To empower team members to take control of safety outcomes

Situation

People Solutions was engaged by the organisation to enhance the safety culture by developing the behavioural safety practices of their employees.

The organisation recognised that to achieve a high functioning work environment and strong safety culture, it is important that all employees understand what is appropriate and inappropriate behaviour with respect to safety.

Challenge

The organisation began as a small, family-owned business which grew quickly over a short period of time. This meant many of their work practices happened “on the fly” and small incidents were occurring that shouldn’t have been. Over time, the organisation grew in maturity and improved their policies, procedures and PPE. Even with these changes, incidents were still occurring.

The organisation’s challenge was to ensure there was a culture which reinforced using the appropriate PPE and that all the required procedures were followed, as well as acting safety when there were no clear guidelines or prescribed ways of working.

Solution

People Solutions partnered with the organisation to develop and deliver customised team workshops. The organisation decided to target the workshops at the high-risk operational roles within the organisation, with a focus on empowering them to take control of their own and their peers safety.

All employees involved in the workshops completed the Individual Safety Attributes Test (ISAT) and the results of these, along with an evaluation of organisational incident metrics, influenced the content of the workshops.

Key objectives of these workshops were to assist employees in:

• understanding what individual behaviours create a safe culture,
• understanding their own team’s strengths and development areas in relation to those that are critical in creating a safe work environment, and
• creating a team action plan with SMART goals to improve the team’s safety behaviour.

Result

An outcome of the workshop was an action plan that all employees agreed to and were committed to implementing into the workplace. All actions were achievable, practical, but also would significantly impact on changing the safety culture within the organisation.

In terms of participant feedback, all the employees who were involved either agreed or strongly agreed that the concepts were explained well, the facilitators were effective, there was good discussion and interaction, and the workshop covered all the stated objectives. Furthermore, the majority of participants either agreed or strongly agreed that they had increased their safety knowledge, identified ways of improving their safety behaviour and were more committed to improving their own and their supervisor’s safety behaviour.

From these workshops, the organisation has continued to use the ISAT with individuals within this team, in conjunction with our development feedback and action planning process. This process gave the Supervisors a framework for performance discussions with employees in relation to safety. Furthermore, the organisation has also introduced the ISAT as part of their recruitment process.

Testimonial

From the workshop, I learnt….

“How to confront people at different levels and in different ways”

“Confidence, awareness and (I) am able to be open about my (own) safety”

“Pre-starts are very important”