The major roles supervisors play in proactively ensuring workplace safety and health fall into four areas.

Behavior

Encourage safe behavior — Continuously encourage safe behavior through positive reinforcement and enforcement of your workplace safety rules.

Discourage unsafe behavior — Discourage unsafe behavior through employee coaching and feedback. Adopt a management style that does not condone (either spoken or unspoken) risk-taking behavior.

Evaluate performance — Provide individual employee feedback through assessing their safety behavior during performance evaluations. Set safety performance goals as a part of every annual performance evaluation.

Discipline — Use the formal employee discipline process when necessary.

Analysis and Improvement

The methods and processes for evaluating the safety and health risks in a workplace can be simple or complex; the important thing is to DO the evaluation, and then improve on it as needed. Be sure to use two people that are valuable in this process: the affected employee and the campus safety manager.

Encourage active safety culture participation by employees. Some ways to do this include:

  • Conduct periodic safety meetings with employees.
  • Encourage self-inspections of the workplace among employees.
  • Ask employees to report unsafe conditions immediately.
  • Provide multiple means for employees to bring forward suggestions, concerns, or reportable incidents.

Evaluate employee safety successes and failures, and discuss these successes and failures routinely with your manager.

Use results from evaluations and analyses to improve work conditions, processes, and procedures.

Training

  • Provide appropriate training on worker safety and health practices for yourself and your employees.
  • Retrain if employee behavior indicates it is necessary.
  • Document the training.
  • Periodically conduct documented safety inspections.
  • Use your findings from the inspection to guide new improvements in behavior, targets of future analysis, and topics for training.

Inspection

  • Periodically conduct documented safety inspections.
  • Use your findings from the inspection to guide new improvements in behavior, targets of future analysis, and topics for training.