Aggregates Manager Digital Magazine
Issue link: http://read.dmtmag.com/i/420189
AGGREGATES MANAGER December 2014 36 To most of your workforce, the supervisor is the boss and has the greatest influence on daily activities. by Zach Knoop Focus on Supervisors I n last month's issue, I explored the role that middle managers play in embedding safety as a core value into the organization. One of those critical roles is to hold supervisors accountable for successfully completing defined and agreed- upon safety activities that, if done well, will result in improved safety performance. Now, we take a closer look at the role of a supervisor in creating safety excellence. A fundamental mistake that many organizations make when measuring safety performance is equat- ing the absence of accidents with success. If you cannot generate a list of specific, measurable safety activities being done on a regular basis to ensure the absence of accidents, then your incident rate may be the product of luck and chance, not the result of an effective safety system. Every organization's goal is (or should be) the complete elimination of injuries. Liken your safety management system to a river on which the results you want to achieve are located downstream. What occurs upstream determines what happens down- stream, so, in order to achieve zero-incident perfor- mance, you must fulfill specific activities upstream. When the focus is placed on manageable, control- lable upstream safety activities or processes (lead- ing indicators), rather than solely on uncontrollable downstream results (lagging indicators), safety excellence can be achieved and sustained. So where does the supervisor fit into this system? To the majority of your workforce, the frontline su- pervisor is the boss, and therefore has the greatest ability to influence the behaviors of your workers. It is quite common in the aggregates industry to promote from within the organization. Most su- pervisors were, at one time, a member of the crew that they now supervise and were elevated to that position due to their ability to accomplish tasks ef- ficiently and effectively. I have found that very few supervisors were promoted to the position because they were the safest employee on the crew. When they become supervisors, they are rarely given ex- pectations for safety and may not know how their safety performance will be measured or the extent of their authority. Safety management expert Dr. Dan Petersen, who