HSE Leadership Practices at Different Management Levels

Safety Culture Transformation Through Executive Engagement

Developing a safety culture at a large industrial enterprise is impossible without the personal involvement of managers at all levels. Formal compliance with procedures is not enough — a transition to conscious leadership is required, where top management and line managers demonstrate their commitment to HSE principles by personal example. In this webinar, Dmitry Kolmakov, HSE Director at Unipro PJSC, breaks down a system of practical tools that help build end-to-end responsibility for safety: from the CEO to the frontline worker.

Tools for Top Management Engagement

Using his company as an example, the speaker shows how safety issues can be integrated into the regular agenda of top management. The foundation is the HSE Committee, where functional directors and branch managers report on the implementation of personal safety plans. To assess progress, a corporate tool based on the Hudson safety culture model is used, allowing for transparent planning of departments' transition to new maturity levels.

Special attention is given to the "Fresh Look" project. Its essence is that functional directors (including HR, procurement, or legal directors), when visiting branches, mandatorily conduct walk-arounds of production sites together with branch management. This is not just an inspection, but a dialogue with personnel at their workplaces, an assessment of conditions for high-risk work, and the subsequent development of corrective actions with the allocation of necessary funding.

High-Risk Management and Competence Centers

It is impossible to control all hazards equally effectively at the same time, so the presentation details an approach to prioritization. Five key areas of high risk are identified: electrical work, work at height, lifting operations, confined space entry, and hot work. Focus programs are implemented for each area, including safety months, departmental self-assessments, and cross-audits.

To deeply develop standards, Competence Centers have been created based in various branches. Each center oversees a specific type of high-risk work, and leadership support is provided by one of the executive functional directors. This reduces the time needed to develop regulations and ensures a consistently high safety standard across the entire company.

Personnel Motivation and Requirement Visualization

Changing workers' attitudes toward safety requires a balance between strict rules and positive motivation. The speaker discusses the implementation of five "Life-Saving Rules," the violation of which leads to unconditional dismissal without the right to reinstatement. In contrast, the "Safety Star" competition operates, where employees can receive a bonus equal to a monthly salary for safe work performance.

Among the unconventional practices presented in the report:

• Safety Passport: an individual worker's booklet with a photo, containing key rules and pages for recording violations or rewards.
• Visualized Instructions: converting complex text regulations into an infographic format (similar to airplane safety instructions) for better comprehension by line personnel.
• Projective Psychological Research: working with focus groups to identify workers' subconscious attitudes toward risks, allowing communication materials and posters to be adapted to the specifics of a particular branch.

What you will learn from this webinar:

• How to develop and implement personal HSE plans for non-production top managers?
• What criteria are used to evaluate the effectiveness of High-Risk Competence Centers?
• How does the "Safety Star" motivation system work, and who makes the decision on bonuses?
• How do psychologists' projective techniques help improve the effectiveness of visual HSE propaganda?
• How to organize a visual identification system for worker permits on site using hard hat stickers?