Employee engagement is a powerful driver of business results, from reduced turnover to higher productivity. Its greatest effect is on worker safety – a puzzling pattern given that frustrated employees don’t want to get injured any more than their energized colleagues. No one has studied this connection deeper or helped companies apply the lessons more than Rodd Wagner. Rodd literally wrote the book on engagement – twice. He’ll explain what’s going on in the minds of frontline workers and help you develop a plan to keep your people safer by engaging them.
My past included a 5-year experience in the Governance, Risk, and Compliance (GRC) software space and it taught me a lot about how the 3 things work together. When I first started GRC was extremely confusing to an ex supply chain guy and although I understood each component I really didn’t understand how they worked together. One day I was in training and the first thing the instructor did was draw a picture representing a building and said he was going to teach us what GRC was using Fire safety as the backdrop. I sat up in my seat and thought this is going to be interesting, little did I know it was the best explanation of GRC I have ever seen.
The Answer for Most Companies is Everyone (and No One)
Your frontline workers know they have the responsibility to complete audit and inspection work. Do they have the accountability to enact changes that should come from it? Ask any business leader or executive coach, and they will agree—your company’s culture is a direct reflection of how your management team views accountability. Business leadership coach and author Peter Lowe states it succinctly¹:
“An organization is only ever as good as its people. In order for teams to truly thrive, people need freedom of responsibility, without the imposing cloud of micromanagement.”
Does this look like the future? The Data Goes In. Nothing Ever Comes Out.
Audit and Inspections in Industry Today: The Information Abyss
We all know frontline workers hate spending time filling out the audit and inspection forms we put in front of them. It’s part of the job across all sectors of industry—lean manufacturing, heavy construction, oil & gas, you name it.
It’s not the extra work that grates nerves. It’s not the number of questions on paper-based checklists that creates the eye rolls. It’s the simple fact that frontline workers usually never hear anything back about the audits and inspections managers ask them to do. The data they are asked to care about gets collected and goes into an information black hole.