, Ph.D., Project Director,
Safety Performance Solutions, Inc.
2. Offer the necessary levels of
education, training, resources,
and authority
so employees can take ownership of the safety
process. It’s a mistake to expect employees to
take pride and be enthusiastically involved over
the long term in order to simply conform to topdown management programs, and/or merely
comply with OSHA regulations. The single most
powerful source of motivation is employee
ownership of the safety process.
Earl Blair, Ed.D., CSP, Associate Professor of
Safety Education, Indiana University, and
owner, Blair Safety Services
3. Focus your training on
principles
and then work from a critical few principles of
the safety process. Ask employees, “How do
you want to apply these?” You’ll be far better off
using this approach. It stimulates internal
commitment, responsibility and accountability.
Performance is always better when energized
out of commitment versus compliance or
obligation.
Bob Veazie, past change-agent for safety,
Hewlett Packard Inkjet Business
4.Include a safety information
column
that addresses one safety topic in each
issue of your company newsletter.
Marc Neuffer, retired nuclear propulsion
naval officer, currently director of
www.SafetyInfo.com
5. Sponsor “The Day of the Pig”
On this day any employee can bring any
environmental health and safety-related
problem to the forefront freely and without fear
of fault-finding or retribution. With management
backing, each item is reviewed and a response
or resolution is proposed. Items are tracked to
completion.
Skipper Kendrick, Manager, Industrial Safety
& Hygiene, Bell Helicopter Textron, Inc.
6. Protect employees’ voices.
Workers who complain about workplace safety or health hazards
are frequently the targets of reprisals by their employers. A 1997
Department of Labor report documented that workers who
brought complaints directly to their employers first were
particularly vulnerable to reprisals. Job termination was
documented to be the most frequent discriminatory act taken by
employers against workers.
An independent voice is also essential because health and
safety involves issues of economics and control — issues that
management and the workforce may each view very differently.
Those who bear the risks should have a significant voice in
decisions regarding those risks.
Nancy Lessin, Health and Safety Coordinator, Massachusetts
AFL-CIO
7. Get workers involved in
making decisions about safety.
Their input into safety procedures, selection of PPE,
and other decisions that affect their own personal
safety is paramount. You can do this through a
Safety Action Team. Delegates are selected by the
employees or are volunteers. My favorite team
members are the ones who are outspoken. This
team is guided by the safety professional and top
manager in the company, but it is not directed by
them. Team decisions can be overruled, but you
need a good reason and a full explanation.
George M. Shirley, safety consultant, Sulphur, La.
8. Give employees something
meaningful to do.
Identify champions from the management
and employee ranks. Involve them in
problem-solving, safety observations,
workplace inspections, and in training.
Communicate the results widely and
cultivate a culture that values and rewards
these efforts.
Gayla J. McCluskey, CIH, CSP, ROH, QEP, Principal,
Global Environmental Health Services
9. Go out and ask for their
involvement
Don't wait for it to happen. Actively search
for opportunities to involve employees.
Listen up. Pay attention to what employees
have to say. Respond to and resolve issues
brought forth by their involvement.
Skipper Kendrick
10. Ask employees how they
would like to be involved.
All this may be simpler than we think. We train
people on specifics — way more than these
smart people need to be told. Let’s get out of
the way, and begin asking more questions
about how they want to create their safety
system and account for their results. Let’s do
this instead of telling them what to do. Ask
more questions about how your people want to
manage safety.
Bob Veazie
11. Remember the three-term
contingency of applied behavior
analysis
• Activator
• Behavior
• Consequence
Activators direct
Consequences motivate.
At first, people need education, training and coaching to know
what to do and to expect beneficial outcomes. Through
interdependency, trust, and ownership, participants internalize
the three-term contingency and hold themselves accountable to
actively care.
E. Scott Geller, Ph.D., Senior Partner, Safety Performance
Solutions, and Professor, Virginia Tech
12. Set up a committee.
• Verizon Communications, the national telecommunications
company formed by the merger of Bell Atlantic and GTE, is in
the process of establishing an Environmental and OSHA
Steering Committee. The committee’s role is to establish
compliance assessment priorities; review and address
assessment results; and review and resolve any resource
issues or areas of concern in maintaining compliance and
preventing accidents. This committee will meet a minimum of
two times a year. It is made up of senior manager members
from lines of business where our work exposes the company
to the most risk.
