Winning Over the Frontline:
The Ultimate Guide to Getting Buy-In for Safety
Written by Ken Lulow
Organizations struggling to engage their teams in safety need to start with a hard truth—and this one may hurt a little. As leaders, the culture we have is the one we’ve allowed.
If that statement triggered a reaction, take it as a sign that it was something we needed to hear. Many organizations are stuck in a cycle of frustration, unable to gain true buy-in for safety from their frontline employees. They implement policies, enforce rules, and roll out new initiatives, yet workers remain disengaged, skeptical, or outright resistant.
Why? Because traditional, top-down, authoritarian approaches to safety don’t work. They never have.
Outdated Methods That Are Failing Your Organization
For decades, the command-and-control model has been deeply ingrained in workplace cultures—especially in high-risk industries like line work. The assumption has been that compliance is best achieved through strict oversight, discipline, and enforcement.
Here’s the problem:
Fear-based safety cultures create resentment. Workers don’t engage because they want to—they comply out of fear of consequences.
Micromanagement kills ownership. People follow rules because they must, not because they believe in them.
Leaders become enforcers instead of partners. The result? An “us vs. them” dynamic where safety is seen as a management tool rather than a shared responsibility. Organic growth is stunted.
A common sign of a broken safety culture is disengaged employees who feel unheard. If your team sees safety as just another box to check, you have a deeper problem: they don’t believe leadership values their input—or their well-being.
Igniting a Culture of Commitment
If we want genuine buy-in from frontline employees, we need to flip the traditional safety model on its head. Safety isn’t about control—it’s about collaboration.
The shift begins with servant leadership and coaching rather than command and control.
Instead of issuing orders, empower our teams.
Instead of demanding compliance, build trust.
Instead of punishing mistakes, create an environment where people learn from them.
The most successful safety cultures are built on engagement, accountability, and shared responsibility.
How to Build a Safety Culture That Workers Actually Embrace
Here’s a step-by-step framework to transform your safety culture and gain frontline buy-in:
1. Own the Culture You’ve Created
The first step is accountability at the leadership level. If our teams aren’t engaged in safety, take a hard look at what behaviors leadership has tolerated, ignored, or even reinforced.
Have mid-level supervisors sent mixed messages?
Have unsafe behaviors been overlooked for the sake of productivity?
Has safety been presented as a compliance issue rather than a core value?
Leadership is taking responsibility. We may not have personally made the unsafe decision, but if the environment allowed it to happen, we own it.
Action Step: Reset the Culture
Be transparent about past mistakes. Acknowledge areas where leadership has fallen short.
Set new expectations—clearly, consistently, and with direct engagement from the field.
Lead by example. If safety is important, show it in every decision and interaction.
2. Engage Your Frontline Workers as Partners, Not Subordinates
Workers won’t buy into safety if they feel like outsiders in the decision-making process. The best safety solutions come from the people who actually do the work—yet too many organizations treat safety as something dictated to the field rather than developed with them.
Action Step: Involve Workers in Problem-Solving
Ask, “What’s getting in the way of safe work?” and listen—not just to the words but the meaning behind the words, is there fear, is there passion, is there loss of passion?
Hold open forums and one-on-one conversations to gather insights. This can be a challenging ask as historically the front-line workers have strong personalities and unrefined answers, that can often cause emotions to surface. Take yourself out of the equation and truly listen to the meaning in their responses.
Empower workers to identify hazards and propose solutions before management steps in, de-centralize authority to make decisions.
What this looks like in action:
Instead of saying, “We’ve seen an increase in hand injuries. Here’s the new rule.”
Try: “We’ve seen an increase in hand injuries. What do you think is causing it, and what would actually help prevent it?”
When workers are engaged in identifying problems and shaping solutions, they take ownership of safety instead of resisting it.
3. Fix the Disconnect Between Leaders and the Field
One of the biggest safety roadblocks is the mixed messages that come from different levels of leadership.
When executives push safety, but mid-level supervisors prioritize productivity, workers will focus on what their immediate leaders truly value—not what’s written in a policy.
Action Step: Align Leadership at Every Level
Ensure mid-level leaders understand the importance of safety—not just as a compliance issue, but as a business and cultural priority.
Hold supervisors accountable for reinforcing safety values—not undercutting them with unspoken pressure to “just get the job done.”
Create consistent messaging across all levels of leadership. Workers should never hear, “Just be safe” in the morning and “Hurry up and finish” in the afternoon.
4. Stop Chasing Quick Fixes—Address the Root Cause
Many organizations approach safety reactively: something goes wrong, and they implement a quick fix without ever understanding why the issue happened in the first place.
The Story of the Hand Injury
A worker repeatedly injures their hand at work with a tool. Leadership quickly steps in and bans the tool and replaces it with a safer alternative. But the injuries continue.
Finally, through discussions with front-line workers, the real problem was uncovered: the safety glasses the workers were required to wear kept fogging up, obstructing the workers vision when energy was exerted using the original tool.
If leadership had asked why, “kept peeling the onion”, from the start, they could have addressed the real issue instead of wasting time with ineffective and costly solutions.
Action Step: Investigate the "Why" Behind Safety Issues
Instead of treating the symptoms (injuries, near misses), dig into root causes.
Use incident investigations as learning opportunities, not blame sessions.
Involve workers in finding real solutions that make sense in the field.
5. Build Relationships—Not Just Rules
People don’t follow rules because they exist on paper. They follow them because they believe in them and trust the people enforcing them.
People follow People, not the ideas.
If workers see safety training as a corporate requirement instead of a genuine effort to protect them, they won’t engage.
Action Step: Make Safety Personal
Visit job sites. Spend time in the field. Be visible, be present.
Show that safety isn’t just about numbers—it’s about their well-being and their families.
Recognize and reward positive safety behaviors, not just rule compliance.
Rethink our model of rewarding high performers who cut corners and compromise the culture. A high performer who does not embrace the safety culture and may bend the rules for productivity, is actually toxic, celebrating these individuals kills the culture we hope to establish. Instead celebrate the teams that embrace the safety culture and establish these teams as the standard.
When workers feel valued and respected, they’re far more likely to buy into safety as a personal responsibility—not just an organizational requirement.
The Bottom Line: Safety Starts with Leadership
If your organization is struggling to get buy-in for safety, it’s time to stop blaming the field and start re-examining leadership’s role in the problem.
Safety isn’t a policy—it’s a culture.
Compliance isn’t the goal—commitment is.
Control doesn’t build trust—collaboration does.
Ask yourself: When your time as a leader ends, do you want to be remembered for reducing safety KPI’s—or for creating a Safety Culture that empowers people to grow, learn, and achieve success? That they will continue to embrace and pass down for generations to come?
The first is fleeting. The second builds legacies.
Now, take action.
Go talk to your frontline teams. Listen to them. Empower them. Lead them.
Safety isn’t something you enforce. It’s something you build—together.
