Kevin Burns Blog

Most companies would prefer that their employees step up and voluntarily do their best work, instead of being pushed to do the bare minimum. But while you may be focused on getting compliance, are you missing the big picture of getting their commitment?

Business development is the focus of most companies. Getting more customers, making more sales, upselling existing clients. Companies hone and adjust their marketing messages to attract more revenues. When more clients buy from us, there is cause for celebration.

Everybody cares about something. And they do care about it … in their own way. The challenge in getting your people to care about safety lies largely with how they understand and interpret the word safety.

Disengagement rates in the workplace are too high. In North America, Gallup says that 65% of North American workers are not actively engaged in their work. And that is going to spell trouble for safety. You’ve been trying to get your employees to focus on safety and your efforts have not been effective. Here’s why.

I ran across another book recently that, on the back cover, suggested that the point of safety was to send people home in the same condition as when they arrived. I shuddered. Someone muttered that awful send them home safe phrase once and someone else must have thought it was clever. So, they borrowed it and then repeated it to someone else. And that someone must have picked it up and run with it until they had the chance to say it again. Now it's everywhere. And it means nothing.

Before you assume that your team is slipping into safety complacency, you need to determine whether complacency is really the problem. It may not be.

When employees actively support and participate in safety, they have accepted safety as their way to work. Without the employees’ willingness to support and participate in the safety program, the company's default position becomes things like rules-enforcement. When a workplace is centered around enforcing rules, people become more reluctant to go to work. Morale suffers and you lose your good people. You’ve probably been frustrated in getting buy-in from your front-line employees. Maybe you’ve gathered your team in a room for a safety event or stand-down. You showed them “safety” videos (I use quotation marks because I’ll bet most of those videos focused on injury, not safety). You instructed them in things like ladder use, handwashing, or lock-out tag-outs. As much as you think it went well during the stand-down, it didn’t stick. That’s because your stand-down safety event didn’t actually get buy-in.

In a supervisory coaching session this week, one of the participants remarked about the cold February temperatures rolling across their region of the country. By the end of the conversation, he suggested that they simply bundle up and go out to do their work. And they take warm-up breaks more often.

Employers, managers and supervisors who do not set clear expectations for their teams are already at a disadvantage. Without a set of clear expectations, you can expect your people to fumble around trying to figure out what’s important to their employers. When people are fumbling to figure out what is important, safety is going to falter.

Why is it that one company can struggle with safety performance while another company, in the same industry, easily excels at safety performance? The answer is in what happens on the ground – with front-line supervisory.