Kevin Burns Blog

Safety marketing is what creates value and motivates people to action. In the summer of 1974, a tractor in a rocky field was cutting the soil and dropping 200-foot long lines of copper wire in the ground. When completed, there were five miles of 200-foot sections spreading out like a spider web. At the center of the wire web was a radio broadcast tower. The copper wire strands connected to the base of the tower grounded and dissipated energy from potential lightning strikes. This was my Dad’s radio broadcast tower in our hometown. I learned a lot of things about both marketing and communications in that first year the radio station went on the air, especially the difference between marketing and communications. The simplified version is this: if you’re listening to the news, the weather or a talk-show on the radio, that’s communications. If you’re listening to a commercial, a contest or an on-location broadcast, that’s marketing. Communications inform. Marketing moves you to an action. And this is where most safety programs make their biggest mistake. They assume that informing (communications) is enough. But it isn’t. PowerPoint slides, inspection reports and incident reviews are information (communications). Statistics, lagging indicators and white papers are information (communications). But none of them move people to take an action. It is information; nice to have and good to know. And although this information may influence your decision (or not) to take an action, in and of itself it does not move people.

When engagement is missing, so is quality, pride and, sadly, safety. Turn on the TV and you come across fix-it experts hosting renovation or business turnaround shows. In every one of these programs are several common denominators which directly relate to a much-needed fix:

Safety is a shared responsibility. It’s not exclusive to one person. It still exists. There are far too many people who still believe that safety is the responsibility of the safety department. They think Safety is responsible for completing forms and paperwork, interventions and observations, and making sure employees are wearing their PPE. The safety department will also supply them with their eye protection, hearing protection, gloves and will pony up cash for other parts of the required and mandated safety equipment. But, just like a rental car, they treat the company-purchased safety protection in the same way. Misplaced regularly, they expect the company to replace their lost PPE items. Even though they may use their own power tools on a construction site, for example, the hands that hold the tools should be covered by gloves purchased by the company. The safety guy must do all of the paperwork because, “that’s his job.”

Selling is about solving a problem or uncovering a benefit of safety in a way that makes people want to buy-in. Safety shouldn’t have to be sold. That comment is typical right across the varying types of safety personnel. People get hung up on the word selling as though selling is a bad thing, a manipulative thing. Truthfully, what now seems like a lifetime ago, I used to sell photocopiers. But, my clients would never buy the photocopier. They bought what it could do. And more importantly, what it could do for them. Prior to photocopier sales, I sold radio advertising. Again, people weren’t buying commercial time. They were buying the foot traffic to their business that the commercial time created - what it could do for them. You must sell safety the same way too. It’s not about shoving safety down the throats of your people. It’s about helping them see that safety improves their lives in a way that they are probably not seeing it. As a supervisor or safety person, you have to help employees see what safety does and can do for them. Selling anything takes a communications skill-set and trust. Rarely are the best salespeople the newest salespeople. The best salespeople are the experienced veterans who always keep the interests of the client at the forefront. They know that the product or service they are selling will help to eliminate a client’s pain-point. And the client knows it, too. No one buys anything that doesn’t make their lives better in some way. It’s why we buy homes, vehicles, vacations, education, insurance and investments. Those things make our lives better, more comfortable, less uncertain. So, why wouldn’t we buy-in to safety too?

When you have achieved successful buy-in, your people can help turn a company’s mundane safety program into a movement built around a set of values, rather than rules. Pick any night of the week and you’re likely to stumble across a repeat broadcast of the TV shows Shark Tank (USA) or Dragon’s Den (Canada, UK, Australia, etc). Entrepreneurs pitch their business ideas to secure investment finance from a panel of venture capitalists. If the pitch is a good one, there’s a good chance of getting buy-in from one or more of the Dragons or Sharks. If the pitch misses the mark, they go home empty-handed. Take this idea and apply it to safety. Instead of looking at a safety meeting as a place to pitch stats, figures, reports and procedures, view your safety meeting attendees as potential investors. If your pitch misses, your people won’t invest themselves in safety. Your presentation won’t yield the buy-in you’re looking for. But if you pitch successfully, you’ve offered plenty of benefits and helped eliminate the mental barriers to improve safety culture. If you want to build a solid safety culture, you’re going to need employee buy-in. Here are three strategies that can get you started in improving buy-in to the safety program:

If you’re going to bring employees to a safety meeting, involve them, engage them, ask them. It’s their meeting too. “These meetings are so boring. I’d rather be working.” That’s a comment actually overheard in a safety meeting. There’s a difference between safety meetings and engaging safety meetings. Safety meetings are typically information dumps and are full of ineffective things that other people use in their safety meetings. Those meetings don’t get results either. Then there are engaging safety meetings, ones that build teamwork and motivation for safety.

