Kevin Burns Blog (34)

Kevin Burns Blog

Leadership for frontline industrial supervisors.

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5 Reasons To Stop Annual Safety Awards
Posted by Kevin Burns on October 1, 2024
5 Reasons To Stop Annual Safety Awards
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.
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Top 5 Things Employees Want From Safety Supervisors
Posted by Kevin Burns on October 1, 2024
Top 5 Things Employees Want From Safety Supervisors
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.
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4 Reasons You Hate "Selling" Safety But Have To Do It Anyway
Posted by Kevin Burns on October 1, 2024
4 Reasons You Hate
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.
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You Say You Want Safety Culture, But Are You Ready?
Posted by Kevin Burns on October 1, 2024
You Say You Want Safety Culture, But Are You Ready?
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.
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5 Things You Absolutely Must Know To Shift Safety Culture
Posted by Kevin Burns on October 1, 2024
5 Things You Absolutely Must Know To Shift Safety Culture
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.
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3 Crucial Strategies To Improve Safety Culture
Posted by Kevin Burns on October 1, 2024
3 Crucial Strategies To Improve Safety Culture
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.
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5 Reasons You're Not Getting Safety Buy-in
Posted by Kevin Burns on October 1, 2024
5 Reasons You're Not Getting Safety Buy-in
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.
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3 Reasons You're Not The Boss Of Me In Safety
Posted by Kevin Burns on October 1, 2024
3 Reasons You're Not The Boss Of Me In Safety
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.
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Top 3 Arguments For Safety
Posted by Kevin Burns on October 1, 2024
Top 3 Arguments For Safety
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.
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5 Reasons Safety Meetings Need One Leader
Posted by Kevin Burns on October 1, 2024
5 Reasons Safety Meetings Need One Leader
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.
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