Kevin Burns Blog

The battle for safety is not about safety at all.

Engagement, or a lack of it, is the biggest problem in the workplace today. The Gallup surveys tell us that 71% of employees are NOT fully engaged. Safety suffers when engagement is missing. How could it not be? If people aren’t engaged in their work, then they aren’t going to be engaged in safely doing their work.

Why has this not become a massive battle by companies to re-connect their people with their work? Because the command-and-control model of management pushes rules-enforcement instead of relationship-building. In my new book, PeopleWork: The Human Touch in Workplace Safety, I write that more rules, more procedures and more processes heaped on to people who aren't engaged, aren’t connected and aren’t paying attention just isn’t going to work. If you want people to pay attention to safety, you first have to get them to pay attention. That means engage first.

A 71% level of disengagement is a serious drop in focused-attention productivity. This should be the battle you’re fighting in your efforts to improve safety performance. Lost productivity and disengaged safety performance creates a huge financial mess forcing companies to continue to pay more and get less. You'd think that there would be a hue-and-cry from the corporate executives to find solutions intended to curb this very real problem that is plaguing our workplaces and costing us money. But there isn't.

Engagement isn’t being talked about in safety circles. They’re still talking about more processes and procedures to fix an obvious engagement problem. But because it’s called an "employee" engagement problem, safety doesn’t know how to fix that.

Here are three ways you can begin to improve engagement levels with employees:

PeopleWork lays out a new safety model. It changes the discussion from rule-based enforcement to performance-based culture focused on mentoring, coaching, and inspiring teams.

When frontline supervisors buy into safety as a personal value, they better understand their role in keeping the workplace safe. In fact, if crews themselves can become safety leaders, the need for safety inspectors almost disappears altogether.

So, I wrote PeopleWork - The Human Touch in Workplace Safety to introduce the next level in safety. In the book, I lay out The M4 Method for taking workplace safety to the next level. The M4 Method combines four elements: Management, Meetings, Marketing and Motivation. All parts depend on the other parts to take safety from a compliance-based focus to one that is more people-based. The people-based approach helps employees to buy-in to safety.

Here are a few snippets from the book now on sale worldwide on Amazon....