What are the key HOF issues?
Irish Rail identified a need to refresh our senior managers on safety leadership, to highlight the importance of leading by example and to create awareness of the pivotal role of leaders in shaping the safety culture of the organisation.
What did you do?
We trained six of our safety team in delivering ERAs 1 day Safety Leadership training programme, and rolled this training out to senior managers across the business. The training covers several areas of Safety Leadership and Safety Culture, including an overview of Human and Organisational Factors, developing a safety vision, the importance of anticipated consequences in shaping behaviour, just culture, and organisational decision making. Sessions were held every two weeks at our training centre and approximately 130 managers were trained in the first nine months of 2022. The training is interactive, and participants are encouraged to reflect on how the topics covered apply to their own behaviours and areas of the business, as well as on what their key take-aways from the training are.
What were the results?
The feedback from the training has been very positive, and there is now an initiative to develop similar training for key frontline managers and supervisors as well as further developing our Just Culture policies and processes.
Author: Nora Balfe, Irish Rail
E-mail address:
