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Supervisory safety
1 Apr, 2006 By: Barbara Mulhern Landscape ManagementGet your supervisors to buy into your safety program and create a positive safety influence
You're a longtime landscape contractor who has a written safety program on the books. Yet one day, you realize that your workers' compensation premium costs are continuing to rise more than you think is warranted. You investigate and find that:
- Your top managers really don't understand what they can and can't control to bring these costs down; and, as a result,
- Your supervisors are getting "mixed messages" about your safety program.
Supervisory buy-in to a safety program is critical in order to manage rising costs and to keep your employees safe, several safety professionals interviewed by Landscape Management agree. But how to achieve that buy-in can be tricky, particularly when supervisors are responsibile for getting jobs done quickly
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Take it from the top
"It has to start at the top," Bob Bogel, risk manager at Cagwin & Dorward in Novato, CA, says. "You have to have the owners of your company behind you with a solid commitment. They have to be willing to let people spend the time working on safety. If safety's not important to the owners, it won't be to anyone else."
"The thing that people don't realize is that managers and supervisors are never told by their bosses to work safely. They are told to get that message across to their employees, and that accidents are always the result of what the employee does. But that's not true," says Gregg Jauert, safety/risk manager at Bachman's nursery in Minneapolis.
Jauert, who oversees safety at the company's landscape, greenhouse, nursery and retail garden center operations, adds: "You need to let supervisors lead by example, and you need to give them safety objectives in a tangible form. Managers' and supervisors' main responsibility is to get the product to the customer. So give them safety practices that they can in turn get to their internal customer – the employee."
At The Bruce Company in Middleton, WI, Safety Manager Laurie Bishop says that "many times, safety is an area where assumptions are made. Training isn't focused on supervisors because assumptions are made that they know all of this. Yet they are a very critical element to train if you're going to have enforcement of your safety rules. They are another set of eyes for incidents that might occur."
More potential barriers
There are a number of other reasons why it may be difficult to achieve supervisory buy-in to your safety program. "Many times, people who are direct supervisors got there because they were really good at doing that particular job. Yet their whole adult work experience might have been in a culture that's not very safety-oriented," says Mark Purschwitz, a former cooperative extension service agricultural safety specialist.
Purschwitz, now an agricultural safety research scientist at the National Farm Medicine Center in Marshfield, WI, adds that "hopefully, you have supervisors who can be trained to understand" that over the long run, taking time out for safety will result in even greater productivity because there will be fewer injuries and less employee turnover.
Other potential barriers to supervisory buy-in include:
- Pulling supervisors off of their daily duties for training. "Having them pulled off means there's no supervisory function going on that day," Bishop says. "We do much of our [supervisory] training during the winter months. They get so busy with other things that having it trickle down from them to the next level, our crew leaders, can be difficult."
- Not understanding how your supervisors think. "You need to talk with them and find out what they think," Purschwitz says. "Don't just assume they'll buy in. You may have to get back to the real basics on why this is important and what it can achieve."
- Failing to talk with your supervisors in terms they can relate to. It's important to clearly tell them that rushing and taking shortcuts are two major reasons why accidents occur, and that a serious employee injury means they will lose even more time (finding and training a replacement worker; being tied up in interviews with OSHA, insurance investigators; etc.) than if they had taken a few minutes to do safety training or enforce safety rules to begin with.
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