712 Safety Supervision and Leadership

Ensuring Accountability

What is Accountability?

In the workplace, employees have the obligation to to comply with established policies, rules, and standards. When employees are 'held accountable,' it implies that their performance is evaluated in relation to these expectations, leading to one of two fundamental outcomes:

• If performance standards are met or exceeded, perceived positive consequences occur.
• If performance standards are not met, perceived negative consequences occur.

As a legal 'agent of the employer,' a supervisor bears a critical responsibility: ensuring that employees are held accountable for their actions. Similarly, supervisors themselves are held accountable by the employer for effectively fulfilling this significant leadership role.

Before a safety accountability system can be effectively implemented and applied, it must be understood. It's important to understand what accountability is, and how it functions to ensure safety system effectiveness. To better understand accountability, let's answer some very important questions:

• Which behaviors should an employee be held accountable for?
• How does a supervisor measure those employee behaviors?
• What obligations must management fulfill before they can hold employees accountable?
• What are appropriate and effective consequences?

With the above questions in mind, let's look at accountability in the workplace, and how we can implement and apply it.

Knowledge Check Choose the best answer for the question.