How can you help employees take ownership of process safety?

Beyond communicating the vision, focus on nurturing psychological safety. Encourage an environment where employees feel secure sharing concerns or uncertainties about process safety. When employees feel psychologically safe, they're more likely to speak up about potential hazards or risks without fear of criticism. This openness creates a proactive safety culture, enabling early identification and resolution of safety issues. A psychologically safe workplace promotes trust, allowing for robust discussions and innovative solutions that enhance overall process safety awareness and ownership among employees.

Don’t overlook the basics here. It’s a good thing to create a big headliner so everyone knows the vision but don’t blow off employees when they reach out with one-off questions, comments or concerns about things in their own worlds. A major portion of an effective safety program is customer service. Treat your employees like your internal CUSTOMERS. You are there to serve and support them. Be responsive and address all valid concerns in a reasonable timeframe. Nothing kills a shared vision faster than feeling pigeonholed or ignored. You can also try utilizing some empathy and legitimately caring about your employees and their issues. That’s always nice too. ?? If you want employees to buy in to your mission, then you should buy into theirs.

Here are some effective strategies to encourage employee ownership of process safety: 1. Empower and Engage Employees: -Involve employees in safety decision-making. -Encourage open communication. -Recognize and reward safe behavior. 2. Provide Comprehensive Training and Resources: -Thorough safety training - Access to safety information. - Encourage continuous learning. 3. Establish Clear Expectations and Accountability: -Define clear safety expectations. -Implement effective incident investigation procedures. -Hold individuals accountable. 4. Promote a Positive Safety Culture: -Integrate safety into all aspects of work. -Lead by example. -Celebrate safety achievements.

Experience has shown that employee tend more to take ownership of process safety among other factors, when they're clearly understand how it is as much about them individually as it is about entire processes. Clearly communicating the vision is a huge factor for sure. Educating employee on process safety should be a continual and structured participatory process as complacency easily sets in. Safety consciousness becomes habitual when it is systemic in the management system if accountability is encouraged followed up on. Finally, the opinions of personnel should be valued in matters around process safety, and contributions to safety discussions 'rewarded' since many employee crave regular validation to feel a part of the system

Fostering a culture of ownership involves empowering employees and recognizing the value of their experience and knowledge, which is a key strategy to developing a commitment to process safety. Establishing feedback mechanisms, enabling a culture of continuous improvement, and promptly implementing those suggestions demonstrate leadership by example. This proactive approach enhances the safety culture and reinforces that safety everyone's responsibility.

You can't fix hazards you don't know about. Therefore, if the goal is eliminating hazards, the first step is learning about the hazards. Since you can't be in all places at all times, the best bet is to empower and educate your employees to recognize hazards and report them. It's a communication problem at the end of the day. In order to solve this you should 1. Build communication pipelines and 2. Eliminate barriers to communication. We all know the biggest killer of communication is fear. Dispel fear by empowering employees. Fear kills communication. Failure to communicate kills employees.

The goal of education is enlightenment or shedding light on areas of shadow in the students' knowledge base. Ignorance can lead to catastrophic outcomes. We are all ignorant of many things. The goal of the safety department is to shine a light and reduce that ignorance. It is important to note that training only goes so far. A Harvard study found that humans are distracted 47% of the time. Another study I read found that when you are training, only a percent of the audience is paying attention at any one time. Regular and relevant training is great but due to the fact humans are not robots, we cannot expect employees to be 100% compliant with our expectations 100% of the time.