Kevin Burns Blog (40)

Kevin Burns Blog

Leadership for frontline industrial supervisors.

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3 Tips To Revolutionize Safety Meetings
Posted by Kevin Burns on October 1, 2024
3 Tips To Revolutionize Safety Meetings
The Safety Meeting is the most important tool in helping employees to buy-in to safety, quickly. Stop thinking that safety meetings are a legal requirement. It's bigger than that. How your people approach safety meetings is the same way they approach safety. How you approach safety meetings is evident to in how they are perceived.
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Why Safety Meetings Are Boring
Posted by Kevin Burns on October 1, 2024
Why Safety Meetings Are Boring
Safety meetings are not supposed to be boring. People, more specifically presenters, make them that way. Talks from the TED conferences are engaging. If you are not familiar with TED (Technology, Entertainment, Design), they are a global set of conferences that bring together the world's most fascinating thinkers and doers, who are challenged to give the talk of their lives in 18 minutes or less.
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Safety Isn’t A Process Problem - It’s A People Problem
Posted by Kevin Burns on October 1, 2024
Safety Isn’t A Process Problem - It’s A People Problem
There is a people problem in safety, a mindset problem in safety and a decision-making problem in safety. Four workers were attempting to lift the fourth wall into place on a home construction project. The wall was too heavy for the four to lift and so three let go crushing the fourth under the weight. The worker died.
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Stop Training In Safety
Posted by Kevin Burns on October 1, 2024
Stop Training In Safety
If they don’t believe in safety in the first place, then all of the safety training in the world isn’t going to help. Challenges with workplace incidents can be traced right back to Day 1 - safety training. Training is the basics that workers need to do the job today. There is no personalization or customization of the training based on either aptitude, attitude or comprehension. Basically, people are trained in safety on a schedule, and it is expected that they will all “get” it at the same time. Training’s fatal flaw is an assumption that everyone starts from the same place.
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Declare War On Safety Apathy
Posted by Kevin Burns on October 1, 2024
Declare War On Safety Apathy
When you don’t ask your people to do anything with the information you are giving them, you are creating the same safety apathy you say you want to overcome. Are you asking your safety meeting attendees to be participants or spectators? Just because the bodies show up at the safety meeting doesn’t mean that their minds do. They might look like they’re paying attention, but you really can’t tell. It must be OK. You’re not asking them to do anything except sit there.
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6 Gut-Check Safety Strategies
Posted by Kevin Burns on October 1, 2024
6 Gut-Check Safety Strategies
200 people will die in workplace incidents this year - one every 43 hours. Every second day, someone is going to die. The roofer stood 3 stories up on the roof and surveyed his work. On his back was his fall-arrest harness. At his feet was the clip supposed to be connected to his harness. I called the company OH&S Manager. He explained he would take action immediately and mentioned that any contractor in contravention of OH&S regulations are fined $100.
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Why Safety Meetings Must Move Out Of Back Shops
Posted by Kevin Burns on October 1, 2024
Why Safety Meetings Must Move Out Of Back Shops
If you want to change the culture of safety within your company, start not with how you DO safety, start with how you celebrate safety. We've all been to safety meetings that missed the mark—topics irrelevant, sessions too long, disorganization was the rule.
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How To Motivate Employees To Buy-In To Safety
Posted by Kevin Burns on September 22, 2025
How To Motivate Employees To Buy-In To Safety
In safety, there is a mistaken belief that in order to motivate employees to buy-in to safety, you have to “go negative.” After delivering a keynote presentation at a safety meeting of electrical linemen, I ended up chatting with Don, a veteran of electrical installs. At one point, Don made a laughing reference to the fact that he had lost his right thumb in a farm accident many years before.
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Make Safety Sexy - Part 1 (in an endless series)
Posted by Kevin Burns on September 17, 2019
Make Safety Sexy - Part 1 (in an endless series)
Stop discussing the negatives of not being safe. Instead, focus on the positives of buying-in to safety. The words “Make Safety Sexy” might conjure up the image in the photo for some. But that’s not at all what the phrase means.
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How To Shift Safety Culture Without Senior Management Support
Posted by Kevin Burns on October 23, 2025
How To Shift Safety Culture Without Senior Management Support
Don't worry that senior management is not supporting your Safety Culture initiative. Truthfully, you don’t need their help. Corporate Culture is the glue that holds your organization together - how you do things, how you hire, how you even handle meetings. Safety Culture is the way your people do safety. But as I wrote in an earlier Blog post, the Unspoken Code of peers is one of the largest contributors to Culture. Companies who attempt to shift Culture without taking into account The Code, run a real risk.
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