“From Compliance to Culture” Safety Leadership Training Workshop

"From Compliance to Culture" Safety Leadership Training Workshop | safety culture training | leading safety culture | call to action!Our wildly popular safety leadership training workshop is fully tailored to your company environment and conducted onsite at a location of your choice.

We work with you through the session preparation process to help you select the right venue, session timing and target audience, and to tailor the session to your specifications.

Below is a detailed description of the workshop.  Please contact us for more information and pricing details:

Workshop Description

This two-day workshop is targeted to those in leadership (or perceived leadership) roles in the organization. In addition to operations/production leaders (team leads, supervisors, managers, directors and VPs), safety team-members and safety-committee members should also attend this session. As space permits, it’s also recommended to include key leadership from the corporate office side to begin spreading the same culture throughout the entire company.

This is a workshop in the truest sense of the word, not a seminar. It is a roll-up-your-sleeves, get-out-of-your-seat, skills-building experience that imparts real-world skills for leading a safety culture in the work environment. This workshop is a radical culture-immersion experience that changes the way we think about safety and the way we behave in safety situations. It imparts a common language and vision around leading safety as a culture, develops leadership presence, builds communication and coaching skills, and equips participants with the tools necessary to lead a safety culture.

We recommend a minimum number of 20 participants per session to maximize engagement, learning, and participant experience. Sessions are capped at 30 participants for this workshop due to the amount of real-world skills-building and coaching that takes place during the session. Exceptions are considered on a case-by-case basis.

Workshop Content

Day 1: Safety Leadership Foundations

Leading Safety as a Core Value

Safety culture starts with the way we think about and what we believe about safety. Culture is about people and relationships, not about compliance to regulations. Safety must be taken out of the category of “highest priority,” and placed in the category of “core value” before it can become a culture. This section is the paradigm shift (or turning point) of the session for attendees. Core values are identified and connected to safety, as are the differences between priorities and values. Participants work in groups to define the differences between leading safety as a culture and following safety as a compliance regulation.

Building Employee Engagement for a Stronger Safety Culture

There is a proven correlation between higher levels of employee engagement and a stronger commitment to safe-work behaviors. Engaged employees are five times less likely to have an accident, seven times less likely to have a loss-time injury, and they cost the organization one-sixth the cost of unengaged employees. They are natural owners of their environment, are actively look for opportunities to contribute, and are natural champions of leading a safety culture—if we just let them lead! This unit explores the “how-to”s and advantages of building employee engagement and ownership in our employees. Participants work in groups to discover how to apply the drivers of engagement specifically to their own environment.

Understanding and Using Safety-Leadership Styles 

Real communication takes place only through employee engagement. That starts by understanding how people think and behave in response to our message. It entails that we adjust our leadership-communication style to maximize engagement and transfer ownership for safety to our listeners. This section focuses on how to lead situationally, as well as how to identify and use your own personal safety-leadership styles to engage people in safety conversations. Participants work in groups to determine what leadership styles best fit different situations, and how best to communicate a safety culture to those who “just don’t seem to get it.”

Leading Safety so that Others Want to Follow

Leadership can be observed in our communication, in our passion, in our authenticity, and in our accessibility. People follow leaders who exhibit a strong leadership presence, who know what they believe about safety, and who communicate it with authenticity and passion. This section focuses on building safety-leadership skills, leadership presence, relationships of trust, responsibility v. culpability, and genuine care and concern for the people who look to you for guidance. Participants learn essential leadership and communication skills to engage a safety culture and are coached on those skills through safety-engagement scenarios.

Day 2: Building a Sustainable Safety Culture

Improving the Quality and Effectiveness of Our Safety Talks

This unit builds on the previous unit by elaborating on best practices for engaging employees in safety meetings, safety talks, pre-job meetings, general production meetings, and other venues for safety communication. Participants prepare and deliver two separate safety-meeting scenarios (a general safety meeting and a pre-job safety meeting) and are coached on improvements. It also covers and uses various tools for holding effective safety meetings, including a pre-job meeting form, a safety-meeting tip-board, and laminated job aids that help guide participants in creating a meaningful discussion around safety while building safety into every production meeting.

