Kevin Burns Blog

When apathy and mediocrity run rampant, morale hovers near rock bottom - right next to 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. When apathy and mediocrity run rampant, morale hovers near rock bottom - right next to safety. When attitudes suck, good luck being a top performer - either in safety or financial performance. Hence, you have a broken safety culture.

Here are the five most important things you need to know about being effective in your safety position. The term safety manager refers to anyone responsible for providing direction in safety. If they are managing or supervising or overseeing the safety program in any way, they are safety managers. I am not referring to your title.

In every profession, there are good and bad performers. Safety is no different. In a LinkedIn post recently, I wrote, “There will always be employment for good leaders. Safety leaders will always have options. That means security for their families and themselves.”

The new management reality: staff don’t work for managers - managers work for staff. There are 5 constants in life: death, taxes, change, Greek folk-songs speed up, and people make decisions that compromise safety. That last constant impacts the first one too often. That impacts the second (taxes/premiums) and creates more of the third, change. I haven’t figured out where the fourth one sits in the scheme of things.

Here are the three steps to take employee focus off of money and put it back onto safety To a union audience at a workshop, I asked the question, “Why do you work safely?” The answers varied from, "it’s the right thing to do" to "money talks."

Safety is in the midst of a change in perception: from a compliance program to a lifestyle choice. 2015 is the year that you are going to see an emergence of attitude being a major factor when it comes to workplace safety. That doesn’t mean that the process safety will take a back seat. Besides improving the safety process, safety attitudes will create buy-in to the safety program.

Why aren’t production and safety working out of the same office? Here are five ways to marry safety and production. Production and safety blame the other for either slowing work down or increasing incident levels. Safety blames operations when there is a push on for greater production. Operations blame safety for holding up production. Neither wants to be wrong. Both want to be right. (Note: if you still believe that safety holds up production, you need to resign immediately.)

Safety awards should not focus on years or milestones of safe service. Safety awards exist in almost every workplace. Someone once came up with the idea that awards for safety would help build safety culture and keep workers wanting to work safely. But like safety meetings themselves, awards events come off as hastily-assembled and minimally organized.

People really want to respect their boss. So don't make it hard for them to do it. In 2011, Google launched Project Oxygen. It was a management undertaking to determine what were the top traits that employees at Google expected of their managers. Up to this point, Google had promoted those with the greatest technical experience into management positions. The conventional thinking was that those who understood the job best, could manage the work the best.

Selling safety meets resistance. It’s not about shoving safety down their throats. It’s about helping them see that safety improves their lives. Use the word "sell" and safety managers get their backs up. The belief is that safety shouldn’t have to be sold. The word “selling” gets in the way of the true purpose of safety.