Putting the 'LEAD' in safety leadership

Teys Australia’s safety leadership program empowers supervisors to meet productivity goals, maintain reasonable workloads and improve safety performance. Developed in partnership with the Office of Industrial Relations and Griffith University, the ‘LEAD’-based initiative took out the Pinnacle Award at the 2019 NSCA Foundation/GIO Workers Compensation National Safety Awards of Excellence, NATASHA DOYLE reports.

For Teys Australia and many organisations like it, equipping frontline leaders with the skills needed to meet competing demands — including high productivity and safety performance — is a recurring challenge. Often, supervisors are overlooked when it comes to leadership training, forcing them to ‘wing it’ when it comes to managing, influencing and motivating staff. To combat this, Teys Australia partnered with the Office of Industrial Relations and Griffith University to develop an award-winning safety leadership program based on the ‘LEAD’ (leverage, energise, adapt, defend) model. I spoke with Julia Teys, Group Manager Workplace Health and Safety at Teys Australia, to learn more about this award-winning program.

Julia Teys, Group Manager Workplace Health and Safety at Teys Australia

The model is applied to teams, rather than organisations, based on the level of risk involved in their work, whether they are facing any procedural or technological changes or whether an incident has occurred, according to a 2019 paper in Safety Science. “It is also based on the practices, or what people can actually do, to drive effective safety performance within teams,” Teys added. The LEAD-based program includes examples of health and safety best practices, activities and workplace projects, and was introduced to the company via a pilot program, with managers and supervisors providing “honest and valuable feedback”, according to Teys.

“After a lot of consultation, we identified LEAD champions across our business who would drive the program across their sites by training all managers and supervisors. The program was able to achieve changes in safety leadership practices and consequently, a survey of Teys’ safety climate placed it significantly above the industry benchmark,” Teys said. These changes include increases in worker engagement and commitment to their own health and safety and that of others, consultation, reporting and knowledge of hazards and monitoring controls, Teys said. Additionally, safety leaders are “encouraging and motivating workers to speak up”.

“Previously we have focused on those ‘technical safety skills’ required by our managers and supervisors, we are now coupling this with the ‘soft safety skills’ that are required to lead workers when exposed to various risks.” Teys believes this new focus on ‘soft safety skills’, along with their ‘co-design approach’, was key to the program’s success. Further, the Teys Australia team chose to train internal staff to deliver the program, rather than use external consultants. This allowed trained staff to act as “ongoing champions and support” for trainees. Teys said they also “encouraged accountability for learning by requiring participants to conduct in-field projects and report back on their learnings at each subsequent session”. Finally, Teys Australia tailored the program based on their teams’ needs and characteristics and used adult learning principles to create an “engaging” program.

Importantly, Teys said the program is designed to run long term, with graduate supervisors and managers able to access an online revision tool to refresh their skills and knowledge every 12 months. Moreover, the program is supported by senior management, with messages from the CEO and senior leaders “ensuring site general managers opened up and visibly reinforced each program implementation”. Teys Australia’s strong commitment to health and safety and, in particular — improving safety leadership — led them to win this year’s Pinnacle Award at the NSCA Foundation/GIO Workers Compensation National Safety Awards of Excellence.

Teys, who accepted the award, said this was “an outstanding achievement for Teys Australia”. “Safety culture starts with good safety leadership and we knew this was an area that we could focus on to continually drive a positive safety culture in our business. We are very proud and honoured to win the Pinnacle Award!” The company will keep working to ensure safety always comes first and that anyone who enters a Teys Australia facility, and their families, can “feel confident that they’ll return home safely”.

Natasha Doyle is Editorial Assistant of National Safety.

Image credits: ©Teys Australia