Severstal Safety Volunteers

Volunteering as a Tool for Developing a Safety Culture

The development of a safety culture is impossible without the active involvement of the employees themselves. Oksana Zalevskaya, Head of the Integrated HSE System at Severstal, shares her experience in creating and developing the safety volunteer movement. The presentation details the company's approach to fostering a conscious attitude towards safety among workers, where personal example and commitment to company values become the key factors.

The "Safety Volunteer" Movement: From Idea to Implementation

The volunteering program at Severstal started a year and a half ago. Initially, the focus was on training managers in leadership behavior models within the VZOR project. After that, the involvement of workers began. The speaker emphasizes that the company consciously abandoned quantitative KPIs for volunteers, focusing instead on quality and sincere motivation. Currently, about 400 people participate in the movement.

• No rigid boundaries: Volunteers are not forced into strict roles or mandatory heavy training programs. The approach is flexible: the company helps develop the skills requested by the volunteers themselves (especially soft skills).
• Partnership and human-centricity: Volunteers participate in leadership walkarounds, round tables, and test transformation programs. This allows them to understand the logic of management decisions, and managers to see the situation through the eyes of the workers.
• Non-financial motivation: Since volunteering is based on ideas and values, incentives are non-financial. These include business breakfasts with top management, personal coaching, tours of company assets, participation in cross-audits, and CEO awards.

Who Can Become a Safety Volunteer?

The speaker breaks down the selection criteria for volunteers. The main rule is the absence of violations of basic life-saving rules for a year. There are no age or position restrictions among workers. Although the program was initially created for blue-collar workers, initiatives from engineering and technical personnel are now emerging, indicating a growing interest in the movement.

What You Will Learn from This Webinar:

• How to launch a safety volunteer movement at a large enterprise?
• Why does abandoning quantitative KPIs promote sincere volunteering?
• What non-financial motivation tools work effectively for volunteers?
• How to build partnerships between worker-volunteers and management?