• Connie S. Lawson, MS, BSN, RN, COHN-S/CM, CHES,
CUSA, Director, Disease Prevention and Safety, Health &
Environment Promotion, Verizon Communications
13. Start every group meeting
with a “Safety Share.”
It doesn’t matter whether the topic is
production, marketing or quality. Ask
participants to report something they have done
for safety during the past week or since the last
meeting. This gives safety special status and
integrates it into every aspect of business —
with the focus on achievement. It also gives
people the chance to recognize the many
things they do daily to keep each other safe.
E. Scott Geller
14. Share power.
At Newfoundland Power, employees and
management share joint ownership of the annual
safety strategy, developed each year and
undertaken with the direct input of all employees.
Strategy sessions are lead by the manager and
coordinated by the joint occupational health and
safety committee. It is a shared responsibility. The
strategy lays out a full 12 months of prevention
initiatives. As one employee said, “We do best what
we plan best.”
Wayne Pardy, President, Pardy Associates, St.
John’s, Newfoundland
15. Hold a summit.
As a follow up to a recent employee perception survey, a
“Safety Summit” was convened. A cross-functional group
of employees and management met off-site to discuss
the top three issues from the survey. The summit was
kicked off by a member of senior management.
Participants were then asked to list what was working in
each of the three areas of concern. Then they listed
opportunities for improvement and specific actions to
drive change. Employee representatives and supervision
presented a summary of the summit results and action
items to the Executive Steering Committee for approval
and support.
Skipper Kendrick
16. Be real.
Don’t confuse true worker involvement with sham
programs such as company-dominated health and
safety committees, which are illegal under section
8(a)(2) of the National Labor Relations Act. Resist
enticements to introduce programs that focus on
worker behavior rather than identifying and
correcting hazardous conditions. Shun programs that
discourage injury/illness reporting by offering
rewards to workers who don’t report injuries or
threaten discipline to those who do.
Nancy Lessin
17. Constantly sell your program
and constantly improve your program. Every
conversation with your management or
workers in the field is a potential opportunity
to sell the benefits of your program.
Doan J. Hansen, Ph.D., MPH, CIH, Department of Energy
SCAPA Technical Coordinator, Brookhaven National
Laboratory, Upton, N.Y.
18. Manage by walking about
Get to know employees and their concerns.
Let them get to know you.
Marc Neuffer
19. Ask for insight.
Managers often ask people to conduct safety tours
or to do behavioral observation counts, but they
rarely ask about what people found when they
looked. This says safety is not interesting. Make a
point to ask for trends, patterns, and overall
conclusions such as, “We take care of guards on
equipment but we often miss problems related to the
condition of the floor.” People like to be reinforced for
being perceptive.
Betty Loafmann, President, Advanced Performance
Technologies – Safety Systems
20. Ask yourself, “How do I get
employees involved in the rest of
our organization’s activities?”
Getting involvement in safety is not likely to happen unless there is also
a climate of involvement in other objectives of your organization. Trying
to manage safety by involvement, and other activities in other ways, is
not likely to work, at least not consistently.
Typically, other company interests can benefit from an involvement
approach as well. It’s been said that, “If you can manage safety, you
can manage anything.” Organizations can learn a lot about what they
need to do overall by seriously examining how to effectively manage
safety through energizing their people in safety processes. Once
managers recognize the benefits and involvement becomes expected,
participation in safety is more readily achieved
Dan Markiewicz, MS, CIH, CSP, CHMM, environmental health and
safety consultant, Toledo, Ohio
21. Answer the question, “What
are you doing now to keep
employees out of safety?”
Employees are already motivated to improve safety. Their
motivation is a natural instinct; they have seen what can happen
when safety is compromised and they don’t want it. They do
want a safe working environment. The difficulty comes when
barriers are inadvertently constructed that de-motivate the
employee.
