Safety Knights

Long time no see!

1) Training
2) Audits
3) Incident investigation

Not in any particular order

1) Learning Together
2) Honest Communication
3) Donuts

Donuts should be 1st.

1) Employee Engagement - aka constant feedback on hazard/near miss reporting
2) Training
3) Audits/Inspections

1) team dynamics
2) buy-in/rapport with leadership
3) flexibility in priorities

1. Teamwork. We are all smarter together than we are separately.
2. Knowing how to be a safety coach/consultant vice a safety cop. Give affirming feedback when workers are doing the correct thing. Giving correcting feedback when need. There should be more affirming than correcting.
3. Be a servant leader.

1. Communication
2. Recognition
3. A manager who is a leader

1. Positive and involved safety culture. From Senior Leadership right down to the workers.
2. 2-Way Communication
3. Effective Training

I have managed Safety Teams for more years than most of you have been on earth. To me the number #1 thing is to give them constructive things to do. We call that employee engagement these days! Give them responsibilities and diplomatically hold their feet to the fire. Train them in not only OHS and OSHA but in Teamwork, Consensus, Problem Solving, and even Leadership. You will get out of Safety Teams what you put into them! In the beginning serve them up some easy) balls to hit (easy problems to solve to build momentum and confidence). Treat them like a good basketball coach and plant seeds and let them think it was their idea! I learned a long time ago that my wins when making pitches to management for safety enhancements was like 50% at best. But when I planted a seed with a team of hourly employees and guided and nudged a bit, when they made the pitch to management we were about 95%!

Be prepared for meetings and and teach them how to be as well! I got to actual Zero Injuries by having Subject Matter Teams (Lockout, Machine Guarding, Haz Com, Ergo, PIT, Falls, and on and on! WE had 60% of the workforce on Safety Teams, the more the merrier! Expensive yes, but remember ZERO Injuries (Recordables for 2 years) and we had the Rate per 100 to less than 1.0 for 5 more years, in a Machine Shop with 500 employees and 300 dangerous machines!

Really late to the party on this...

1) Alignment with mission, vision, and values. Strong leadership sets the stage for effectiveness in any organization. If your safety team isn't rowing in the same direction as leadership, it's going to be a rough journey. Training, audits, etc. should all be consistent and use the same language.

2) Effective communication. If you make a change, how does the rest of the organization find out about it? It's important to have a framework for what gets communication, who does the communicating, who will be communicated to, and by what method. This way everyone knows where to look for new information.

3) Continuous improvement. An effective team has to be constantly evaluating and improving its processes and programs to better protect employees and reduce risks. The team should use data and metrics to measure its performance and identify areas for improvement.

1. Communication. Transparent communication between supervision and frontline employees. I prioritize ALWAYS following up with my operators on the floor, even if it's "no update yet".
2. Leadership support from above and across. If I didn't have management that cared about safety I'd be in a world of hurt.
3. Being visible and out on the floor. My manager is stuck doing managery things in his office all the time. I'm on the floor 60%+ of my time at work and the operators constantly bring up "while you're here", or "oh this happened by the way", and stuff that they didn't think to tell their supervisors/team leads. I am their "voice" so to speak, to management since they're normally swamped.