Kevin Burns Blog

Selling is about solving a problem or uncovering a benefit of safety in a way that makes people want to buy-in. Safety shouldn’t have to be sold. That comment is typical right across the varying types of safety personnel. People get hung up on the word selling as though selling is a bad thing, a manipulative thing. Truthfully, what now seems like a lifetime ago, I used to sell photocopiers. But, my clients would never buy the photocopier. They bought what it could do. And more importantly, what it could do for them. Prior to photocopier sales, I sold radio advertising. Again, people weren’t buying commercial time. They were buying the foot traffic to their business that the commercial time created - what it could do for them. You must sell safety the same way too. It’s not about shoving safety down the throats of your people. It’s about helping them see that safety improves their lives in a way that they are probably not seeing it. As a supervisor or safety person, you have to help employees see what safety does and can do for them. Selling anything takes a communications skill-set and trust. Rarely are the best salespeople the newest salespeople. The best salespeople are the experienced veterans who always keep the interests of the client at the forefront. They know that the product or service they are selling will help to eliminate a client’s pain-point. And the client knows it, too. No one buys anything that doesn’t make their lives better in some way. It’s why we buy homes, vehicles, vacations, education, insurance and investments. Those things make our lives better, more comfortable, less uncertain. So, why wouldn’t we buy-in to safety too?

When you have achieved successful buy-in, your people can help turn a company’s mundane safety program into a movement built around a set of values, rather than rules. Pick any night of the week and you’re likely to stumble across a repeat broadcast of the TV shows Shark Tank (USA) or Dragon’s Den (Canada, UK, Australia, etc). Entrepreneurs pitch their business ideas to secure investment finance from a panel of venture capitalists. If the pitch is a good one, there’s a good chance of getting buy-in from one or more of the Dragons or Sharks. If the pitch misses the mark, they go home empty-handed. Take this idea and apply it to safety. Instead of looking at a safety meeting as a place to pitch stats, figures, reports and procedures, view your safety meeting attendees as potential investors. If your pitch misses, your people won’t invest themselves in safety. Your presentation won’t yield the buy-in you’re looking for. But if you pitch successfully, you’ve offered plenty of benefits and helped eliminate the mental barriers to improve safety culture. If you want to build a solid safety culture, you’re going to need employee buy-in. Here are three strategies that can get you started in improving buy-in to the safety program:

If you’re going to bring employees to a safety meeting, involve them, engage them, ask them. It’s their meeting too. “These meetings are so boring. I’d rather be working.” That’s a comment actually overheard in a safety meeting. There’s a difference between safety meetings and engaging safety meetings. Safety meetings are typically information dumps and are full of ineffective things that other people use in their safety meetings. Those meetings don’t get results either. Then there are engaging safety meetings, ones that build teamwork and motivation for safety.

Start thinking in ways of how you can transform your people … and, in turn, your safety culture. Supervisors and safety people, you have a choice. You can choose to be only as good as you were last year; to allow yourself to be complacent in your learning and effectiveness. Or you can choose to supercharge your effectiveness this year. (Hint: complacency will take a whole lot less effort but won't be nearly as rewarding.) You are looking for more effectiveness from your people this year in safety aren’t you? How are you going to accomplish that without investing in your own new skills and information? Front-line employees get better at the job when they get skills development. Same too for supervisors and safety people. They become more effective when they get new skills, ideas and strategies. As I wrote in PeopleWork (page 194), “There’s no such thing as the status quo. You’re either moving forward or you’re falling behind. Everything is in a constant state of motion. In order to remain relevant and effective in our work, we all need to improve. We do this by learning to push our own boundaries.”

To change crew-code in safety will require you to win the hearts and minds of your good people. In addition to the Occupational Health and Safety Code, every company has its own corporate safety manual. These are the processes and procedures specific to a company that meet or exceed the minimum standards of the OH&S Code. There’s also an unspoken Crew-Code of “how we do things around here.” This is how workers and supervisors interpret the processes and procedures in the safety manual. The crew-code is powerful, perhaps more so than even the company safety manual. Depending on the crew, in some instances, it’s basically a “what we can get away with” code. Crew-codes that shortchange safety are illegal and dangerous—the opposite of a culture of safety. Crew-code happens at the crew level. That’s good news for safety people and supervisors. You really only have to be able to influence your small crew in order to shift the crew-code. But, the inexperienced supervisor who doesn’t know how to motivate and develop employees, will have a harder time influencing crew-code. As a front-line supervisor or safety person, here are three ways you can begin to influence the crew-code in safety:

