Safety Culture Starts at the Top: How Engaged Leaders Motivate Employees

8 minutes14/10/2025

Many safety programs fail despite leadership support because they aim to drive change, but change is uncomfortable, and humans are change-averse. Success requires more than policies; it demands engagement, clarity, and alignment. Some common blockers include: 

• Negative safety culture and lack of employee involvement 
• Cumbersome incident reporting software and training tools 
• Poor communication between leadership and frontline teams 
• Misalignment on safety goals and expectations 
• Lack of transparency and standardized safety training processes 

To build a resilient safety culture, leaders have to pair clear safety KPIs with modern EHS software and inclusive practices that engage employees at every level.

The solution? Align safety leadership with employee engagement using behavior, data, and tools that collectively facilitate a safety culture transformation.

Best practices for leadership in safety

Since safety culture starts at the top, leaders have to actively engage with their safety program. This is the first step to achieving meaningful change. The best ways to do that are to: 

• Be visible 
• Take accountability 
• Make data-driven decisions 
• Involve employees 
• Communicate 
• Set aspirational goals 

Be visible

When managers commit to being visible on safety, they become more authentic, credible safety leaders. Visibility looks like engaging in safety conversations, participating in audits, and investing in tools to make safety tasks easier and more convenient. 

Additionally, visible leadership is about promoting a shared understanding of what the company’s safety culture is and how to transform it. The Bradley Curve helps leaders engage with safety. Using the model, they can develop a compelling vision for future safety and identify the steps to get there.  

Be accountable 

Engaged leaders embrace accountability for safety. They adopt a positive safety mindset that sets an example in the workplace. This includes systematically following up on reported incidents and holding themselves to the same standards upheld across the entire organization. 

Accountability can also relate to how leaders handle their own failures. Making mistakes is part of being human, no matter the job title. By visibly owning mistakes and committing to learning from them, leaders can set a powerful example that tangibly improves safety culture in the workplace. 

Make data-driven decisions

Collecting, analyzing, and interpreting data enables leaders to measure safety performance and make data-driven safety decisions. The right data boosts confidence by replacing guesswork with actionable insights that drive more successful safety programs.  

To build a data-driven foundation for confident decisions, leaders need to select meaningful KPIs and use digital safety management solutions to gather, analyze, and display the data they collect. Selecting the right software and choosing KPIs demands leaders engage closely with the current safety status quo and formulate relevant, achievable company goals. 

Involve employees

Actions like seeking input from employees on new measures and KPIs, involving staff in software decisions, and shifting responsibility for tasks like risk assessments closer to the frontline help leaders create policies grounded in real workplace conditions. 

This builds a positive safety culture across the organization. Employees and leaders alike begin to see safety as relevant to every role and routine, from assembly line to corner office. 

Communicate

It should be no secret that unclear or incomplete communications can lead to accidents. Engaged leaders communicate as clearly and accurately possible. They also actively listen, ask questions, and encourage feedback. By doing so, they create an environment where no one is afraid to speak up about incidents or unsafe behavior. 

Many companies today are multilingual. Effective safety communications also require accurate translations that allow everyone to access key information in their native language. Safety leaders who harness the right human or digital resources for this task will raise the global quality of their safety communications and display shining examples of care for employees. 

Set aspirational goals

Various frameworks exist for driving improvements in safety culture. One such method is behavioral-based safety (BBS). Like the Bradley Curve, it aligns everyone around a common definition of safety — in this case, it’s expressed as a collection of safe behaviors that are collaboratively tracked and celebrated. 

For both the Bradley Curve and BBS, setting the ambitious goal of zero accidents can be a real engine for progress. But, even the loftiest goals have to start somewhere. Another option is to aim for 1% fewer accidents each year. Regardless, these enable leaders to share a clear, motivational vision for the future of the company’s safety. 

Why leadership commitment isn’t enough

Even if leaders fully commit to improving safety, their efforts will stall if employee engagement in safety programs is weak. Unengaged employees are less likely to give up outdated practices, embrace new methods, or accept new safety equipment. 

Recent figures show that employee engagement fell from 23% to 21% globally. Raising this figure is crucial for safety because highly engaged employees reportedly have 63% fewer safety incidents. Beyond reducing accident rates, safety engagement in the workforce can improve operational performance overall. 

Best practices for employee engagement in safety

To fully tap into this potential for their own organizations, leaders need to take targeted steps to boost employee engagement. They can do this by:  

• Creating a positive error culture 
• Embracing feedback 
• Giving clear guidance and instruction 

Create a positive error culture

If employees know that they will be named, shamed, and blamed for mistakes, they are unlikely to report it. This starves the organization of insights that can provide important learning opportunities and misses data that can improve safety performance. 

So how to encourage safety reporting? Leaders should create a culture where errors are seen as learning opportunities, and reports are genuinely valued. Behavioral-based safety is an effective framework for establishing this mindset using collective goal setting, reporting, and positive reinforcement. 

Embrace feedback

If employees are not adhering to a new rule, punitive measures will achieve little. Rather than motivating them to engage with the new system, sanctions generally create shame and guilt, which are likely to lead to feelings of resentment and reduce engagement rates even further. 

Engaged leaders know that behaviors are a product of the wider system. They address issues through that lens, with curiosity and open-mindedness. They seek to understand why employees aren’t complying and then potentially modify rules or rules-based instruction to earn wider acceptance.  

Give clear guidance and instruction

Training is integral to engaging employees in safety and developing a positive safety culture. If training is just a one-time compliance event each year, it sends the message that safety is a fringe topic and not relevant to day-to-day work routines. 

Leaders need to take a strategic approach that focuses on continuous learning. Training should be relevant, convenient, and easy to integrate into regular activities. This will also encourage employees to continually think about what safety means to their daily work and how they can take responsibility for themselves and others — the end goal on the Bradley Curve.  

Summary

“Leadership isn't a position, it's a behavior. Not a title. It’s what you do.”  

Prof. Dr. Andrew Sharman, in an interview with Quentic 

Safety culture thrives when leaders actively engage and motivate employees to do the same. By adopting best practices that focus on behavior, digital solutions, and data, leaders can foster a culture where everyone is connected through a shared safety vision and mindset, clear safety programs and goals, and actionable insights.

How Quentic can help

By forming a bridge between your leadership strategy and frontline action, Quentic helps you connect top-down goals and bottom-up action. Its automated work routines and clear workflows enhance collaboration among safety stakeholders, while holistic views of safety issues and risk management help you identify and prioritize actions.  

The flexible tools for online safety training and up-to-date instructions keep safety top-of-mind for everyone, every day. The intuitive mobile reporting channel makes logging near-misses, incidents, observations, and best practices easy and convenient for everyone in your organization. And after you’ve collected feedback from the field, you can centrally evaluate the reports and use the analytics dashboards to track your safety KPIs. 

Turn your safety strategy into measurable frontline action.

Book your 10-minute call with one of our experts. Our product specialists will work together with you to find the best solution for your unique business needs.