Kevin Burns Blog

Why aren’t production and safety working out of the same office yet? Start with the common ground between safety and production. Companies associate the success of operations with efficiency, productivity and profits. And it's easy to measure. In safety, success is determined by a complex formula ending in TRIR rates and with the prevention of occupational injury and illness. How do you make these two necessary parts of a company work together if they are not even measuring the same things? Production and safety blame the other for either slowing work down. Safety gets compromised when there is a push on for greater production. Operations blame safety for slowing down production. Neither wants to be wrong. Both want to be right. (Note: if you still believe that safety holds up production, you are probably in the wrong job.) Why aren’t production and safety measuring success the same way let alone working out of the same office? And whose bright idea was it to let the two coexist separately? In order for production/operations and safety to work better together, they have to first establish the common ground. Neither side wants to see anyone get hurt and both sides want the company to have success. That is the common ground.

Be positive about your safety program and the way it helps to protect and value your good people. Promote. A scary word for safety people and supervisors. For the ones who don’t understand what it means, it feels disingenuous. But to promote something is to advance a cause or a program; to support it or to actively encourage. So when you tell your people to be safe, you are promoting safety. When you erect posters as safety reminders, you are promoting safety. When you hold a safety meeting, you are promoting safety. When you recognize good behaviors, you are promoting safety. And in order to build a solid safety culture, we cannot do it without promoting safety.

Good employees who have special skills and talent take pride in their work and they protect that pride by engaging in safety. Without getting into long descriptions, good workplace safety culture is the result of attitudes and personal and corporate values aligning. If apathy in the workplace exists, little care will be given to safety. When the quality of the work is “good enough,” apathy in safety exists. If employees think it's a lousy place to work, then safety will take a back seat. Poor safety attitudes will impede becoming a top performer. That reflects in both safety and financial performance. A broken safety culture will have an impact on overall corporate performance. You cannot change the safety culture without addressing the underlying attitudes and values. Attitudes, values and culture drive everything. A 2013 study states that “when organizations have engaged workers, they are 18 percent more productive than their competitors, 12 percent more profitable, have 22 percent higher-than-average shareholder returns, and have employees who are 57 percent more effective and 87 percent less likely to leave.”

Every employee has responsibilities in safety. The biggest of which is to ensure that you protect yourself. There is a lot of talk of safety leadership, complacency, accountability and responsibility on the job these days. At the same time, there is less discussion about compliance measures, rules, regulation, etc. And although there is still much work to be done in safety, we’re starting to change the conversation. Workplaces that are becoming more people-focused is good news.

Effectiveness in safety is about how little effort it takes to inspire people to do the right things. As a safety person, manager or front-line supervisor, you already know that your work can be thankless. But you still have a responsibility (see last week’s post) to drive down the best practices and advice onto those employees at the front-line. That’s where the greatest number of your people are. That’s where the greatest amount of activity is. That’s where the greatest risk of incident exists. What you know about safety needs to get to the front-line.

Safety is a shared responsibility with each individual being accountable for their actions. On a recent LinkedIn post about accountability, I was asked the following: Hi Kevin, I'm constantly engaged in discussions around accountability and responsibility with all levels of hierarchy within the business as almost no one understands the difference. What's your experience? Awesome question. I too, used to think they were two interchangeable words. In fact, the dictionaries interchange them at least once on each word. So, it's not surprising that your clients and colleagues struggle with it. But to me, they are not interchangeable at all. In fact, each word has very specific differentiators. This post will help you to arm your colleagues, employees and clients with a new and unique way to understand accountability and responsibility, to use them more effectively, and to be able to align themselves with each word personally and within the scope of the safety program. Be forewarned, these definitions may not be the classic dictionary version of the words.

Stop discussing the negatives of not being safe. Instead, focus on the positives of buying-in to safety. Ask employees about how they perceive the safety program and they will most likely answer that it's dull, boring, repetitive, mind-numbing, disengaging, and it tries to scare you into compliance. That's because safety has been focused on following rules and avoiding injury or accidents. But like everything else in life, safety evolves. Sure, there is still an expectation of meeting the minimum standards of safety. But, that's the least that the law will allow you to do. If the focus is to achieve the minimum standard, you are chasing compliance - the standard that you are not allowed to fall below. And when safety programs are focused only on achieving the minimum, that's where the organization will live. As organizations are becoming more people-centric, they are integrating people-development programs. You cannot develop your people without including safety. The best-managed companies and employers-of-choice still value a profit but not at the expense of their good people. They are organizations that attract the best employees and hang onto them. As I say regularly, the best place to work is always the safest place to work. The best employees are attracted to workplaces that focus on achieving positives, more than just avoiding negatives. The best workplaces have a plan to make the experience of working there a positive one. Here are the four most important ways to focus your safety program on positives:

Data is not how you build a safety culture. Leadership is. Safety is about preparedness - yet most times even the safety meeting does not meet that standard. How many times have you seen your own safety meetings get thrown together at the last minute? This does not inspire confidence from employees. If the organizer is not engaged in delivering an engaging safety meeting, attendees won't engage either. Why would they? Employees take their cues, not so much from what you say in meetings, but from what you do with them and your level of conviction about safety. As motivational speaker, Larry Winget, once said: "When you stand in front of a group of people, they won't care what you have to say. In fact most won't even believe what you have to say. But they'll be checking you out to see if you believe what you have to say." In other words, you need conviction when it comes to organizing and executing the safety program - especially the meetings. If you don't have convictions about both the value of the program outside of the rules (the content and discussion points) and the purpose (the outcome - what you want them to do with the information), you will have a hard time getting employees to engage. If you want to engage employees to participate in the safety program and to own safety as one of their guiding principles, you have to give them what they want.

Leadership is not forced or thrust upon anyone. It’s voluntary. And personal safety leadership builds great teams. A commitment to teamwork and safety. It’s all you need to go from newbie or lowly front-liner to leader. To become a safety leader requires a commitment to the welfare of your teammates. You can't build a strong team without caring about the safety of the members of the team. In this way, you can use safety build leadership in safety and teamwork. While it might be easy enough (with applied work) to lift yourself up from the front-line to leader in the real world, the safety world hasn't been terribly well-equipped for it. It has been focused on compliance, following rules and filling out paperwork; all treated very scientifically and meticulously. Historically, it’s been all business. Add a top-down model of management and you have a system that doesn’t look particularly attractive to want to buy-in to. Where's the teamwork? you might ask. While the focus in on processes and procedures and rules, there is little of the “person” in personal safety.

To be a safety leader, you have to be better at the job than the others. The best organizations give world-class safety performance. They don't do it with a mediocre effort, mediocre standards or mediocre supervisors and safety people. They do it by surpassing industry average targets, a focused engagement with employees and with safety people and supervisors on top of their game. Those companies search out and employ supervisors and managers who set a higher standard for themselves. They seek out those who want to inspire their own crews to be better, to reach farther, to achieve at a higher level. You don’t build championship teams by shooting for the middle of industry averages. You don’t instill a positive safety culture by settling for average performance. To lead, you have to do not just what others are not doing, but by doing what they’re not even prepared to do. World-class safety is driven by wanting higher standards. Higher standards drive greater effort. Greater effort is driven by higher-performing safety people and supervisors. World-class safety is not achieved by a mediocre effort, standards or people who don’t seek to be exceptional. Without exceptional people and standards, you're shooting for mediocrity. You will become world-class by luck. Here's the problem. Not every safety person is a high-performer. Like every other industry and profession, there are below-average and average performers. Then, there’s the top echelon; the elite - the leaders. Which of those sounds like you? How about a short self-assessment?