The 3 Biggest Safety Mistakes that New Supervisors Make and How to Fix Them
New supervisors struggle most with these 3 challenges
Front line supervisors are the most important people in your business.
Senior management sets the tone, safety professionals act as a resource, but it’s the front-line supervisors who are responsible for implementation. That implementation covers everything from production, scheduling, and managing employees to executing your safety program.
It’s a huge responsibility, one that most new supervisors are not able to fully grasp until they’ve been at it for a while. Many times, new supervisors get thrown into the role without a lot of prior training and have to learn by trial and error. The problem with this is that when it comes to health and safety, trial and error puts employees at risk.
It’s not the supervisor’s fault, they simply don’t know what they don’t know.
Here are the 3 biggest mistakes I see new supervisors make when it comes to Health and Safety.
1. Thinking that Safety is just “Common Sense”.
Many supervisors (and business people in general) think that safety is just common sense. I hear this all the time.
The thing is, none of us spring from the womb with knowledge of workplace hazards and how to avoid them. We all have to be taught, and if your employees haven’t been trained on how to avoid specific hazards in your workplace, they won’t be able to protect themselves. Keeping your employees safe means showing them what the risks are in their job and what to do to stay safe. Expecting employees to know, for example, that a machine must be locked out properly prior to repairing it might be common sense to an experienced electrician, but if the employee is new to the job or has not done this task before, it’s not common sense, it’s a learned skill.
Make sure your employees are trained in the risks involved with their job, even if it may seem self-evident to more experienced workers.
2. Prioritizing Production over Safety (we’re just too busy …).
This is another common mistake and an easy one to make. Business is booming, orders have to get done, 3 people have called in sick and senior management is pressing the supervisor to get product out the door. It’s very tempting to take shortcuts. Things like equipment inspections and safe procedures may get left behind in an attempt to speed up the process.
And it works, at first. Maybe you get way with rushing or taking a shortcut the first time or the 5th or the 10th, but at some point it catches up with you and there’s an incident. And that incident puts you even further behind the 8 ball when it comes to production.
Here’s reality, without production, no business can pay the bills. But setting aside safety to focus exclusively on production often backfires and puts you in an even worse situation. Do the job that needs to be done, but so it safely and don’t rush through steps that are designed to keep workers safe.
3. Failing to Address Near Misses.
When a near miss occurs, new supervisors often think they’ve dodged a bullet and simply continue on with the day relieved that everyone is ok.
The problem is that a near miss is a symptom of a hazard in your work that is not being properly controlled. If something happened once that caused a near miss, and corrective steps aren’t taken, it’s only a matter of time until it happens again and this time someone may get hurt.
Near misses should be treated as seriously as actual accidents. Assess what happened, identify the root cause, establish suitable corrective actions and follow them through to completion. This way, you can ensure that the near miss won’t happen again and put people at risk.
New supervisors are key to your business and face a steep learning curve themselves. It’s crucial for leadership to train and support them when it comes to Health and Safety so they have the best possible chance to ensure all of your workers go home safely at the end of each day.
Well, that’s it for today. Thanks for reading and if you liked this content, your clients might too. I ghostwrite newsletter content, thought leadership articles and educational email courses for EHS professionals. If you’d like to learn more about how it works or just chat about your content strategy, send me a message or email me at dmoriarity@keystrokecommunications.com
Until next week,
Cheers,
Dan.
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