Kevin Burns Blog

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."

Why aren’t production and safety working out of the same office? Here are five ways to marry safety and production. Production and safety blame the other for either slowing work down or increasing incident levels. Safety blames operations when there is a push on for greater production. Operations blame safety for holding up production. Neither wants to be wrong. Both want to be right. (Note: if you still believe that safety holds up production, you need to resign immediately.)

6 minimum standards that are preventing you from establishing a strong safety culture. No one wants to see anyone injured. To build a safety culture requires more than just viewing safety as an injury-prevention program. It’s more than following rules and meeting minimum standards. To build a safety culture requires employees to be respectful of each other, to display courtesy and care about each other. Safety is a teamwork philosophy.

Every single person in the organization has a hand in a strong safety culture. It doesn’t work any other way. Strong safety cultures are built on character and values like courtesy, respect, sharing, teamwork and personal leadership. They are not built on certifications, hierarchies, self-congratulations, position or tenure.

To improve the culture of safety, take a long, hard look at how you frame communications about safety. Safety Culture will improve when the communications about safety within the organization improve. Besides increasing the quantity of communication, consider the quality.

You have all of the control over your safety program and how many of your good people buy-in to the program. There are some things you can control and some you can not. What you can control is your participation in the safety program. No one can turn down or increase your participation in safety.