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.

Your incentive program may actually be preventing your employees from buying-in to safety. Here are 5 reasons why.

You may have fallen under the impression that safety incentives, paying your people (in either cash or prizes) to achieve Zero, may actually work. Well let me say right here that safety incentives do not work - ever.

The rate of 71% of North American workers that are not actively engaged in their work should be a wake-up call to every supervisor and safety person.

Turn on the specialty TV channels like The Food Network and Home and Garden TV and you will see a steady parade of experts hosting renovation or restaurant-turnaround fix-it shows. In every one of these programs are several common denominators:

• people who don’t care about much
• people who are apathetic and don’t buy-in to their job
• people who have lost their passion for the work they do and are simply going through the motions
• people who don’t take pride in their work and think “good enough” is good enough.

How do you get employees to find their focus in safety when some show up at work in the morning barely a degree or two above comatose?

It started on a conference call with my client's Safety Day organizing committee. They had chosen me to be the closing keynote safety speaker for a series of safety meetings. We spent a considerable amount of time preparing for the event, reviewing and discussing the pages of responses to my pre-event questionnaire. It was during the discussions that one of the committee members made an off-handed comment that may just prove to be a great tool to get employees to buy-in to safety.

To attract the people who already buy-in to safety as a personal value, you need to study the example of how guitar-stores hire employees.

You don't find personal values on a résumé. The résumé is a lousy tool for finding engaged workers with a set of personal values that buy-in to safety. A résumé doesn't give you that information. It only tells others what a worker was allowed to do in their last job - not what they were good at, not what they stand for and certainly not what makes their bum hum (excites them and drives high motivation).

The 80/20 Rule, The Pareto Principle, may be the exact reason you can't seem to hit Zero in safety and consistently hold it there. What you might think is the problem, is not actually the problem.

Safety is not something you do or manage; it is the result of five things done right. Unfortunately, the focus for achieving Zero has historically been solely on the OH&S part. But it is only one-fifth, or twenty percent, of what needs to be addressed.

Safety managers and safety supervisors complain that their employees won't buy-in to safety. They also complain about employees' lack of engagement and a lack of accountability in the safety program.

Safety incidents are on the rise. Workers are getting hurt because of decisions they make. Oh, sure, safety managers try to reduce the numbers of incidents through compliance but compliance alone doesn't work. If it did, every workplace would already be at Zero and stay there all of the time. So, more compliance is obviously not the answer.

Make safety buy-in about what your employees can gain, not what they have to lose.

We don't buy-in to a financial plan because of what we might lose. We don't buy-in to a healthy lifestyle because of what we might lose. We don't buy-in to personal development because of what we might lose. We don't buy-in to going to university because of what we might lose. But safety is focused on reminding workers of what they might lose if they don't comply - instead of showing people how safety buy-in makes life better.

Before you plan your next safety meeting, ask yourself if your intent is to scare your workers into compliance.

Do you want them to be afraid, or to get them to voluntarily buy-in to safety as a personal value?