Start thinking in ways of how you can transform your people … and, in turn, your safety culture. Supervisors and safety people, you have a choice. You can choose to be only as good as you were last year; to allow yourself to be complacent in your learning and effectiveness. Or you can choose to supercharge your effectiveness this year. (Hint: complacency will take a whole lot less effort but won't be nearly as rewarding.) You are looking for more effectiveness from your people this year in safety aren’t you? How are you going to accomplish that without investing in your own new skills and information? Front-line employees get better at the job when they get skills development. Same too for supervisors and safety people. They become more effective when they get new skills, ideas and strategies. As I wrote in PeopleWork (page 194), “There’s no such thing as the status quo. You’re either moving forward or you’re falling behind. Everything is in a constant state of motion. In order to remain relevant and effective in our work, we all need to improve. We do this by learning to push our own boundaries.”

To change crew-code in safety will require you to win the hearts and minds of your good people. In addition to the Occupational Health and Safety Code, every company has its own corporate safety manual. These are the processes and procedures specific to a company that meet or exceed the minimum standards of the OH&S Code. There’s also an unspoken Crew-Code of “how we do things around here.” This is how workers and supervisors interpret the processes and procedures in the safety manual. The crew-code is powerful, perhaps more so than even the company safety manual. Depending on the crew, in some instances, it’s basically a “what we can get away with” code. Crew-codes that shortchange safety are illegal and dangerous—the opposite of a culture of safety. Crew-code happens at the crew level. That’s good news for safety people and supervisors. You really only have to be able to influence your small crew in order to shift the crew-code. But, the inexperienced supervisor who doesn’t know how to motivate and develop employees, will have a harder time influencing crew-code. As a front-line supervisor or safety person, here are three ways you can begin to influence the crew-code in safety:

The M4 Method is meant to directly help supervisors and safety people build on-the-job relationships that support safety from the ground up. Focus on enforcement and your people are focused on rules. Focus on helping people integrate safety into their lives and they focus on being part of the safety solution. Different tactic, different outcome. But so much time, effort, and money is wasted on enforcement tactics because so little time is spent on encouraging employees to buy into safety. The energy spent on enforcement could be better spent building teamwork, morale, and camaraderie. A team that has adopted safety as a personal value is better equipped to make the kinds of decisions on the job to ensure safety. Instead of mere compliance with procedures, programming, and production, a safety-oriented crew draws from a deep well of mutual caring and connection. When crews themselves become safety leaders, the need for safety cops disappears. What you have instead is a team of solid safety leaders who perform and produce at a higher level. In my book PeopleWork: The Human Touch in Workplace Safety, I present The M4 Method for improved safety culture. It’s a way of integrating people into the strategy of building solid safety programs. The M4 Method is meant to directly help supervisors and safety people build on-the-job relationships that support safety from the ground up. The M4 Method marries four critical components to achieve the next level of your organizational safety culture:

Shifting your safety culture from one of compliance and rules enforcement to one of human engagement will require marketing. If you think that marketing is all about sales, advertising, and late-night infomercials, then this post should change your mind. Marketing is a way to communicate the “why,” the meaning and importance of safety. A sign in the workplace that reads, “Stop. Do Not Proceed,” is a warning, and nothing more. It’s a type of communication, but it doesn’t communicate the “why.” Memos, PowerPoint slides, emails, toolbox talks, and safety training are all forms of communication. You need to take communication to the next level; to create communication that motivates employees. This is where marketing comes into play. In my book, PeopleWork: The Human Touch in Workplace Safety, marketing is discussed as the third critical component of the M4 Method. Here are three reasons your safety program should have a marketing strategy: