The way you lead your team on health and safety can determine how safe your site is to work on (and the number of accidents, incidents and ill-health cases that happen) because:

•  your attitudes and beliefs about health and safety drive your behavior;
• your behavior on site sends a powerful message to your workers about how seriously they should take health and safety;
• the real causes of accidents on site can often be traced back to managers’ decisions.

See below top tips to become an effective health and safety leader:

Enhance improvement

• How could current health and safety practices be improved?
• Are there new ways to improve health and safety – eg by learning from accidents, incidents and ill-health?
• Challenge your workers, by asking them ‘What can we do to solve the problem?’.

Create a vision

• If you want to retain top talent, bring fresh ideas into the discussion or encourage people to speak up to stop an unsafe action.
• Consult your workforce to identify and set clear health and safety goals.
• Motivate them to create a ‘shared vision’ through those goals.
• Involve them in planning and decision making.
• Make sure everyone knows what they need to do.

Inspire workers to be healthy and safe

• Make sure everyone has the skills, abilities and resources they need to do their jobs safely.
• Plan enough time for work to be done in a healthy and safe way.
• Share your expertise to help workers overcome barriers.
• Develop mutual trust.
• Reward workers who successfully work safely.

Build trust

• Be honest with yourself. Do you set a good example to your workers?
• Put health and safety first and behave in a healthy and safe way on site.
• Promote safe work behavior and practices – encourage the attitude: ‘I do it because I want to, not because I have to’.
• Be fair – trust and respect workers when making health and safety decisions.

Show consideration

• Get to know workers and respect their opinions.
• Treat each worker as an individual.
• Show personal concern for their safety and well-being.
• Treat others as you would expect to be treated yourself.
• Develop a team spirit where health and safety come first and everyone looks out for one another.

Communicate regularly and effectively

• True communication takes place in the presence of relationship and trust.
• Update workers on developments and performance in health and safety and encourage feedback.
• Be approachable and receptive to your workers’ ideas.
• Respond to concerns immediately and discuss the actions you will take.

Process Engineering may support you on implementing an effective safety leadership by:

• Management Consulting on methods to increase engagement and personnel’s participation.
• Developing safety campaigns.
• Creating communication tools.
• Supporting on behavioral safety coaching techniques.