Barriers are things like incentives, not listening to the employees’
view, sending mixed messages about the real importance of
safety, having mixed support within management, poor quality
safety meetings, poor communication — all the things we know
are important but don’t know how to maintain effectively. Lack of
employee motivation is a symptom, not a cause.
Thomas R. Krause, Ph.D., Co-Founder and Chief Executive
Officer, Behavioral Science Technology, Inc.®
22. Ask senior line management this question:
“How can safety help you meet your important
business objectives?”
When asked with sincerity, this question can change
management’s perspective of safety. Rather than a staff
cost necessity, safety is seen as a business-building asset,
a new business partner. To get senior line managers
involved, play in their sandbox; don’t expect them to play in
yours.
Rick Fulwiler, Sc.D., CIH, President, Technology
Leadership Associates
23. Enhance your relationship
skills.
Be recognized as trustworthy and display
confidence in the ideas you want promoted.
Management and employees will not eagerly
support merely an idea or program, but they
will support someone they like and trust. It
takes a leader, in the true sense of the term,
to bring along followers and supporters.
Dan Markiewicz
24. Build trust in yourself and
your message.
This must happen before anything else. People
must understand that your core purpose is to
assure worker health and safety. It’s not about
you, it’s about them. Then you need to get
champions from management, unions and
employees to believe. You need to keep the
urgency so people perceive the importance of
your message. Keep them thinking holistically
and viewing safety and health as a system.
Hank Lick, CIH, CSP, Ph.D, Director of
Industrial Hygiene, Ford Motor Co.
25. Solve problems.
People remember those who helped them
out. Any problem left long enough will
become a safety problem. Unfortunately,
you’ll have plenty of opportunities to solve
problems. Being known as a problem-solver
is one way to get people on your side.
Roger Simpson, CSP, CHMM, Safety and Environmental
Director, Shelby Williams, Morristown, Tenn.
26. Treat employees with
respect, honesty and fairness.
You get employees involved in safety the
same way you get anyone to do anything.
Work to find out what they want, then
respond in meeting their needs and
addressing their concerns. This requires
leadership and partnership, and it is
irresistible.
Molly McClintock, Ph.D., Senior Partner, Safety
Performance Solutions, Inc.
27. Use pay envelope stuffers
— a small slip of paper thanking employees
for their efforts in safety.
Marc Neuffer
28. Demonstrate to hourly employees
and staff that the safety process is
working.
They have to see that it’s working. Often, it’s up
to one individual to start this process. Take a
credible, realistic position on safety. Express
“zero tolerance” for non-compliance with your
work standards and procedures, and provide a
method for modifying them. Finally, recognize
informally and/or formally efforts toward
compliance.
Ernie Huelke, CSP, CHMM, RPIH, Safety Manager,
O’Hare Airport Transit System, Chicago, and owner of the
consulting firm, SafetywoRx
29. Show results.
When people begin to see positive results by
eliminating hazards, they all want to get on
board and you end up with a waiting list of
employees ready to contribute to safety
committees and other activities. I’ve learned
that everyone wants to be part of a winner and
no one wants to be part of a loser.
Mark D. Hansen, CSP, CPE, PE, Director, Quality, Health,
Safety & Environmental, Weatherford International, Inc.,
Houston, Texas
30. Give people the feeling that
they will have an impact.
Listen well. We received 29,000+
suggestion, near-miss, unsafe act and
condition reports last year — an average of
ten per person. Why? Because employees
could see a process that assured 100
percent of their reports would be taken
seriously.
Kyle B. Dotson, CIH, CSP, PE, Occupational
Health and Safety, BHP, Houston, Texas
31. Start at the beginning.
You must have the basics of workplace
safety in place, including high levels of the
following: management involvement,
engineering for prevention, environmental
health and safety compliance, and an
effective system to address hazards. The
overall culture should be one that
encourages employee participation.
Earl Blair
32. Go back to the most basic
fundamental:
What the boss is interested in, everyone
else will soon be interested in as well. We
call it “management support,” and
employees can tell whether it exists or not in
a New York minute. There is no substitute,
and there is no success without it.
