Benchmarking Session: "How to Engage in Safety: From Top Management to Workers"

From Ambassadors to Top Managers: How to Engage the Entire Company in Safety

Engaging personnel in HSE issues is one of the most difficult tasks for any manufacturing company. How can we ensure that safety ceases to be solely the responsibility of specialized professionals and becomes part of every employee's daily work? During the benchmarking session, experts from leading industrial companies share their approaches to creating a safety culture that spans all levels — from workers to top management.

The Institution of Safety Culture Representatives: Rosenergoatom's Experience

Irina Kosareva, Project Manager of the Corporate Culture Change Management Group at Rosenergoatom, talks about a large-scale project that began in 2014 with 46 people and has grown to more than 1,100 safety culture representatives. The main difference of this institution is the complete absence of supervisory and inspection functions. Representatives do not punish; their task is to promote the development of a safety culture through communication and personal example.

Why is this important? Workers are often afraid to speak openly about minor problems, fearing punishment. Representatives, being informal leaders trusted by the team, create an atmosphere of openness. They collect information on low-level events (Near Misses), participate in projects to reduce the impact of psychological factors on personnel errors, and conduct full-scale self-assessments of the safety culture state.

Personal Projects of Top Managers: When Leadership Becomes Visible

The second practice of Rosenergoatom is aimed at top management. Following self-assessments and Rostechnadzor inspections, a deficit of safety leadership was identified. The solution was the personal projects of top managers. However, as the speaker notes, not all projects were successful. Success came only when the manager personally immersed themselves in the project, linked it to the real problems of their department, and did not completely delegate it to subordinates.

How does this work in practice? Projects that "took off" were accompanied by personal statements from managers posted at production sites. This made their commitments visible to all employees, which significantly increased the level of trust and engagement.

Safety Ambassadors: How to Make HSE Interesting

Mikhail Zhiganov, Director of the Safety Culture Development Department at Nornickel, presents the "Safety Ambassadors" project. The project is based on an understanding of basic human needs: the desire to belong to a group, to be part of something bigger, and to realize one's values. Ambassadors are workers who sincerely want to participate in improving working conditions.

What do they do? Ambassadors shoot videos for training, participate in identifying workplace risks, and help conduct HSE events. Importantly, their activities are supported at the highest level: company vice presidents participate in strategic sessions with ambassadors, which emphasizes the significance of their work.

Managerial Participation: Developing Leadership Competencies

Another Nornickel project is aimed at developing the leadership competencies of production managers. Instead of a top-down directive of ready-made plans, managers were invited to become co-participants in developing HSE measures. When a person invests their ideas into a project, it becomes valuable to them.

As a result, the managers themselves determined the pool of measures: leadership walkarounds, revision of instructions, and solving workers' problems. The plan was implemented ahead of schedule, and the level of leadership in the department, according to pulse surveys, exceeded the company average.

What you will learn from this webinar:

• How to create an institution of informal safety leaders and why they should not be given supervisory functions?
• What mistakes do top managers make when implementing personal safety projects and how to avoid them?
• How to motivate workers to become safety ambassadors without significant financial costs?
• Why does a directive approach to engaging managers work worse than the participation method?
• How to evaluate the effectiveness of implemented personnel engagement tools?