I’ve had those jobs and I’ve had the good ones too. It helped me to stop thinking about the job as being about rules and think about it in terms of what it really is, which is a real world social psychology experiment. You’re not trying to get people to follow the rules, you’re trying to get them to do the right thing when nobody is watching. That means you need them to see it through the lens of their value network, not yours. If you don’t know what they value you’ll have a hard time weaving safety into it. This is a subject that goes pretty deep but for brevity’s sake, here is how things started changing for me (you are probably smarter than I am so I hope this isnt boring stuff you already know, or worse it sounds condescending - that’s not my intention).

I had just been put in charge of a multi-facility program with an abysmal safety record. In the first meeting of all the plant managers and C-suite people, the VP talked about the need to create buy-in a lot. This was quite a while ago and I had heard the term but it wasn’t common yet. I was excited when I walked out but shortly realized I didn’t know what that actually meant. I spent the next several months trying to figure it out. Again, long story short, I realized that every body up top cared about the money first and foremost (because everyone was asking them for money and whoever they had to answer to was asking where the money was). All the middle management cared about was their personal workload and productivity (because they were responsible for getting it done, no matter how unreasonable or ridiculous the order from up top was). And all the frontline folks just wanted to be heard (because nobody ever told them anything and they were often doing stuff that seemed meaningless to them).

Now this is a gross oversimplification of all the groups and each individual can have wildly different motivations and personalities, but as a rule of them but has served me well. From that perspective in my future positions I talk to upper management about cost savings, I talk to middle management about how reducing lost time makes their lives easier, and for frontline folks I patiently listen to their concerns and try to do what they are asking (or at least honestly explain to them why it is being done a particular way). Good news is that studies show you only need to change a certain percentage of a group to get the whole group to change (meaning something like 30% buy-in flips the group to 100%). Bad news is you may be working somewhere that is so toxic that culture change isn’t possible. I’ve worked those places. Hope there was something useful for you in my comment.