Unleashing the power of leadership: Driving excellence in occupational safety and health
Leadership plays a key role in establishing and maintaining a strong safety culture, fostering trust, motivation and emotional intelligence, and addressing harmful behaviors to ensure a safe and healthy work environment.
Leadership is the most important factor in ensuring a safe and healthy work environment. How leaders approach safety will determine the overall safety culture of an organization. Let’s discuss the critical role leaders play in building a safety culture and explore some key concepts that can help them be successful.
Building trust through psychological safety
One of the most important things leaders can do to promote safety is to create an environment of psychological safety. When employees feel they can voice their concerns without fear of negative consequences, it paves the way for honest communication about potential dangers or issues.
To build this kind of trust, leaders need to walk the talk — starting with speaking up about their own mistakes and responding constructively when employees raise concerns. By modeling openness and vulnerability, leaders send a powerful message that it’s okay to speak up.
Encourage employees to prioritize safety
Behavioral and leadership theories provide a framework for understanding why employees prioritize safety in the workplace. These theories provide valuable insight into the psychological and social factors that influence employee attitudes, behaviors, and decision-making processes regarding safety.
Abraham Maslow’s hierarchy of needs is a foundational theory that emphasizes the importance of meeting basic needs before focusing on higher level goals, and this also applies to worker safety. According to Maslow, humans have five levels of needs: physiological needs, safety needs, love and belongingness needs, self-esteem, and self-actualization needs.
From an occupational safety and health perspective, this theory suggests that employees will not be fully engaged in safety activities or prioritize safe behaviors unless their basic needs, such as job security, fair compensation, and a stable work environment, are met. Leaders need to ensure that these basic needs are addressed to lay the foundation for a strong safety culture.
Frederick Herzberg’s Two-Factor Theory, also known as the Motivation Hygiene Theory, is a further development of employee motivation. The theory proposes that there are two sets of factors that influence job satisfaction and motivation: hygiene factors and motivators. Hygiene factors such as working conditions, safety, and relationships with supervisors can lead to dissatisfaction if not properly addressed. However, the mere presence of these factors does not guarantee motivation.
