Kevin Burns Blog

Disengagement rates in the workplace are too high. In North America, Gallup says that 65% of North American workers are not actively engaged in their work. And that is going to spell trouble for safety. You’ve been trying to get your employees to focus on safety and your efforts have not been effective. Here’s why.

I ran across another book recently that, on the back cover, suggested that the point of safety was to send people home in the same condition as when they arrived. I shuddered. Someone muttered that awful send them home safe phrase once and someone else must have thought it was clever. So, they borrowed it and then repeated it to someone else. And that someone must have picked it up and run with it until they had the chance to say it again. Now it's everywhere. And it means nothing.

Before you assume that your team is slipping into safety complacency, you need to determine whether complacency is really the problem. It may not be.

When employees actively support and participate in safety, they have accepted safety as their way to work. Without the employees’ willingness to support and participate in the safety program, the company's default position becomes things like rules-enforcement. When a workplace is centered around enforcing rules, people become more reluctant to go to work. Morale suffers and you lose your good people. You’ve probably been frustrated in getting buy-in from your front-line employees. Maybe you’ve gathered your team in a room for a safety event or stand-down. You showed them “safety” videos (I use quotation marks because I’ll bet most of those videos focused on injury, not safety). You instructed them in things like ladder use, handwashing, or lock-out tag-outs. As much as you think it went well during the stand-down, it didn’t stick. That’s because your stand-down safety event didn’t actually get buy-in.

Your team was doing great in safety and then suddenly, it wasn’t. You’ve been watching the incident numbers inch up over a few months and you are concerned that something bigger is going to happen. You know you need to deal with it before it gets worse. But you don’t know where to start. And you’re not even sure what the plan is or whether you even have the time needed to fix it. Complacency is the biggest concern of safety professionals and senior managers.

Since the onslaught of COVID-19, safety meetings have changed. Well, we hope they have. Most organizations have been connecting with their distanced employees through electronic means. And that includes safety meetings. Most safety professionals would freely admit that safety meetings were done badly before COVID. Taking a bad meeting and putting it online is not the answer.

In a supervisory coaching session this week, one of the participants remarked about the cold February temperatures rolling across their region of the country. By the end of the conversation, he suggested that they simply bundle up and go out to do their work. And they take warm-up breaks more often.

Employers, managers and supervisors who do not set clear expectations for their teams are already at a disadvantage. Without a set of clear expectations, you can expect your people to fumble around trying to figure out what’s important to their employers. When people are fumbling to figure out what is important, safety is going to falter.

Why is it that one company can struggle with safety performance while another company, in the same industry, easily excels at safety performance? The answer is in what happens on the ground – with front-line supervisory.

Supervisors armed with leadership skills and team-building tools create a greater sense of purpose on the front-line. Once upon a time, supervisors were chosen by either being the most senior person on a worksite or by being the best out of all members of the crew. Then, that person would take over as crew chief and lead their teams through the production and deadlines. But it was usually done without any training or much support from higher-ups.