The M4 Method is meant to directly help supervisors and safety people build on-the-job relationships that support safety from the ground up. Focus on enforcement and your people are focused on rules. Focus on helping people integrate safety into their lives and they focus on being part of the safety solution. Different tactic, different outcome. But so much time, effort, and money is wasted on enforcement tactics because so little time is spent on encouraging employees to buy into safety. The energy spent on enforcement could be better spent building teamwork, morale, and camaraderie. A team that has adopted safety as a personal value is better equipped to make the kinds of decisions on the job to ensure safety. Instead of mere compliance with procedures, programming, and production, a safety-oriented crew draws from a deep well of mutual caring and connection. When crews themselves become safety leaders, the need for safety cops disappears. What you have instead is a team of solid safety leaders who perform and produce at a higher level. In my book PeopleWork: The Human Touch in Workplace Safety, I present The M4 Method for improved safety culture. It’s a way of integrating people into the strategy of building solid safety programs. The M4 Method is meant to directly help supervisors and safety people build on-the-job relationships that support safety from the ground up. The M4 Method marries four critical components to achieve the next level of your organizational safety culture:

Shifting your safety culture from one of compliance and rules enforcement to one of human engagement will require marketing. If you think that marketing is all about sales, advertising, and late-night infomercials, then this post should change your mind. Marketing is a way to communicate the “why,” the meaning and importance of safety. A sign in the workplace that reads, “Stop. Do Not Proceed,” is a warning, and nothing more. It’s a type of communication, but it doesn’t communicate the “why.” Memos, PowerPoint slides, emails, toolbox talks, and safety training are all forms of communication. You need to take communication to the next level; to create communication that motivates employees. This is where marketing comes into play. In my book, PeopleWork: The Human Touch in Workplace Safety, marketing is discussed as the third critical component of the M4 Method. Here are three reasons your safety program should have a marketing strategy:

To fix safety performance, you must first fix the engagement issue. Gallup pegs the disengagement rate of employees and workers at around 70%. 7 out of 10 employees, workers and contractors are not actively engaged in their work. Here’s why that spells big trouble for safety. If a worker is not engaged in their work, then they are not engaged in safely doing their work. You cannot be disengaged from the job but still engaged in safety. To fix the safety performance, you must first fix the engagement issue.

If you want to change the safety culture, you have to change the way you do things around here. There has been a lot of talk on the subject of safety culture recently. But for those that have a hard time defining what safety culture really is, let’s turn to Wikipedia’s definition. “Safety culture is the attitude, beliefs, perceptions and values that employees share in relation to safety in the workplace. Safety culture is a part of organizational culture, and has been described by the phrase "the way we do things around here."

The battle for safety is not about safety at all. Engagement, or a lack of it, is the biggest problem in the workplace today. The Gallup surveys tell us that 71% of employees are NOT fully engaged. Safety suffers when engagement is missing. How could it not be? If people aren’t engaged in their work, then they aren’t going to be engaged in safely doing their work. Why has this not become a massive battle by companies to re-connect their people with their work? Because the command-and-control model of management pushes rules-enforcement instead of relationship-building. In my new book, PeopleWork: The Human Touch in Workplace Safety, I write that more rules, more procedures and more processes heaped on to people who aren't engaged, aren’t connected and aren’t paying attention just isn’t going to work. If you want people to pay attention to safety, you first have to get them to pay attention. That means engage first. A 71% level of disengagement is a serious drop in focused-attention productivity. This should be the battle you’re fighting in your efforts to improve safety performance. Lost productivity and disengaged safety performance creates a huge financial mess forcing companies to continue to pay more and get less. You'd think that there would be a hue-and-cry from the corporate executives to find solutions intended to curb this very real problem that is plaguing our workplaces and costing us money. But there isn't. Engagement isn’t being talked about in safety circles. They’re still talking about more processes and procedures to fix an obvious engagement problem. But because it’s called an "employee" engagement problem, safety doesn’t know how to fix that. Here are three ways you can begin to improve engagement levels with employees: