Safety Is a Marathon, Not a Sprint: 4 Ways to Avoid Frustration as a Safety Manager

Being a safety manager can be a tough job. You’re working hard to create a strong safety program and achieve the ideal: a zero-incident safety culture. When incidents happen, it can shake your confidence and cause frustration. 

If you’ve felt discouraged in your work, know that you’re not alone, and your intentions are on the right track: a zero-incident safety culture is the goal. And we would like to offer a few tips to help reduce your frustrations, from shifting your mindset to actions you can take now to build an even stronger safety culture tomorrow. Read on to learn how.

1)    Safety Is a Marathon, Not a Sprint

The first thing to keep in mind is that safety is all about continuous improvement. There is no end state to safety: you’ll never arrive at “perfect” and no longer need to change anything in your safety program—and if such a state did exist, that wouldn’t be great news for safety manager job security. 

Risks will always exist and evolve as industries change, new processes are developed, and job duties shift. So instead of focusing on achieving a perfect safety state, choose small goals on shorter timelines that support your overall strategy, and start tackling them one at a time. 

If you try to fix everything all at once, you’ll have a much more difficult time than if you make incremental, 1% improvements to sections of your program on a regular basis. For example, lockout/tagout procedures can be complicated, and if you attempt to implement a complex system in a day, it’s less likely to be carried out correctly and consistently. 

Create a plan to get a new procedure situated that allows you to track progress toward compliance. By committing to making many small improvements over time, your job will feel more like forward motion and less like a Sisyphean task with no end in sight.

2)    Tell Stories with Data in Context

Humans are unfortunately not always convinced by data and statistics alone, but giving directives without explaining why they are important isn’t effective either. Instead of merely stating: “Wear your safety glasses because it’s the rule,” you need to show the value of the standard and how it protects workers from statistically relevant risks. 

We may not be programmed to weigh statistics over our personal feelings, but if you can tell a story around those statistics, it can help contextualize the data and sway worker feelings toward greater compliance.

At TenCate Protective Fabrics, we have regular meetings with our senior leadership team and safety staff to review incident data, what we have been doing, what we can be doing, and what needs attention. That information is then relayed to plant managers who disseminate the data alongside the message that it is our job as employers and managers to provide the workers with proper working conditions, and these are the things we are doing to support them. 

Using multi-channel strategies to communicate regulations and the statistics behind them is a big part of affecting safety improvement. Rather than relying on one mode of communication, incorporate several different angles to effectively communicate with your employees, from handouts and posted reminders to regular trainings and pre-shift safety meetings.

3)    Keep Communication Channels Open

Communication channels should be two-way at every level. As safety manager, you can leverage your network of plant managers, superintendents, and employees to be part of your safety team by encouraging open dialogue and having clear methods of escalation. 

Actively invite employees to participate in the safety program by using pre-shift and weekly meetings to ask if they’re having trouble with anything, or if anything is out of the ordinary and needs attention. 

Make sure all employees know the names of safety committee members, and have new employees do walk-throughs with safety staff to familiarize them with everything they need for their new job. 

4)    Empower Your Employees

Ensuring employees have everything they need for their jobs and know what exactly they need to do is a big part of empowering them. Imagine you sit down to take an important test, like the SAT, and then realize you don’t have a pencil. Now you’re flustered and scrambling to find or borrow the tool you need to carry out your task. 

Add on top of that any number of circumstances that led up to that moment, like maybe there was traffic on the way, or your sibling picked a fight—everyone is coming from something, and the last thing you want when you get to work is to not have the necessary tools or know-how to do what needs to be done. 

That’s why it’s so important to make sure workers have a comfortable and organized work environment. They don’t need to think about finding things or worry about trying to work around a malfunctioning machine; they know where their tools are and to tell a supervisor about the machine instead of trying to power through. 

As their safety manager, you can help set employees up for success by putting yourself in their shoes and doing pre-job safety checks, additional on-the-job trainings, and walking along with them to ensure their comfortability.

Incremental Changes for Lasting Impact

By tackling your safety program in manageable chunks, focusing on improving one small thing at a time, and engaging and empowering your workers with every tool they need to be successful and safe, you’re laying a solid foundation that will make continuous safety progress practically a given. And if you ever want to discuss your safety strategy with one of our TenCate Protective Fabrics experts, you can reach out to us here any time.