Kevin Burns Blog

To inspire your people to buy-in to safety, you must make safety inspiring. “If you want to your safety program to run like a well-oiled machine, consider your people as “moving parts.” Parts need maintenance for best performance. Coach, communicate and inspire their best. It’s safety after all.” - Kevin Burns

Flippant answers must stop immediately. Dismissing concerns as unimportant, disengages people from the job and safety. “Most people do not listen with the intent to understand; they listen with the intent to reply.” ― Stephen R. Covey, The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People

The biggest issue uncovered is poor communication. Safety managers are concerned that employees will lose respect because of their communications skills. Having mission and values statements are useless without communication. Building and authoring a safety program is useless without communication to tell others what is in it. Safety certification is useless without communication skills to pass along what they know.

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.)