To inspire your people to buy-in to safety, you must make safety inspiring.
“If you want to your safety program to run like a well-oiled machine, consider your people as “moving parts.” Parts need maintenance for best performance. Coach, communicate and inspire their best. It’s safety after all.” - Kevin Burns
Once upon a time, all you needed to do was threaten people to get them to comply. And you would get blind compliance. They wouldn’t like it but they would do it for fear of losing their jobs.
Safety meetings were replete with gory photos and dismembered limbs. Injury-survivors told their 30-year-old “don’t do what I did” stories. Actually, that still goes on today in a lot of workplaces. Sadly, lousy managers resort to scare tactics to coerce their employees into being safe. Surely you must get the irony of scaring workers into being safe.
Fear and intimidation by coaches on sports teams never win championships. How is your team any different than a championship sports team?
Good coaches know that to get players to improve performance takes good coaching and inspiration. Coaches have to get players to reach down deep inside and find their winning motivation. That’s what drives positive performance - not fear and intimidation.
Here are 5 key strategies to inspire excellent safety performance from your team:
1Make safety personal to each person. Not everyone learns the same. People have their own context, the way they see the world. They have their own values that drive their decision-making. Some don’t read well. Some learn best by auditory. Some learn better when they see it and touch it. Standing at the front of a room and delivering instruction doesn’t land the same in every brain. Watch pro sports teams. Good coaches work one-on-one with individual players to improve skill and performance. Make safety personal with every player, every week.
2The safety manual is useless without a coherent communications strategy. You, as a safety person, may know what is in the safety manual and why it is there. You may even have your safety certifications and designations. But are you certified in communication skills? People achieve excellent safety performance when they receive excellent communication. If you find that you have to repeat yourself at safety meetings because the same issues keep coming up, it’s not them - it’s you. Learning about safety and getting certified is the easy part of safety management. Developing excellent communications skills is the hard work, the ongoing work.
3Safety professionals attend inspiring and engaging safety conferences. Then, they return home and run the same boring and disengaging safety meetings. Connect the dots. You look forward to attending annual safety conferences. You get new information and network with other safety professionals. You look forward for a whole year to a great safety conference. Then, you come home and run the same boring meetings that you always have? Get good at presenting at meetings. You are not right now. Don’t even think you are.
4You have to care. You can’t fake this one. You can tell when someone is being disingenuous. You can tell a fake from a friend. Everyone has the same radar that lets them know when someone cares and when someone is giving them lip-service. If you can tell, your co-workers can tell. You are in a position where caring matters. If someone gets hurt, you had better take it personally. Your care for your fellow workers should keep you awake at nights. It should worry you. If you care, you don’t allow excuses to get in the way of keeping your people safe. People who care, matter. People who don’t care, don’t matter. People will care about their safety when they know how much YOU care about their safety.
5Before the team can get better, you have to get better. Nothing happens until you do. If you don’t improve, they don’t improve. Don’t expect your crew to wake up one morning and to have magically gotten better overnight. People improve in proportion to how well the instruction, training, managing and coaching improves. In order for that to happen, the person who does the training, managing and coaching has to improve first. Business gets better when the people in the business get better. Safety gets better when everyone involved in safety gets better. Be a leader. Show them the example of what “getting better” looks like.
To inspire your people to buy-in to safety, you must make safety inspiring. People don’t just change their minds about safety. They make new decisions based on new information. Peddling the same things you’ve always said the same way you’ve always said it hasn’t worked so far. It won’t today either.
Kevin Burns is a management consultant, safety speaker and author of "The Perfect Safety Meeting." He delivers engaging and entertaining keynote safety presentations for everyone: from front-line staff to senior management. He helps people see the light when it comes to buying-in to the safety program.
