Page 50 - IGC BOOK

Improving Health and Safety Culture 3.2

Management Commitment and Leadership

The most important thing to remember about management
commitment and leadership is to 'lead by example'. As soon as
management undermines the safety standards in order to
achieve increased productivity, or ignores an unsafe act, then they
lose employee respect and trust and the whole safety culture of the
organisation is threatened. For example, it is very difficult to chastise
an employee for safety misconduct if management were condoning
or turning a blind eye to safety non-conformances the day before.

Itis important to ensure that the behaviour is positive in order to
produce positive results and a positive culture.

The top management can demonstrate their commitment by
- Set as an example
- Involvement and consultation with staff members in health and safety matters including.
• Risk Assessments
• Workplace inspections
• Accident Investigations
• Committee meetings.
- Sending newsletters, minutes of meetings, notices with references to safety.
- Actively taking part in safety tours, audits and meetings.

Competent Workers

Competence can be described as “the combination of training, skills, experience, and knowledge
that a person has and their ability to perform the task safely.

The employer must ensure that the staff carrying out the task must be competent enough to
carry out the task safely, competent workers will be able to perform their task safely. This is
observed by other staff members, will have an influence on positive safety culture.

Competence of an employee can be screened by having checks on their qualification, previous
employment experience and or references, interviewing employee and membership from any
professional bodies (IOSH, IIRSM etc.,).

Managers and supervisors must also have suitable competence in their field of work to
demonstrate correct behaviour towards health and safety, so that the correct health and safety
behaviour is learnt by their team members as main competencies to fulfil the job.
The managers and supervisors must be able to identify the mistake done by their workers when
carrying out the task, certainly this can be achieved if they are competent enough to with
sufficient knowledge about the discriminate between correct and poor behaviour of the worker
when performing a job.

ENSIGN| Unit IG1 – Element 3 – Managing Risks – Understanding People and Processes 5