Safety Attitude Adjustment™
What Most Safety Professionals Miss In Trying To Build A Culture of Safety
What is Safety Attitude? It's how your people think of safety. A Safety Attitude goes beyond the time clock. A Safety Attitude has no start and end time. A Safety Attitude is a state of mind - not a tolerance for the rules while on shift. Look, if compliance worked, we’d all be at Zero all of the time.
A Safety Attitude also extends to how you drive, how you conduct yourself online, how safe you are with money and credit cards, whether you're paying attention to safety hazards at home, how you load yourself down with groceries to save another trip to the car and even how you cook - it's all a part of developing a Safety Attitude.
What Is Your Safety Attitude?
Are you instilling a Safety Culture or simply a safety compliance program? What's the difference? Safety compliance makes your people wear their requisite PPE during their shift but then the workers go home and cut their lawn wearing sandals. That's not Safety Attitude or Safety Culture. That's just plain tolerating the rules only because they're forced to.
Without addressing Safety Attitude, you will never successfully establish a Culture of Safety. Because everything that you're doing now is based on the assumption that workers want to learn. That is a potentially fatal assumption. That's like sending a kid to hockey camp for two weeks to sharpen his skills when he really has no desire to play competitive hockey - his father wants him to.
So What Is The Solution?
Stop talking about safety. Stop talking about the negatives of not being safe. There is glory in coming back from injury to do something with your life. There are a ton of motivational speakers on the circuit doing just that – missing limbs and glorifying injury. So people aren’t afraid of injury anymore. Scaring or shocking them won’t work.
Instead, start talking about things like accountability and responsibility. Start talking to your workers about values and principles like family, trust, respect and integrity instead of giving them a list of rules to follow. Talk to them about their contributions toward making the work environment a safer place to be. Ask your people to take pride in what they do and at the end of the day; ask them to help make sure the other team members take pride in their work. People who take pride in their work are engaged in the work. People who are engaged and focused on what they’re doing rarely have accidents happen.
Knowing The Difference
Safety is an Attitude. Occupational Health and Safety is a program. Safety Attitude is what will get your organization to Zero.
Corporate America treats safety as the dorky little brother they are forced to bring along when they want to hang out with the cool kids. But safety shouldn’t be treated that way. Safety should be permeating the discussions in sales, finance, Human Resources, marketing, management and every other department. Safety should have an equal seat at the table of all decisions within an organization. We should be having the discussions around safety across all departments of all organizations.
But in most organizations, Safety is kept at an arms-length from the other departments.
Until we start seeing CEOs attending the safety conferences, and not just sending their safety managers, safety will always be an arms-length part of any organization. It’s the decision-makers that need to attend these conferences - not the choir in the Church of Safety. It’s the people who are in positions of power, who can affect change to the corporate culture of an organization. That’s who should be attending these conferences and joining tailgate meetings and making sure senior management abides by ALL of the same rules. And until the entire team across the top of an organization embraces safety as a viable and necessary part of their organization, safety will always be an arms-length concern - and Zero will always be just out of reach.
(From "Why Compliance Won't Get Us To Zero" by Kevin Burns)
Your Choices
Now, you have two choices: address Safety Attitude and Safety Culture at your next safety meeting - or - "hope and pray" a little harder that you can get to Zero without addressing the Attitudes that are causing the incidents.
Download
Download Kevin's Safety Attitude Adjustment™ Info Package to discuss at your next safety meeting.