Dan O’Brien, CSP, Safety and Health Manager,
Engineered Carbons, Inc., Borger, Texas
33. Gain a clear understanding of
your enterprise’s critical outputs
to gain management’s involvement. Then identify the
direct linkages that safety outputs can have with these
critical enterprise outputs. Once the linkages are
identified, start expressing safety outputs in terms of the
business outputs. For example, express injury and illness
or workers’ comp costs in terms of sales equivalent
dollars [$ equivalent sales = injury/illness costs as $ X
100% / profit margin as %] or a reduction in repetitive
motion disorders as an increase in productivity. This will
gain the attention of senior line management and their
involvement will follow.
Rick Fulwiler
34. Get managers at the top to realize the
need for excellence in safety.
To get their attention, it’s often better to have some
type of objective assessment that comes from the
corporate level or from outsiders. This could involve
employee sensing sessions, climate surveys and
programmatic reviews. As we all know, prophets are
not often heard in their own land, and so it is with
safety professionals. An outside perspective can
provide leaders with a new perspective regarding
other organizations that are pursuing safety
excellence.
David J. Sarkus, MS, CSP, a safety and health consultant
in Monongahela, Pa., and ISHN’s Technical Editor
35. Assess your corporate
culture.
In positive cultures, you can build
relationships and trust, partnering with
management and employees alike. In
negative cultures, try to show employees
that you are here to ensure a safe workplace
by eliminating hazards through engineering
design, training and safe work procedures.
Mark D. Hansen
36. Show management commitment in
small and multiple ways.
This is critical. Involve management at all levels in
audits and inspections. Be sure managers are visible
and engaged in training. Include safety and health
issues in all management presentations. Be sure
that follow-up on safety and health issues and audit
items is part of the management review process.
There must be consequences at all levels for nonconformance to agreed-upon policies and
procedures.
Thomas G. Grumbles, CIH, CONDEA Vista
Company, Houston, Texas
37. Reinforce managers in
regular staff meetings
for what they personally did about safety this
month. This moves safety from a set of
boring statistics that include luck to an
aspect of management that can be a source
of pride.
Betty Loafmann
38. Expect accountability.
At RailWorks, a newly created corporation comprised of
35+ railroad construction, maintenance, manufacturing
and supply companies, operations within a group with
high claim counts are financially penalized for abovegroup-average claim costs. Credits are given to
operations with better-than-group averages. The current
average claim cost is used as the multiplier in this “zero
based” budget program where debits = credits. Also,
safety is a “first agenda item” of staff and management
meetings and an integral item of our executive incentive
(bonus) program.
Jeffrey D. Meddin, CSP, CHCM, WSO-CSE, Corporate Director of
Safety, Railworks Corporation, Baltimore, Md.
39. Give supervisors information
and tools.
Each week or twice each month slip a
“Supervisor Safety Topic” sheet in each
supervisor’s in-box. They’ll read it on their
own time.
Marc Neuffer
40. Build safety into the core of your
business.
Safety unto itself as a program that “everyone should be
involved with” won’t work. It has to be an integrated part
of your entire operation. When processes, procedures,
training programs, operations manuals, supervisory
training programs, and management planning sessions
all contain aspects of safety, everyone will become
“involved in safety.” It’s not a matter of how to get
individuals involved. It’s a matter of involving safety in the
conduct of your overall business.
Earl DelGrosso, Director, Environmental Affairs/Safety
Services, Treasure Chest Advertising Co., Inc., Baltimore,
Md.
41. Don't build new structures if the
existing ones are already successful!
Find out what existing management systems
make your company successful. Then
brainstorm with a cross-section of the company
— hourly workers to senior management — to
determine how to inject environmental health
and safety into those systems. Systems
(generally non-EHS) that people use everyday,
and that are part of the culture, are the best
vehicles for getting people involved.
R. Birkner, MBA, CIH, CSP, Vice President, McIntyre
Birkner and Associates, Inc., Thousand Oaks, Calif.
42. Design your safety approach to
be practical
… so that everyone sees it as reasonable and
useful. Help others become truly enthusiastic about
safety based upon their getting positive benefits.
This has to go beyond “do this so you don’t get hurt.”
