Kevin Burns Blog

You Say You Want Safety Culture, But Are You Ready?

Posted by Kevin Burns on October 1, 2024

6 minimum standards that are preventing you from establishing a strong safety culture. No one wants to see anyone injured. To build a safety culture requires more than just viewing safety as an injury-prevention program. It’s more than following rules and meeting minimum standards. To build a safety culture requires employees to be respectful of each other, to display courtesy and care about each other. Safety is a teamwork philosophy.

5 Things You Absolutely Must Know To Shift Safety Culture

Posted by Kevin Burns on October 1, 2024

Every single person in the organization has a hand in a strong safety culture. It doesn’t work any other way. Strong safety cultures are built on character and values like courtesy, respect, sharing, teamwork and personal leadership. They are not built on certifications, hierarchies, self-congratulations, position or tenure.

3 Crucial Strategies To Improve Safety Culture

Posted by Kevin Burns on October 1, 2024

To improve the culture of safety, take a long, hard look at how you frame communications about safety. Safety Culture will improve when the communications about safety within the organization improve. Besides increasing the quantity of communication, consider the quality.

5 Reasons You're Not Getting Safety Buy-in

Posted by Kevin Burns on October 1, 2024

You have all of the control over your safety program and how many of your good people buy-in to the program. There are some things you can control and some you can not. What you can control is your participation in the safety program. No one can turn down or increase your participation in safety.

3 Reasons You're Not The Boss Of Me In Safety

Posted by Kevin Burns on October 1, 2024

You'd want your co-workers to make the right decisions if you were the boss of them. Well, you are the boss of you. So how about you act like you're in charge? Stop using the word leadership to describe management. We have all worked for managers who had zero leadership skills. You don’t call them your leader. You call them your boss. Leadership and management have little to do with each other.

Top 3 Arguments For Safety

Posted by Kevin Burns on October 1, 2024

Here are three compelling arguments for choosing safety. Call it the “Diesel Strategy” because it is powerful and goes a long distance. The safety department complains that it’s difficult to get workers to buy-in to safety. Employees resist buying-in to a program of checks, forms and paperwork.

5 Reasons Safety Meetings Need One Leader

Posted by Kevin Burns on October 1, 2024

The best safety meetings have both conviction and experience. The safety meeting is far too important to hand off to an inexperienced person and hope that it goes OK. Can employees lead the safety meeting? It is an idea that hopes to lead to increased engagement. The thinking is that if a new voice speaks, people will listen. If a staffer leads the meeting, then others will engage better. It might be true. But there is a stronger case for not putting the responsibility onto employees.

3 Ways To Outsmart Safety Inspectors

Posted by Kevin Burns on October 1, 2024

A team focused on winning a championship will outplay the team focused on avoiding penalties. I received an email this week from a safety adviser whose company has the right safety systems in place. Company management is strong and committed and there is a concentrated presence on the company’s job sites. But, the Occupational Health & Safety inspectors still find infractions? The question was: what is it that the inspectors are seeing and why can’t the company see it first?

Why Safety Managers Cling To The Rules

Posted by Kevin Burns on October 1, 2024

Being in a position of authority doesn’t automatically make you a leader. Your safety management positon doesn't automatically elevate you. Managers, who have no self-confidence about their abilities, cling to the rules. The reason for that is simple: the rules are always on your side and when you stick to the rules, you will always be right. That's why safety meetings cling to the rules, the statistics and the reports; they are irrefutable. They are proof. They are results. By clinging to the rules and statistics, there is no room for employees to challenge the person delivering them.

5 Conversations That Have Nothing And Everything To Do With Safety

Posted by Kevin Burns on October 1, 2024

Improve the individuals and the organization as a whole gets better. Improve personal skills and the collective safety culture improves. Safety meetings, should solve problems and make the organization better. They are not meant to bore, to disengage or to frustrate. But they do. Meetings don’t have to entertain. But there is nothing wrong with entertaining employees and making work fun, even safety. Fun meetings engage employees and increase uptake.

Leadership for frontline industrial supervisors.

You Say You Want Safety Culture, But Are You Ready?

5 Things You Absolutely Must Know To Shift Safety Culture

3 Crucial Strategies To Improve Safety Culture

5 Reasons You're Not Getting Safety Buy-in

3 Reasons You're Not The Boss Of Me In Safety

Top 3 Arguments For Safety

5 Reasons Safety Meetings Need One Leader

3 Ways To Outsmart Safety Inspectors

Why Safety Managers Cling To The Rules

5 Conversations That Have Nothing And Everything To Do With Safety

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