Employee Involvement - LG&E and KU€¦ · Employee Involvement ... You discourage employee...
16
Employee Involvement Frank Downs Safety Specialist — Cane Run
Transcript of Employee Involvement - LG&E and KU€¦ · Employee Involvement ... You discourage employee...
Employee Involvement
Frank Downs Safety Specialist — Cane Run
Safety Core Elements
Employee Involvement − Capitalize on the company’s most valuable resource − employees − by actively creating and facilitating opportunities to become involved in loss-prevention efforts.
What YOU Can Do To Get Involved
• Lead by example• Correct unsafe or unhealthy acts promptly• Provide job-specific safety recommendations• Assist with workplace inspections• Stop and report unsafe acts or conditions• Safely operate equipment and tools for which you have been
trained and are specifically authorized to use• Report immediately incidents, injuries, illnesses or near
misses/close calls• Help ensure the safety of co-workers• Provide input about incidents, close calls and near misses
Ways To Get Involved
• Safety committee and focus group• Incident investigations• Procedure development• Safety and health audits or surveys• Development and implementation of safety and health
training• Job safety analyses• Recommendations for specific actions in response to
employee safety suggestions• Problem-solving techniques to seek solutions to identified
safety and health problems
“Why I Choose to Work Safe”
GET INVOLVED
Empowerment
Larry DodsonSafety and Technical Training ConsultantEast Operations Center
What is true employee empowerment?
a. Unleashing a person’s knowledge and skills to make decisions and accomplish goals
b. Forcing an employee to work on his own
c. Developing skills for the benefit of the business
d. Allowing an employee to work without a supervisor
What is true employee empowerment?
a. Unleashing a person’s knowledge and skills to make decisions and accomplish goals
b. Forcing an employee to work on his own
c. Developing skills for the benefit of the business
d. Allowing an employee to work without a supervisor
Empowerment
Key Elements of Employee Empowerment
• Trust
• Communication
• Commitment
• Awareness
• Training
• Positive attitude
• Ownership
Empowerment
Why It Matters...
• Reduces incident rates
• Supports the best safety programs
• The job being done the right way
Empowerment
Why Employee Empowerment Fails
Management Mistakes
Empowerment fails when managers fail to:
• Really understand what employee empowerment means
— Employee empowerment is a philosophy that enables employees to make decisions about safety and their jobs
Presenter
Presentation Notes
Managers don’t really understand what employee empowerment means. They have a vague notion that employee empowerment means you start a teams to address employee morale or safety issues. You ask people what they think about something at a meeting. You allow employees to help plan the company picnic. Wrong. Managers fail to establish boundaries for employee empowerment. In your absence, what decisions can be made by employees? What decisions can they make day-by-day that they do not need to have permission or oversight to make? These boundaries must be defined or employee empowerment efforts fail. The Sunshine Silver Mine Disaster: Everyone needs to have clearly defined roles. They need to understand what to do and who has authority
Management Mistakes
Empowerment fails when managers…
• Fail to define the decision-making authority and boundaries with staff, but then micromanage the work
• Second-guess the decisions of employees they have given the authority to make a decision
• Abdicate all responsibility and accountability for decision-making
Presenter
Presentation Notes
Managers define the decision-making authority and boundaries with staff, but then micromanage the work. This is usually because managers don’t trust employees to make good decisions. Employees know this and either craftily make decisions on their own and hide their results or they come to you for everything because they don’t know what they really can control. Second guess the decisions of employees you have given the authority to make a decision You can help staff make good decisions by coaching, training, and providing necessary information. You can even model good decision making, But, what you cannot do, unless a serious complication will result, is undermine or change the decision you had empowered an employee to make. You discourage employee empowerment for the future. Managers abdicate all responsibility and accountability for decision-making When employees are blamed or punished for failures, mistakes, and less than optimum results, your employees will flee from employee empowerment. Or, they'll publicly identify reasons why failure was your fault, or his fault, or the other team's fault. If you fail to publicly support decisions and stand behind your employees or make them feel deserted. You can make employee empowerment fail in sixty seconds. I guarantee it.
Employee Mistakes
Empowerment fails when employees fail to:
• Seize the opportunity
• Be responsible and accountable
• Develop the courage to make decisions and mistakes
• Communicate openly
• Gain the knowledge on which to base decisions
Presenter
Presentation Notes
Empowerment can be threatening and some employees may not want the freedom empowerment, so they fail to seize the opportunity. This uncertainty is a change from working in an established routine where employees adhere to the rules and procedures and doing what their supervisor say to one where they make the decisions. Responsibility as well as accountability for one’s actions are a big pieces of empowerment, and often difficult to accept. Empowerment is very personal and taking on higher levels of responsibility requires courage to make decisions on one’s own and to be able to live with mistakes, which are a natural part of empowerment. Empowerment requires open communications and a willingness to put one’s thoughts on the table; to be exposed to scrutiny; to own up to ideas, assumptions, biases and fears; and help others to do the same. Empowerment means moving from reliance on supervisors to making one’s own decisions, which requires becoming more knowledgeable about many aspects of the business in order to make appropriate decisions.
Ask Yourself How The 3 “P’s Relate Empowerment
• Purpose
• Passion
• Pride
