Best Practices for Building Effective Relationships around Safety

According the Judy Agnew, Ph.D. a senior vice president of ADI, to ensure the best possible results for your safety initiatives, you need to have effective relationships between management and employees.  For that to occur, there are several important things that management can do.  Following are some of these:

• Make expectations extremely clear, don’t leave room for assumptions

• Learn to be an active listener, using the skills necessary to do so.

• Take the time to acknowledge positive safety performance, not just mistakes or errors

• Engage employees with questions to understand problems and issues don’t just jump to conclusions.  Good questions uncover details, there are two sides to every story

• Ask your direct reports to give you feedback on your own effectiveness and areas that you can improve on. Admit when you make mistakes, and learning from them.

• Avoid blame wherever possible. What people do makes sense to them even if it doesn’t make sense to you.  Try to find out what lead to the undesired behavior

• Respond fairly to incidents, safety and other wise.

• You build respect with your direct reports when you solicit their opinions and input

• Follow through…do what you say you will do

• Stand up for your direct reports, verbally promote them and share their success with others, and if they make mistakes acknowledge some responsibility

• Your main objective is to help your employees become successful.  Find out what gets in their way and remove it if possible

• Use direct pinpointed feedback and do it just in time. 

• Trust your employees, give them responsibilities and avoid micromanaging them.

• Treat your employees like people, showing interest in their lives with concern and consideration Make expectations extremely clear, don’t leave room for assumptions

• Learn to be an active listener, using the skills necessary to do so.

• Take the time to acknowledge positive safety performance, not just mistakes or errors

• Engage employees with questions to understand problems and issues don’t just jump to conclusions.  Good questions uncover details, there are two sides to every story

• Ask your direct reports to give you feedback on your own effectiveness and areas that you can improve on. Admit when you make mistakes, and learning from them.

• Avoid blame wherever possible. What people do makes sense to them even if it doesn’t make sense to you.  Try to find out what lead to the undesired behavior

• Respond fairly to incidents, safety and other wise.

• You build respect with your direct reports when you solicit their opinions and input

• Follow through…do what you say you will do

• Stand up for your direct reports, verbally promote them and share their success with others, and if they make mistakes acknowledge some responsibility

• Your main objective is to help your employees become successful.  Find out what gets in their way and remove it if possible

• Use direct pinpointed feedback and do it just in time. That it the most effective

• Trust your employees, give them responsibilities and avoid micromanaging them.

• Treat your employees like people, showing interest in their lives with concern and consideration

These skills based on negotiation, flexibility and good will rather than coercion are well worth developing if you want to create relationships that result in a trusting and thus high-performance safety culture.

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