Employ a “scissors” approach that simultaneously
enlists management top-down and line workers
bottom-up. Plan beyond an initial intervention. All
involvement has to be fed and maintained in order to
build momentum and enhance credibility.
Robert Pater, Strategic Safety Associates, Portland,
Ore.
43. Keep it simple.
A safety mission or program should be simple
and respectful. Our lives are so complicated
and stressful, a simple safety plan,
administered and demonstrated by
management in a concise manner, will have
employees buying into it better than a
complicated or ambiguous safety mission or
program.
Ron and Dot Hayes, co-founders of The Fight
Project, Fairhope, Ala.
44. Design a one-page “Safety
Flash”
that covers not only workplace safety but
also home and recreation safety tips. Scatter
them around the company lunchroom tables,
or place them in a rack by the vending
machines.
Marc Neuffer
45. Discuss your OSHA
recordable rate.
A rate of ten, for example, means that ten out of every 100 employees will be
hurt seriously enough to require medical attention this year. Remind everyone
that the rate is based on all of your employees, including office workers who
are less likely to be hurt. For the more hazardous jobs, the OSHA recordable
rate may actually be as high as 30.
This means that an employee could expect to be hurt seriously enough to
require medical care three out of every ten years of their employment, or nine
times in a 30-year career. Ask your employees if they would want their son or
daughter to work at a company where they could be seriously hurt nine times in
their career.
This discussion usually causes a few employees to all of a sudden see the light
and want to change the world. These are the people you want on your safety
team. You need them to help you convert the majority of employees who don’t
care about safety one way or the other to your side.
Gary Higbee, Manager, Health, Safety & Environmental, The Budd Co.,
Stamping & Frame Div., Rochester, Mich.
46. Find your true believers.
The best salespeople are those who are
convinced that safety works to keep them
safe. Have an employee whose sight was
saved because he wore safety glasses give
a talk. He’ll motivate his fellow employees to
get involved.
Barry R. Weissman, REM, CSP, CHMM, Regional
Manager-Safety, Health & Industrial Hygiene, EA
Engineering, Science and Technology, Inc.
47. Provide positive
consequences
for desired behaviors and actions. People only work to receive
positive consequences or avoid negative ones. Safety programs
typically motivate people to avoid negative consequences, such
as injury or discipline. A new way to define and measure desired
safety performance is needed. These new expectations must be
clearly communicated and understood by all. Then, positive
reinforcement must be provided when those desired behaviors
occur. This does not mean trinkets or giveaways, but sincere
acknowledgement from peers, supervision and management.
When this happens, employees will be motivated to be involved
in any safety program.
Robert Ryan, CSP, President, Safety Metrics, Inc.
48. Have managers set clear safety
expectations
for the organization, with your input. Managers, not you
or other safety personnel, should communicate these
expectations to the organization. Managers must then
visibly support these expectations during facility tours,
meetings and one-on-ones. They should track progress
and hold the organization accountable for meeting the
expectations. They should also recognize and reward
progress and performance. Many times senior line
managers do not get involved with safety because they
simply don’t know how or what to do. Their roles need
not be complicated or extremely energy intensive.
Rick Fulwiler
49. Develop a vision for safety.
This vision should get employees excited about
moving toward excellence in safety. Along with this
vision, management must provide opportunities for
learning that go beyond compliance activities or the
basics. These learning opportunities must create a
high-trust culture. Within this culture people must be
given opportunities to fail and succeed, realizing that
they are being empowered to move toward “their”
vision of excellence for safety.
J. Sarkus
50. Get everyone on the same
page.
Executives, supervisors, employees and the safety and health
team must have the same vision for safety and health. Everyone
must understand that safety and health really are important to
each level of the organization, and that the employees’ wellbeing is what it is all about. There can be no hidden agendas, no
“gotchas.”
Employees’ concerns and their ideas and suggestions are to be
taken seriously, sometimes implemented, and rewarded. This is
not a difficult mission, but it does take discipline to keep on track.
Margaret M. Carroll, CSP, PE, Sandia National Laboratories,
Safety Engineering, Albuquerque, NM