Why leadership often overlooks safety
Before you can start changing minds, we need to understand the reasons why leadership might not feel like safety is a priority.
Leadership teams can see safety as a purely reactive practice. For them, safety procedures are about responding to events as and when they happen. If nothing terrible has happened, why should we change anything about the way we work? When leaders believe that their approach meets the minimum safety standards that their industry requires, and things seem to be going ‘well’ on the surface, there isn’t always the incentive to do more.
Creating and maintaining a good health and safety culture takes time and requires ongoing attention. For some leaders, this equals less time spent on work, unexpected delays and lower productivity. When leaders see safety in terms of what it costs them, rather than the benefits of investing time and money in safety, it’s easy to see why they might choose to prioritise their organisation’s output.
Ultimately, this attitude leaves their teams, their workplace and their reputation at risk.
Here are some steps that safety leaders can take to help change perspectives and demonstrate that good safety management is an investment worth making.
Steps to getting leadership bought into safety
Speak their languageSafety managers are immersed in the language of risk assessments, safe systems of work and hazard identification, but many leaders won’t be. When you speak to leadership, think about how you can use your safety data and link it to organisational outcomes they will know about, like financial data or productivity measures.
Make it personalLeadership might feel like health and safety is an abstract process that doesn’t apply to their seemingly incident-free workplace, so make a case for building a solid safety culture relatable. Use evidence and case studies from other organisations in similar industries to show the impact of accidents and how they could be prevented. When your leadership team sees how a reactive approach to safety could personally affect them and their teams, they are more likely to pay attention.
Focus on business goalsA common misconception is that safety is separate from other business goals. As a safety manager, you can show how good health and safety practice connects to existing and future targets that your organisation is working towards. From being able to evidence high employee retention thanks to strong engagement, or showing prospective contractors your strong safety record, demonstrating good safety practices can boost an organisation’s reputation and growth.
Show that safety improves productivityYes, implementing a sound safety management strategy does take time and might involve a significant financial commitment. But ultimately it’s an investment that will save time and money in the long run. You can use safety data from your company and others to demonstrate this. For example, implementing a system to improve near-miss reporting will give you more data about how accidents could occur. You can then use these findings to take steps to prevent accidents, leading to less lost time to injuries, less money spent on potential insurance claims and reducing the damage to your reputation.
Get them involvedTalking with leadership about health and safety at work is great, but don’t forget to involve them in the practical side too. Encourage your leaders to take part in walkarounds for audits and risk assessments. You could ask them to suggest what KPIs they’d like to include, whether that’s reducing time lost to injury or improving staff training. Show them the trend data you collect and share employee feedback with them. Employee engagement is key to a successful safety management strategy and this goes for engaging leadership too.
How to handle pushback when seeking safety improvements
If health and safety has never been a priority for leadership, there’s a chance you might face some pushback when you begin looking to make change. Here are some common objections you might hear and what you can do to counter them.
“We’ve Always Done It This Way”We get it: change can be scary! But just because an approach has worked up until now, doesn’t mean it will hold up if (or when) an incident happens. If your leadership team seems resistant to change, start by showing them how other organisations have made improvements and what other positive shifts in safety culture have happened in your industry. Ensure you stress the risks of staying the same – not only for employees’ safety but for the company’s legal standing too.
“We Don’t Have the Budget”Not investing in your safety management is more costly than making room in your budget for improvements. According to the Health and Safety Executive, workplace injuries and illness cost Britain a total of £21.6 billion annually. Encourage your leadership team to prioritise spending on health and safety by highlighting just how much accidents cost, in terms of lost productivity, claims and industry fines.
“We’re Too Busy Right Now”Even leaders with the best intentions can struggle to prioritise health and safety thanks to multiple other demands on their time. The key is to position safety improvements as a way to boost efficiency through good data collection and analysis, strong employee engagement and an understanding of your company’s overall health and safety picture. Yes, it can take some time to put this picture together. But if everyone plays their part in improving your company’s safety culture, the process becomes much easier and more thorough. Making use of the right tools, like digital safety software, can help streamline this process and save time.
From leadership buy-in to a safety culture transformation
Creating a lasting safety culture transformation isn’t something that will happen overnight. Once you succeed in bringing your leadership team on board with your safety improvement plans, you need to work with them to ensure that plans are followed through and their impact is felt.
Reinforcing the importance of ‘walking the walk’ is crucial if you want to improve wider employee engagement. Encourage leaders to talk openly about safety, report near misses and participate in staff training and development. When teams see their leadership taking action to promote good safety practices, they will feel more valued and invested in their own safety at work.
When it comes to employee engagement, good communication and transparency are essential. Work with leadership to regularly share safety updates and improvements. Digital tools like Notify’s safety intelligence dashboards can help you visualise your safety data, showing progress against company KPIs and tracking changes in real time.
It can be all too easy to focus on what’s going wrong, so engage leaders in the positive side of the safety conversation too. Use your safety data to show improving trends and publicly share positive changes that have been made. Highlight to leadership who is playing their part in improving reporting or providing critical feedback, and reward their contributions to the company’s overall safety success.
We know that getting leadership buy-in on safety can be challenging. Starting the conversation about the importance of workplace health and safety and using data to back up your argument is crucial to making positive, lasting changes to your company’s safety culture. With Notify’s digital tools, getting leadership bought into safety becomes a more achievable and measurable goal. Whether you want to save time by streamlining your risk assessment process or transform the way you create and carry out safety audits, Notify is here to help. Get in touch today and discover how Notify can support you and your leadership team with your health and safety goals.