Kevin Burns Blog

It is impossible to create accountability in safety without getting every employee to make it a part of their job. Safety managers and front-line supervisors want employees to be more active and vocal about safety. They want employees to be more engaged in the decisions that the employees make and the results they get. They want more active participation in reporting, in actively talking about safety and a much higher involvement in being vocal at safety meetings.

Small, incremental improvements to the safety program are not as noticeable and do not expose employees to undue stress. Every job has its ups and downs. Employees can feel overwhelmed by the sheer volume of responsibility and workload. Then add in paperwork, Job Hazard Assessments, new OH&S guidelines, new reporting as part of the corporate re-focus on safety and you have a workforce that can feel stressed. Responsibility can be demanding. But taking a coffee break of fifteen minutes per day to self-improve can reduce stress and feelings of being overwhelmed.

In organizing your safety promotion campaign, here are three things you absolutely must stop doing if you want to get safety buy-in. When marketing and promotion of safety goes up, incidents go down. Plain and simple, this works. Promoting safety raises awareness which causes people to be focused. Safety promotion is a key component of any good safety program. Ongoing campaigns for safety remind employees to make good decisions between safety meetings.

Have you thought about the value and benefit that a well-run safety meeting can bring to your organization? There is no other department in your organization that brings together every single staff member as often as a safety meeting does. No one should be exempt from attending safety meetings. Safety applies to everyone. Even the receptionist should be involved in safety meetings. The purpose of a safety meeting may have started as a legal requirement but have you thought about the value and the huge benefit that a well-run safety meeting can bring to your organization? Let’s start with three benefits that your safety meetings create ... but only if you do them right:

When you remove worry and uncertainty from your work site, people are more likely to make decisions that are in alignment with their own health and safety. This week is the annual birthday celebrations of both Canada and the USA: Canada on July 1 and the USA on July 4. Both days are celebrated as national holidays in their respective countries - however Canada has a much lower concentration of backyard fireworks displays (probably because "the rocket's red glare" isn't in the Canadian anthem).

When people engage in these four things at your safety meeting, they will buy-in to safety. Safety meetings started out as a legal requirement. You had to have them, they had to be recorded and the subject matter had to satisfy the Code. But nowhere does it state that you can’t add items to the safety meeting or that you can’t have fun and to speak-up in the meetings.

Safety leadership is just like regular leadership - only these ones buy-in to safety as a personal value. There is a difference between simple safety compliance and becoming an active safety leader. As I’ve mentioned in the past, leadership in safety has nothing to do with management. You don’t have to be in management to be a safety leader, mentor or influencer. All that is required is a commitment to wanting to embrace safety as a personal value and to be willing to not allow the shortcuts, risky behaviors or condemnation of safety of others to influence your choices.

Every safety-whiner points the finger at the company to be responsible. Personal accountability goes missing when it’s whine-time on the safety job. So, are you responsible for your own safety? It would seem elementary. But the safety whiners, the one’s who think that the whole idea of safety is just big pain in the ass, don’t get that. They expect that the company will supply them with their eye protection, hearing protection, gloves and will pony up cash for other parts of the required and mandated safety equipment. And just like a rental car, they treat the company-purchased safety protection in the same way.

Personal leaders in safety are those who lead themselves in their own lives and make decisions that are best for themselves and those around them. When consulting with companies to help them improve their safety meetings, I routinely meet with safety managers, supervisors and foremen in a round-table discussions. In these round-tables, I get a better understanding of staff participation levels, identify what is working well and what is not and establish safety culture baselines.