Coaching Safety-Leadership Performance and Behaviors

Safety leadership must be reinforced through coaching, and coaching must be done in a way that transfers ownership for performance and behavioral changes to the person who is being coached.  Our coaching method starts with communicating a concrete goal against which current levels of performance and behaviors are measured.  Participants learn established coaching principles, how to generate options for improvements with the person they are coaching, and how to transfer ownership for those improvements and gain a solid commitment for improvements from the person who is being coached.  Participants also engage in a real-world coaching situation and report the results.

Coaching On-the-Spot Unsafe Behaviors

When observing an unsafe behavior, the first step is to stop the action and get the employee to a safe place. But then we must engage the employee in a conversation about our safety-culture goals, behaviors and their consequences, and core values. They must be internally motivated to do the right thing even when no one is looking, and that comes only through helping them connect safety to their own core values. This unit introduces a coaching model that is tailored to each participant and applied to a number of safety-engagement scenarios.

Making the Most of Our Time in the Field and on the Floor

Safety cultures are significantly impacted by the degree to which leadership is “present” in the day-to-day activities of the workforce and the extent to which they make a point to observe the work practices of their teams. This is best accomplished through regularly scheduled safety-leadership walkthroughs. But leaders must go beyond the typical management safety audit and focus instead on leadership engagements with their employees to ensure process-safety integrity with safety-critical tasks. This section emphasizes the differences between management walk-arounds and safety-leadership walk-arounds, explores the common causes of missed leadership opportunities during these walk-arounds, suggests the DOs and DON’Ts of intelligence-gathering questions, and lays out a strategy for maximizing our time in the field.

Developing Best Practices for Safety Leadership

Now that we know and understand the principles of safety leadership, how do we tailor them to our environment? Participants brainstorm real-world applications of the safety-leadership principles and work out an action plan to lead safety as a culture in their own environments. The session ends with a signed safety-leadership commitment from all participants.

Only have a few people to train and need an alternative to our onsite workshop? Take a look at our online version of this workshop!

Have a large Spanish-speaking employee base and need to train them in safety culture? Consider our “De Cumplimiento a Cultura” Safety Leadership Training en Español!

Workshop Reviews

No program can claim to be effective until it has its customers’ stamp of approval. Our program has consistently reduced our clients’ recordable incidents (TRIR) by an average of 40% in the first year of its implementation, with continuing improvements of 20% to 40% each subsequent year the program is followed. We have a track record that is second to none. Our clients consistently report “best-ever safety performance” years after implementing our program, and some have won awards for the improvements they were able to achieve. Below are the thoughts of just some of our clients who have gone through our program:

“I honestly believe that the information shared during the meeting was ‘the missing link’ between where we are and where we want to be in regards to safety performance. I had a major ‘a-ha’ moment during the training. I hope this is shared with the rest of our company with an emphasis on management and leadership. I have personally committed to implementing the training both in my professional and personal life.”

“Best program of this type I have been part of in my 36 years in the industry.”

“This program changed the way I look at safety and it will help instill safety as a core value.”

“This is by far the best safety training I have ever encountered in all my work experience. Keep up the good work; I can’t wait to start spreading the seeds.”

“This program really had a great message. This is my first exposure to safety-leadership training and it really helped me put safety in the right perspective.”

“You guy’s did a great job putting this together; one of the best programs I have gone through. I think everyone in the company should go through this.”

“I believe this was the best information that I have been given at a conference or training seminar in my 26 yrs as a supervisor. GREAT JOB.”

“By far the best safety training ever.”

“One of the best programs I’ve been a part of in my career, and the best I’ve experienced at our company.”

“The course was one of the better I’ve attended for the 20 or so years that I have been attending events of this type.”

“I thought this program was an OUTSTANDING training event. The facilitators did an excellent job with the material, and the content of the material was exactly what supervisors (and hourly employees) need to help promote our safety culture. I fully support the idea to make this training MANDATORY in all of the company’s field offices for supervisors and hourly employees.”

“Best program I have attended in my 15 years on the job.”

“Fantastic program. Thank you!”

“This training should be offered to everyone in a leadership role or future leadership role with the company. One of the best safety training programs I have ever been a part of.”

“Great program–not what I thought it would be.”

“This was truly one of the better seminars that I have attended. I would recommend this material be applied company wide.”

See more client testimonials here!

Contact Us

If you’d like more information on how we can help improve your safety culture, please contact us at:

Phone: 303.278.8610
Email: [email protected]