Kevin Burns Blog

Your people deserve your best communication effort. Their safety depends on it. The need to be effective in safety communications is perhaps the most important skill any supervisor or safety person can have. It has been proven that managers (including safety managers) and supervisors spend 50-80% of their day in actual communication. 50-80%! Communication is seriously important. If you have to repeat yourself, you're not being effective. And when your effectiveness is lacking, your people aren't buying-in to what you're saying. They're tolerating safety the rules. What you say and how you say it matters. You need to maximize your communication skills. Here are four personal strategies that you need to embrace to begin implementing effectiveness in safety communications:

Safety improves when engagement improves. Engagement improves when supervisors and safety people make it a point to value the people that they work with. An untrained or under-skilled supervisor or safety person tends to get the basics done. Nothing more. Get production. Stay within the safety rules. Everybody goes home safe (fingers crossed). Job done. Except, the job is not done. In fact, it could be argued that job is systematically being undone. If you’re focused on just getting it done, you may be missing the biggest part of the safety picture.

Welcome to The Safety Leader Podcast. We are live on Libsyn and iTunes! Click the play button above to listen. Subscribe to The Safety Leader Podcast in iTunes. https://itunes.apple.com/ca/podcast/the-safety-leader-podcast/id1147852584 In a perfect world, safety processes and procedures are definable and repeatable. But when you throw in the human element, process and procedure don’t always work. People are the most difficult variable to control. The choice is either to police your people into compliance or to build a culture of safety that wins their hearts and minds. As a motivational tool, hitting frontline workers over the head with a rulebook doesn’t work. In fact, it takes much less effort to let them know they’re appreciated. The problem is that an inexperienced supervisor who doesn’t know how to motivate and develop individuals on the job, ultimately has a harder time getting the job done. If there is no strategy to continuously improve employees, there’s little chance of improving the organization as a whole, and that includes safety. In fact, there are seven particular things that inexperienced and poorly trained supervisors and safety people do wrong. Let’s take a look at each of these mistakes.

It’s not the framework that determines safety success. It’s what happens inside the framework. Each year, sports leagues adjust and tweak their respective rules in an effort to make the game more entertaining for the fans. They also adjust rules to better protect their players and make the game safer. But rule changes don’t always prevent penalties or injuries. Even with new rules, sometimes tougher rules, individual players still choose to step outside of the rules. As much as there needs to be a framework to play the game within, it’s not the rules that improve the play. It's what the players do, the actions they take within the rules that improves the play. It's also what makes the game more exciting for the fans and safer for their fellow players. Safety performance is only as good as the people who are engaged in safety. Safety rules and process are a framework for how we are supposed to work in safety. But it still comes down to what each individual employee chooses to do within the rules and process of safety that determines the safety program’s success.

If you want to be passionate about safety, first be passionate about people. Successful workplace safety culture lies in the relationship between the frontline employee, the employee’s immediate supervisor, and the bond among the entire crew. No senior level initiatives, safety department compliance measures, or culture improvement ideas can have positive results if the frontline supervisor hasn’t established real working relationships. The supervisor needs to be a tipping point between safety compliance and safety success.

If you want to impact safety performance and buy-in, you are going to have to make a heartfelt connection. Finding a way to get front-line employees to buy-in to safety is tough. Communications can be a bit uncomfortable too, especially during the awkward one-on-one, heartfelt moments.

Welcome to The Safety Leader Podcast. We are live on Libsyn and iTunes! Click the play button above to listen. Subscribe to The Safety Leader Podcast in iTunes. https://itunes.apple.com/ca/podcast/the-safety-leader-podcast/id1147852584 If a safety issue doesn’t affect you directly, you may see the importance of addressing it but you may not feel the same motivation to address it quickly. Because the problem doesn’t affect you personally. If you’re not working directly at the front-line, you may not be motivated by the same things or in the same way that a front-line worker or supervisor is when it comes to safety. Every moment spent in an office, and not in the field or on the shop floor, is a moment that you’re not experiencing what your front-line crews and supervisors are experiencing. When you talk about performance numbers at safety meetings, they don’t have the same meaning. They don’t resonate with your people the way they do with you. If you want to connect with people at a level where they feel your commitment to safety, walk a mile in their shoes, or walk a mile beside their shoes. Walk where they walk. See what they see. Experience what they experience....

Safety leaders focus in the present and on what they are doing in the moment. With Labor Day on its way this weekend, many will be hitting the golf links. The subject of safety leadership is normally a serious one. But, I thought that we could venture a little off-road and have a look at safety leadership from a different perspective. Each of the points should be fairly evident and provide you with a new way to connect something fun with something serious. Let's play the front-nine. Here are nine reasons that safety leadership is like golf:

Welcome to The Safety Leader Podcast. We are live on Libsyn and iTunes! Click the play button above to listen. Subscribe to The Safety Leader Podcast in iTunes. https://itunes.apple.com/ca/podcast/the-safety-leader-podcast/id1147852584 In every job, regardless of position or title, there are people who are effective at the job. And there are people who may be qualified for the job, but not terribly effective. Being qualified for the job doesn’t automatically guarantee that you’re going to be effective at it. You may have seniority, or your certification, or a love of safety. These don't guarantee that you'll be effective at the job. The job of a safety person isn’t to be a hero or to save people’s lives. The biggest part of the job really is communication. Safety people and supervisors are supposed to influence, coach and mentor employees to make good decisions. To become much more effective and make a bigger difference, understand that your people don’t need your protection. They need your guidance....

When employees say that they’re in it for the paycheck, the other safety motivators are missing. A few years ago, a group of paper mill workers gathered in a community hall for a safety meeting. I was facilitating a safety leadership workshop that day. The conversation turned to motivation for safety. I asked the attendees to shout out reasons why the employees were motivated to work safely. First answer offered? Money talks. It seems that the employees were given a quarterly bonus for exceptional safety performance. Now, I disagree with cash incentives as motivation for increased safety performance. So I followed up asking that if the bonuses stopped, would they purposely engage in unsafe work? No one was willing to step forward and be anything but safe. We established that it wasn’t the money that motivated them to be safe. They agreed that money played only a small role in helping them to focus on safety. Motivating Safety Beyond The Paycheck So, what about the people who claim to be only in it for the money? The ones who say they only come to work for the paycheck? How do you get them motivated about safety?