Kevin Burns Blog

To move people toward safety, you have to get the communications part right first.

Safety performance is only as good as the quality of the communication. Communication matters. How you communicate can matter even more. It has been studied that 50-80% of a supervisor’s time is spent communicating. Since it is the biggest job supervisors and safety people do, you need to be good at it.

In safety, you will find warnings, communications and marketing. What’s the difference? Warnings warn. Communications inform. Marketing moves. For this article, we are going to focus on the communications part, especially how you communicate.

Here are four strategies that can immediately improve the level of your safety communications:

There is a vast difference between communication and effective communication.

Why is it that some supervisors and safety people can say something once and they get compliance? While other supervisors and safety people find they have to repeat themselves constantly. How can it be that one group gets it immediately and another needs constant reminding? There is a vast difference between communication and effective communication.

Relationships work better when there is respect and trust - both ways.

As a supervisor or safety person, building better relationships is key to open communication. It is also the strongest building block to creating engaged teams that buy-in to safety. Combine good communication with mutual trust and respect and you build solid teamwork. Relationships matter and so you had better get good at them. But you cannot feign or fake your way to building solid working relationships.

Nothing shows your respect for employees like making them feel that they matter.

Communicating one-on-one is the backbone of solid safety performance improvement. If you don't make the communication personal, you can't possibly make safety personal. So the key to making safety personal is to make the communicartion between supervisor or safety person and front-line employee personal.

There are no tricks to doing this effectively. But there are five things that you really should consider adding to your communications with front-line employees. It will help you build better rapport and open the lines of communication:

Communication gets better when your intentions for communication become clearer.

Clear, concise safety communication is critical to front-line crews and employees. As a supervisor or safety person, you need to be fully understood in your communication. There’s no room for ambiguity. There can be no doubt about what you’re trying to say and what you want them to do next.

Too many supervisors ascend to their positions because they’ve been on the job the longest. It's not because of their communication skills. There is no direct connection between tenure (seniority) and communication. In fact, the longer you’re in the job, the more you assume others already know what they should know.

Safety people and supervisors are not required to have any schooling in either communications or management skills. But the biggest part of the job is communicating, right?

Let’s re-frame communications in a way that helps front-line supervisors and safety people. Let’s improve communications. Here are three questions that are designed to streamline your communications effectively in safety:

Front-line supervisors and safety people have the most challenging positions in any organization.

Front-line supervisors and safety people have the most challenging positions in any organization. Most do it with little management or supervisory skills training. It's tough to stumble around in a job trying to find your voice and management style. Yet, supervisors and safety people do it. They manage the heart and soul of production and must get exceptional safety performance.

If this is you, here are five things you need to acquire to become more effective at the job:

Your people want and deserve a blueprint for success in safety - something more than rules and procedures.

Safety buy-in happens when employees figure out what they gain, not what they could lose. You don't buy-in to a financial plan, a healthy lifestyle or a good education to avoid what you might lose. You look for your wins. Instead of reminding workers of what they might lose if they don't comply, safety should show people how life is better because of it.

You cannot just think of yourself as a quality safety leader and employ low-quality tactics for the safety of your crew.

An employee not engaged in their work; who mindlessly goes through the motions of their work does not buy-into safety. Gallup says that over 70% of employees in North America are not fully engaged in their work. That spells trouble for safety performance. Safety managers and supervisors, engagement just became your problem.

Supervisors and safety managers must participate in management and coaching training courses now. A supervisor or manager who can't help an employee engage in safety is also a job-hazard.

Front-line supervisors and safety people set the tone of “how we do things ‘round here.” They also set the tone of how we safely do things ‘round here. They also influence respect and trust among crew members. Anyone in a position of influence must embrace that responsibility.

Instead of focusing on negative outcomes, re-frame communications to be more positive in safety.

Safety, like any other message or idea, needs to be marketed to employees. Safety needs reminding. The more a safety message is repeated, the more employees become comfortable with the message.

The overwhelming focus of safety marketing in past has been wrong. Scare tactics, sad stories and data charts do not provide inspiration or motivation to buy-in to safety. They create fear and accident avoidance. That's a short-term result that needs to be constantly fed and reinforced.

Safety is focused on achieving compliance instead of developing an affinity with personal values. A cop at the side of the highway causes short-term compliance. Values alignment creates safety buy-in so that cops become unnecessary.

Instead of focusing on negative outcomes, re-frame communications to be more positive in safety.

Shooting down one person’s imperfect safety ideas in favor of your own imperfect safety ideas still yield the same results: good people getting hurt.

If only social media were treated like safety conferences, or social events, or wine-and-cheese gatherings. People would be considerate of others’ points-of-view. They would listen, consider and digest ideas. They would ask questions. They would be respectful and be willing to accept that perhaps, among all of these diverse minds and experiences, they might get a new perspective that challenges their own.

But, it’s social media. Social media is apparently where points-of-view are defended, where others’ opinions are chastised - sometimes, even ridiculed. You’ve seen people offer their opinion to headlines without actually reading the entire article. That would never happen at a party or social event. There, people would be given consideration to finish explaining their idea. People would engage, listen, hear, exchange and probably learn something.