August 28, 2025 | Loralai Stevenson

Safety Walks: Creating a Culture of Trust

If there’s one word to describe the culture of the standard safety walk, that word would likely not be trust. Most employees have at least one story of the “dog and pony show” that occurs immediately prior to the appearance of management, where fresh paint dons the walls and hardhats don the heads to avoid admonishment from their supervisor and their clipboard. This common practice, however, defeats the very purpose of safety walks altogether: a problem that both employees and supervisors can work to counteract by creating a culture of trust.

What is a Safety Walk?

A safety walk is a method for upper management to get involved in the workplace, looking for unsafe conditions so they can act to protect their employees. However, if employees do not trust management, and management does not listen to employees, the practice becomes more dangerous than protective. If management checks only surface level issues, and employees work to cover up anything deeper out of fear of reproof, then issues have the time and space to develop into tragedies. Trust makes safety walks meaningful, and therefore must be prioritized.

How to Build Trust

Invite employees to bring up concerns:
- The employees working within these environments every day know best what risks they deal with, and their observations can be invaluable. Showing care for employees’ concerns creates trust with management and allows for the creation of a safer workplace.
Be consistent with scheduling safety walks:
- Consistent scheduling shows employees that their management cares for them, and sees their safety as a priority rather than a checklist to work on only when the resources are present.
Check important safeguards:
- Every workplace has its own unique dangers and safeguards in place to protect against them; a one-size-fits-all safety walk may produce a clean checklist, but it will not take care of employees.
Address concerns quickly:
- Ignoring or waiting to address concerns creates mistrust, but showing that concern will bring about immediate action makes employees more comfortable sharing with management.

Tactics to Avoid

Focusing on ease of audit:
- Aiming for a clean checklist of simple or minor mistakes can lead to significant distrust, as deeper issues that employees experience are overlooked for smaller, more easily solved problems.
Policing small concerns:
- If an employee views management as a threat, however, they are more likely to avoid telling them about dangerous workplace mishaps or concerns out of a desire to protect themselves and their coworkers. Policing small concerns from a checklist over
Safety walk inconsistency:
- Waiting to perform safety walks until the end of the month, or when resources are available, shows employees that the practice is more about paperwork than protecting their safety.
Overlooking cleanups:
- The “dog and pony show” that often occurs before a safety walk can damage the walk’s value to employees. Checking for wet paint or dirty breakrooms can help supervisors to see if the version of the workplace they are seeing is typical. If signs of a cleanup are present, it may be time to make sure employees understand the purpose of safety walks, and to ensure supervisors are actively listening to their concerns.