Culture (leadership and teamwork)
The best safety leaders develop their practices over time, learning from others along the way.
Safety leadership exists at all levels of an organisation and across all industries. While the level of safety maturity will vary from person to person and across different organisations, all safety leaders share a common objective - to create safer and more productive workplaces.
Build safety capability by encouraging open discussions about safety, including sharing quality information up and down an organisation to promote learning and improvement. Improve co-operation and trust in your workplace by engaging in consultation about the benefits of supporting a worker’s recovery and return to work.
- Support for work health and safety (WHS) from managers, supervisors, and co-workers will increase when value is placed on speaking up on WHS issues.
- Encourage discussion about problems, errors, and incidents, to reduce the likelihood of major destructive or harmful event.
- Through communication, planning, and coordination, you can identify and assess risks and challenges, and make meaningful changes to safety and effective team performance.
- As a leader or supervisor, you can take action to prevent workers’ compensation stigma that can trigger negative stereotyping or labelling of an injured or ill worker.
- Providing practical support to help solve issues and offer solutions can assist your worker’s recovery and return to work.
Leadership and teamwork have a significant impact on safety capability. View the Resources for tips on building your own leadership or check out the LEAD model and framework to further your understanding of safety leadership theory.
The Safety leadership at work program is designed to improve safety culture and contribute to reducing work-related injuries and fatalities in Queensland workplaces. Through the program, safety leaders at all levels have the opportunity to learn from others, develop their safety leadership skills and build a positive safety culture in their workplace.
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Social support for safety
Employees form beliefs about the level of assistance an organisation provides and the extent it values their individual contribution.
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Team coordination and shared understanding
Safety capability is achieved with safe and effective team performance involving communication, planning and coordination.
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Team climate to speak up
Encourage open discussion in the workplace about safety, including speaking up to disclose problems, errors, incidents and near misses.
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Injury illness and stigma
Safety capability means taking action to stop stigma around work-related injury and illness. This can trigger negative stereotyping or label...
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Supervisor support
Supervisor support is important to help an injured or ill worker’s effective recovery and RTW.
Resources
View the Resources page for information and tips on how to improve your systems and processes to build your safety capability and understand your legal obligations.
Measure your current level of organisational capability by registering for the Safety capability survey.
Register for survey