Kevin Burns Blog

When you commit to the safety of employees, you commit to the empowerment of employees. You commit to unlocking their personal leadership capacity. Compliance safety leveled the playing field and ensured some basic minimum standards for workers to remain safe on the job. It meant getting employees to follow protocols even if they didn't mesh with the employee's own personal values. Compliance safety did what it was supposed to do. It was good while it lasted. But the days of a corporate culture built around compliance-based safety are numbered. Today, there are a lot of discussions on safety; most of it on the process-side. Never before in history have we had better processes and procedures in safety. Never before in history have there been more certified safety professionals. So why isn’t the industry at Zero? Because safety is not a process problem. It is a people problem. The processes work - but only when people use them.

Trying to run a safety program on rules enforcement is meeting with stiff opposition. Today’s worker has no appetite for being constricted by rules. Safety is at a crossroads; where the old safety cop is being forced to give way to the new safety leader. It's a bit of a bumpy ride right now but one that we will be over in a few years. Safety leaders will emerge to begin coaching better safety performance from their teams. Safety cops in future will have a tough time finding work. The market is changing and so are the players. This year (2015), finds that over 75% of the North American workforce is either over the age of 50 or under the age of 30: Millennials (Generation Y - under age 32), comprise 45% of the total workforce. Baby Boomers (over age 50) make up only 31% of the market. And Boomers are retiring in droves. As Generation X (21%) moves into the more senior positions of influence, they are siding more with the Millennials. Gen X understands them better.

The “management” part of safety management is as important as the “safety” part. It’s no surprise that safety managers spend a great deal of time staying current on safety legislation. In fact, they invest hours upon hours every month into ensuring they understand rules, processes and procedures for safety. What they don’t do though, is invest an equal amount of time in developing their management and communications skills. It is safety management after all. It’s two equal parts - safety and management. As a result of little attention paid to the management side of skills development, here is a list of seven things that safety managers, supervisors, and advisors do wrong when it comes to managing the safety program and building respect with employees:

A safety leader is someone who influences good decisions and positive behaviors. Safety leadership has nothing to do with being a manager or supervisor. You don’t have to hold a safety management position to be a safety leader. A safety leader is someone who influences good decisions and positive behaviors. Anyone can do it if they are willing to put the work in. And the benefits are huge: to you and the people you lead. Here are five ways that you can start to improve your own safety leadership skills right away.

Let’s count down the Top 10 reasons why every employee should buy-in to the safety program and to own safety as a personal value. There are two ways to do every job: safely or unsafely. That is the choice in every moment of every day. It’s a simple choice. It’s the same choice as voluntarily buying-in to the safety program and being forced to comply against your will.

It is never the safety position or title that gets respect: it is the person in the position. Don Miguel Ruiz authored the book, The Four Agreements in 1997. It spent seven years on the bestseller list. The book is an inspiring read and could easily teach about safety and the building of a safety culture. Ruiz’s four agreements are as follows:

Here are 7 changes you must make immediately to begin to shift away from a negative-based approach to safety. The headline to this post is negative. Stop, never or don’t are not positive. Telling people what not to do isn’t a plan for positive action because it’s not a complete set of instructions. It’s like scolding. It’s easy to point out what not to do. A successful trip to the grocery store doesn’t include a list of what not to buy. Focusing on what-not-to-do is not a blueprint to safety success.

When apathy and mediocrity run rampant, morale hovers near rock bottom - right next to safety. Without getting into long descriptions, good workplace safety culture is the result of attitudes and personal and corporate values aligning. If apathy in the workplace exists, little care will be given to safety. When the quality of the work is “good enough,” apathy in safety exists. If employees think it's a lousy place to work, then safety will take a back seat. When apathy and mediocrity run rampant, morale hovers near rock bottom - right next to safety. When attitudes suck, good luck being a top performer - either in safety or financial performance. Hence, you have a broken safety culture.

The new management reality: staff don’t work for managers - managers work for staff. There are 5 constants in life: death, taxes, change, Greek folk-songs speed up, and people make decisions that compromise safety. That last constant impacts the first one too often. That impacts the second (taxes/premiums) and creates more of the third, change. I haven’t figured out where the fourth one sits in the scheme of things.

Here are the three steps to take employee focus off of money and put it back onto safety To a union audience at a workshop, I asked the question, “Why do you work safely?” The answers varied from, "it’s the right thing to do" to "money talks."