Frontline Worker Leadership The Key to Sustainable Health and Safety Culture

Health and safety are cornerstones of Performance Solutions by Milliken. Our field-tested principles drive performance excellence, ensuring a daily safe return for every worker in manufacturing through the Milliken Safety Way.

A Culture of Health and Safety:
​A best-in-class health and safety program starts with a simple, non-negotiable commitment: zero workplace injuries.

How companies work backward from that commitment can take various forms, explains Dede Ericson, Director of Client Engagement for Performance Solutions by Milliken. “Are the people doing the work actively engaged in developing and leading the health and safety process?” Ericson asks. “They know the hazards. They have ideas on how to help solve those risks. Their perspective may contrast with the company’s health and safety professionals, who may be more focused on meeting compliance objectives.”

Scott Houston agrees. Houston is a UK-based Senior Practitioner at Performance Solutions by Milliken (PSbyM). The 30-year industry veteran offers a perspective informed by experience at Tetra Pak, the Swedish food and beverage packaging giant, and Schmalbach Lubeca PET Containers, supporting the European bottling operations of Coca-Cola and PepsiCo.

“The key is to get early buy-in from frontline associates,” Houston explains. “Line workers are used to having corporate programs imposed on them from above. It’s better to demonstrate a process that produces early wins to overcome natural skepticism and inspire involvement.”

What can an early health and safety win look like? It requires quickly understanding the challenges frontline workers routinely face. For Ericson and Houston, this means administering and reviewing a week’s worth of one-on-one assessments. “What’s life really like for a third-shift employee at 2:00 a.m.? What’s weighing on associates’ minds? You’d be surprised how quickly certain issues emerge. That presents early win opportunities,” Ericson says. “What hazard can we quickly reduce or eliminate?”

The win could be a relatively small matter, like fixing a long-faulty door. “You’re not even talking about moving the needle in terms of near-misses, accidents, or hazards,” Houston reports. “Now you have line workers’ attention. The win helps free conversation for deeper discussions.”

Frontline Worker Leadership:​

Why all the attention on frontline staff? Why not engage line supervisors and middle management? The construction of a health and safety culture is a bottom-up process. The key to culture development that outlives senior leadership changes, acquisitions/mergers, and consulting coaches is a frontline staff whose health and safety mindset can’t be easily shaken by inside or outside forces.

Central to that mindset is a reliance on leading health and safety indicators, which can often be a sharp counterpoint to more commonly applied lagging indicators—like the ubiquitous health and safety sign “XXXX days without an accident.” “How is that sign useful?” Houston questions. “It’s reactive. It looks backward, not forward. You need proactive leading indicators like the percentage of associate engagement in health and safety audits, corrective actions performed, risk assessments, safe behavior observations, and so on. You want folks looking forward, working on issues before an injury happens.”

There’s another reason why the frontline is center stage: Call it the Snowman Effect.

Recognizing the Snowman:

“Imagine a three-part snowman. In every organization I’ve worked with, the top snowball—senior leadership—has full buy-in on a health and safety transformation. They understand the cascading effect a health and safety culture have in building workforce involvement, engagement, and empowerment, all organizational positives. The bottom snowball—the hourly workforce—are the primary beneficiaries of a safe work environment, so they’re all-in,” explains Phil McIntyre, managing director of Performance Solutions by Milliken.

What’s less certain is the middle snowball—middle management. “Call them first-line supervisors. They often struggle with change. It’s difficult to allow people who answer to them to act with autonomy in creating a health and safety-based culture,” McIntyre says. “It’s not easy to win these folks over. The best you can usually hope for is they’ll see the transformation taking place, with or without them. Smart middle managers quickly see it’s in their best interest to get on board.”