7 Habits of Highly Effective Safety and Health Professionals

JASON KUNZ

According to researchers at Duke University, habits account for 40 percent of our behaviors. Understanding how to build new habits (and refine current ones) is essential for making progress in your health, relationships, levels of overall fulfillment, and life in general. As a safety and health professional, the quality of your habits is in direct proportion to the quality of your leadership and the quality of your life.

Our research shows the highest performing safety/health professionals have intentionally established habits that support their ability to lead, learn and grow, and create loyalty. Consider that it takes only 66 days to create a habit. What habits have you created in your career that either better serve you or can prove detrimental? This column shares habits culled from more than 300 interviews with top-performing professionals.

Habit #1: They have a frontline, not simply a front office, mentality. There is not a company or senior leader in the world who will tell you that the way to improve safety performance is to engage your frontline teams less. Yet, after speaking to thousands of safety and operational leaders across 36 countries, very few companies are engaging their frontline teams in a meaningful, purposeful manner.

The 4H Principle can help you and your organization engage more meaningfully:

• Handshakes: Handshakes are scientifically proven to create rapport, deepen trust, portray confidence, and establish a level of human connection that would otherwise take three hours of conversation to establish.
• High-Five: Effective safety and operational leaders provide specific, consistent praise and recognition to their people every day through verbal positive reinforcement, recognizing people for working safely, and catching people doing things well.
• Hug: Workers across all industries have more leverage than ever, and now “demand” that their leaders deploy effective “soft skills”—which are actually anything but soft. Listening, empathy, and self-awareness…these are a “hug,” figuratively speaking.
• Hang Out: Authentically interacting with workers in person can help safety and operational leaders better understand inherent hazards and risk. When we get in proximity to where the work is done, we gain new perspectives into how to drive safe, productive operations by learning from those who know best.

The highest performing safety and health professionals of tomorrow find a way to get one percent better each day. They take action, even when the path is obscure.

Habit #2: They obsess over “work as done,” rather than “work as imagined.” They learn from normal work, understanding that the best time to understand work as it’s happening day-to-day is before you have a deviation from an expected outcome (aka, an incident), rather than after.

Habit #3: They obsess not over hard or soft skills, but essential skills. They really ask, and really listen, especially during frontline worker engagements. A leader who doesn’t listen will eventually be surrounded by people who have nothing to say.

Habit #4: They believe in the “Holy Trinity” of safety and health excellence. First, the highest performing companies understand that line leadership owns safety, and the safety department supports and consults accordingly. Second, how clear and understandable are the standards your organization sets? How well are they communicated throughout the organization? How well does leadership hold the standard? A standard unenforced quickly becomes the new standard. Finally, seek daily, authentic engagement with the frontline. It will help you deepen trust and make improvements to the workplace.

Habit #5: They believe in “whole person” health. Self-care is fundamental to overall well-being. If we don’t take care of ourselves today, we severely limit our ability to care for others tomorrow. Our duty is no longer to send people home in the “same condition as they came.” Our duty now is to send people home better than they came—physically, mentally, emotionally, financially, and yes, even spiritually.

Habit #6: They “micro experiment”. When they deploy a new initiative, they start small, gathering feedback from sub-teams and pilot sites by asking and understanding what’s working and what’s not. Then, they iterate accordingly. It’s not about deploying the perfect solution, but instead about aiming for both action and progress.

Habit #7: Mentors help people get better, sponsors help people get ahead. The highest performing professionals understand this distinction. They see their teams and colleagues not as they are, but as they could be. They don’t settle for helping people get better, they commit to helping them get ahead.

Motivation for positive change often comes after starting, not before. Action leads to momentum. The highest performing safety and health professionals of tomorrow find a way to get one percent better each day. They take action, even when the path is obscure.

What one habit will you take action on today?

Jason Kunz, CIH, CSP is principal consultant at The Kunz Company. This column was excerpted from his keynote address at PPSA’s 80th Annual Conference in June, 2024. Contact him at [email protected].