How being a leader in workplace safety makes you more competitive
By WhyNot Partnering
It’s a common misconception that being a strong leader means building a team of loyal followers. In fact, successful leaders are those who inspire leadership qualities and attributes in others, empowering their teams and encouraging them to be effective leaders in their own right.
This is particularly important within a workplace safety context, where you want to make sure that you achieve and surpass your safety goals and ambitions without having to bring in overly-bureaucratic systems, processes and procedures.
Such systems, more often than not, feel more like micromanagement than anything else, building a culture of mistrust among your workforce. Many will feel they are needed to protect the company, not to keep the staff safe.
And yet, a trust-based culture is absolutely essential for safety at work (especially true for those in hazardous industries like utilities, energy, mining and many others).
Empowering staff members to become safety leaders means you’ll be able to improve the safety climate of your organisation, driving down accident and injury rates significantly… without having to assume complete control all on your own.
Critical leadership skills that will help you deliver on this front include leading by example, active listening, engagement, communication, collaboration and recognition in response to positive progress and work achieved by employees.
As a result, you’ll enjoy all sorts of associated benefits, including greater productivity, improved morale, better teamwork across the board, fewer injuries, fewer illnesses and fewer disruptions to the work as a whole.
But there’s one particular benefit that should certainly not be overlooked and that’s the fact that you can improve your business reputation and make yourself more competitive, simply by focusing on developing a trust-based safety culture at work.
Prioritising health and safety is not just the ethical thing to do, it is also a sure-fire way to build resilience as an organisation, allowing you to reduce costs, drive down the risk of legal action for workplace incidents and reducing staff absences and turnover… all of which will help save you money.
You’re also sure to give your standing as a business a serious boost as a result, making you a more attractive prospect for investors and potential job applicants alike, while encouraging customers to come and do business with you, rather than your competition.
Of course, developing a safety culture at work doesn’t happen overnight and it can be difficult to know where to begin, particularly if you’ve been wedded to a traditional way of working for some time.
But no progress was ever made by standing still and it may well be that you’ve started to see your safety performance take a dip in recent years. This is a big signal that you need to take action – and now!
Take your first step into the unknown with the WhyNot Partnering team at your back. We can help you focus on unleashing the potential in your workforce across all levels of employees, helping you to identify and address the deep-rooted adaptive challenges in your business.
Get in touch with us today to find out more.
