SAFERi for CEOs / Administrators / Executive Directors
Health and Safety performance in Nova Scotia’s Long-Term Care, Home Care and Disability Support Program sectors has been a significant area of concern for many years. Organizations in these sectors have some of the highest rates of worker injuries in the province. In particular musculoskeletal injuries, and injuries and claims related to workplace violence result in high numbers of staff being absent from work and/or unable to perform their full job duties.
The SAFERi Safety Leadership Framework provides a practical, evidence based way for CEOs, Administrators, and Executive Directors of Nova Scotia’s Long Term Care, Home Care/Home Support, and Disability Support Program sector organizations to improve the safety culture and organizational health and safety performance by being more visible and active safety leaders.
Below you’ll find some tools designed to help CEOs, Administrators, and Executive Directors self-assess their level of safety leadership based on the SAFERi Safety Leadership Framework.
You can complete the self-assessment on-line or download the self-assessment tool as a PDF document. The “SAFERi – Guide to setting safety leadership goals” can also be downloaded as a PDF file, as can a 360-review version of the SAFERi Safety Leadership Assessment tool!
Note: a PDF version of the tool can be emailed to you on request. Please contact [email protected] if you’d like to receive one.
What Next?
STEP 1
After completing the Safety Leadership Safety Self-Assessment, take some time to review your answers and responses. Review any notes or thoughts you made about the specific SAFERi element and the safety practices highlighted in the self-assessment tool. The Self-Assessment tool results combined with the thoughts you made while completing it will provide you with good insight into how actively you are helping to support and lead your organization’s health and safety program.
STEP 2
SAFERi Safety Leadership 360 Review Assessment Tool (Click here to download)
After reviewing your self-assessment results, you might consider asking your senior leadership team to complete the Safety Leadership Self-Assessment 360 Review tool. The 360 review tool asks others about how and how often you demonstrate safety leadership, based on their own observations and experiences with you and what they hear from others in the organization.
You may want to meet with the entire senior leadership team to talk to them about the 360 review tool, why you are asking them to complete it, to reassure them that you are looking for an open, frank and honest review of your safety leadership, and that you are open to talking about their views / opinions and experiences. Also, it is best to let them know that you are committed to improving your safety leadership and to implementing more effective and regular safety leadership practices.
STEP 3
Comparing your personal self-assessment results to the results from the 360 Review tool can help you to reflect on areas of inconsistency between how you view yourself as a safety leader and how you are viewed from a safety leadership point of view by others. It can help to identify where you need to improve how you communicate your safety vision / participation, where you need to be more visible and vocal in your support for health and safety programs and activities, and identify opportunities for you to better demonstrate to staff the importance of health and safety in your organization.
Note: if you or any member of your senior leadership team have concerns about using the 360 review tool, AWARE-NS can administer the 360 Review tool to your senior leadership team and then collate and communicate anonymized results.
STEP 4
SAFERi – Guide to setting safety leadership goals (PDF) (Click here to download)
The AWARE-NS SAFERi – Guide to setting safety leadership goals provides you with some guidance and worksheets to help you set goals and create an action plan that will help you maintain or enhance your safety leadership!
The Six SAFERi Safety Leadership Framework Elements
S: Speak About Safety
- Talk about worker health and safety to highlight its importance to you as a leader.
- Communicate your commitment to ‘safety for all’ in a persuasive way, fostering a sense of urgency, and setting a personal example for others to follow.
A: Be Actively Involved
- Clarify your personal vision of ‘safety for all’ by visibly demonstrating to your people that nothing is more important to you than their health and safety.
- Seek out opportunities to be involved in safety activities like incident investigations, frontline safety meetings, inspections, and safety briefings.
F: Focus On Health & Safety as a Continuous Quality Improvement Strategy
- Commit the necessary resources – people, equipment, your time – to strengthen safety performance.
- Support SAW/RTW programs in managing workers’ injuries and recovery to reduce the time an injured worker is away from work, while ensuring workers feel respected and supported throughout the process.
- Include workplace health and safety measures within your organization’s performance indicators (or balanced score card) to impact strategic and operational planning for your organization.
- Regularly monitor safety processes and performance outcomes to know how the organization is tracking against KPIs and changing the way things are done to reflect new learnings
- Continually striving for health and safety improvements.
E: Engage & Empower Your People
- Involve people so they know what they need to do, feel empowered to do it and inspired to achieve common safety goals.
- Give people the knowledge, skills, information, resources, and responsibility for making the workplace safer.
- Hold yourself and your people to account.
R: Recognize, Reward & Celebrate Success
- Take time to find out about and acknowledge the efforts employees put into safety and look for meaningful ways to celebrate safety successes.
- Establish safety recognition programs for both individual contributions to a safer workplace and corporate improvements of health and safety outcomes.
i: Identify & Manage Risk
- Ask the right questions and insist on timely, accurate, and impartial information to identify safety opportunities and mitigate risks.
