Safety excellence requires the active involvement and trust of the workforce.  Sadly, however, despite all the hype promoting worker engagement and psychological safety these days many companies remain mired in a “Don’t Ask - Don’t Tell” culture that is wasting their most valuable assets – the workers.  Recent data from Gallup show that only around 25 percent of employees in the U.S. feel engaged.  This dismal figure is actually better than the global results from Gallup that show 85% of employees disengaged from their work.  Gallup’s State of the Global Workplace frames the problem like this: “they (the workers) are indifferent to your organization. They give you their time, but not their best effort nor their best ideas. They likely come to work wanting to make a difference --- but nobody has ever asked them to use their strengths to make the organization better.”

Obviously, the problem is far bigger than safety, although the fix can start, but not end, there.  Workers who feel like business partners and stakeholders in their company naturally want their actions, and the actions of others, to help their company succeed.  Transforming disaffected workers into work owners and champions for continuous improvement is, of course, a formidable challenge and won’t happen overnight.  Building the trust necessary to promote engagement takes time and targeted effort.  Those of us in safety can, however, help move the needle by promoting treatment of workers as assets and problem solvers rather than liabilities in need of traditional “fixes” such as behavioral modification programs and ever more command and control. This will require a fundamental shift in thinking for many in our profession.  

Course Objectives:

• Learn why worker engagement is critical for safety excellence.

• Embrace workers as safety assets rather than error prone safety liabilities.

• Understand the importance of giving workers opportunities for personal control over their work. 

• Understand the importance of trust to safety and learn the keys to building that trust.

• Understand the vital role of management to worker engagement.

• Understand that safety is a team sport and must be done with the workers not to the workers.

Why Should You Attend:

Research has found that in command-and-control cultures with limited worker involvement you find lower productivity, lower profits, higher turnover, and more safety incidents than in companies demonstrating concern for the wellbeing and safety of their employees.  On the other hand, company cultures where employees are engaged and feel cared for are 71% less likely to report burnout and five times more likely to strongly advocate for their company as a good place to work.  The key to harnessing worker safety engagement is to stop doing safety to your employees and start creating safety with your employees.  Safety is a team sport.

Course Outline:

• The state and cost of worker disengagement.

• The futility of ever more rules and controls.

• The importance of trust and psychological safety to worker engagement.

• Management’s vital role in worker engagement.

• The power of listening.

• Making safety a team sport by involving workers in every aspect of safety from procedure writing incident investigation.

• The role of the safety professional.

What You Get:

• All slides and training materials.

• Links to additional information.

• Live Q & A with session presenter.

• Opportunity for follow-up connection with presenter via e-mail.

Who Will Benefit:

• Safety and Health professionals

• Regulatory compliance personnel

• Line management

• Employee Safety Committee members and union representatives.