Kevin Burns Blog

Are you aware that a front-line supervisor has more influence on safety performance than senior management? Are you aware that a front-line supervisor has more influence on safety performance than senior management? Here’s why. The front-line supervisor, as the name would imply, lives at the front-line. The front-line supervisor has more frequent contact with employees. Armed with decent supervisory skills, caring and conscientiousness, a supervisor has more influence in front-line activities than a senior manager. It’s important for companies to choose the right person for supervisory positions. They need to be the right mix of personal skills and technical ability. Choosing that person, sadly, happens the wrong way far too often. The tendency is to pick the most senior person on a crew and give them a supervisory role. But even a company like Google found out that employees want more from their supervisors. Google’s Project Oxygen surveyed all 38,000 Google employees to determine what the employees wanted from their supervisors. Out of the eight top traits, technical expertise finished dead last. Google employees wanted their supervisors to have things like good coaching skills, to be approachable, to have a focus on always improving, to be a good communicator and someone who empowers the team. Google employees are not as tightly regimented in their workday as front-line laborers. So you can imagine how having those skills in tightly-run, high-risk environment would be needed even more. For the supervisor, it’s imperative that they understand that authority and influence are two very different things. Anyone can be the boss and throw their authority weight around. That takes no skill. Influence, though, takes skill and the right mindset. Here are three areas where you as a front-line safety supervisor can develop better influence:

Two years is a long time to be trying to get it right as a supervisor. Especially when it comes to safety. Does your workplace take the most senior employee in a crew and promote that person into a supervisory position? And then leave them to hang without skills, training and basic supervisory tools? Has that happened to you?

Employees are more likely to commit to something that benefits them. We’ve officially entered into spring. It’s also, coincidentally, hiring season. I am working with a number of companies currently who are preparing to staff-up for their spring-summer work. There are about to be a lot of new faces on job sites and workplaces in the coming few months. My clients have all made commitments to ensure that safety is in the forefront for the spring-summer season of work. However, without the employee commitment to safety, any new safety initiative falls flat. The majority of safety incidents happen at the front line. The largest numbers of workers are at the front line. The most amount of activity is at the front line. And so it is at the front line where the focus on safety needs to take place. It is at the front line where safety leadership is needed most. Now, let’s be clear. Leadership is not another word for management, even though managers hijack the word and use it interchangeably with their own title. The truth is, you don’t need to have a management title to be a leader. In fact, some of the best job-site leaders have no title at all. Every employee is quite capable of demonstrating some form of safety leadership. It’s as simple as caring about the well-being of others. Take the few extra moments to assess the hazards. Make the effort to fill out paper forms legibly or watching for and warning fellow employees about dangers or improper use of PPE. It could be as simple as paying full attention during safety briefings. Or, not allowing side-talk or distraction to interfere with getting the right information. These are some of the things that will have to happen at the front line to get better participation and results in safety. But that’s not the only place you need to focus. Here are three more areas where you can get to work to build employee commitment to safety:

You can’t use negative tools to create a positive safety culture. Would you show your love and caring to your child or spouse through the use of guilt, manipulation and scare tactics? Do you think that by using guilt, fear and manipulation, your loved one could get a really good sense of how much they are cared for and valued? A few years back, while attending a safety meeting, the safety manager closed the meeting with a video of a workplace injury. At the end of the twenty minutes, an employee asked why they were shown that video? The employee pointed out that the story was twenty years old, the regulations had changed, and their own corporate safety manual wouldn’t allow any of the behaviors. He voiced his displeasure at being forced to sit through something that insulted their ability, their teamwork and their commitment to safety. Safety must stop downloading anonymous Internet photos of injury, guilt and fear-inducing videos, and “don’t do what he did” stories of workplace injury. Scaring people straight may work for troubled teens when they visit prisons. But fear and guilt are no way to honor mature adult employees with families.

Instead of focusing on what your people might lose, focus on what they’ll gain. Present safety in a positive way. One of my clients recently brought up the DSL Strategy in my book,PeopleWork: The Human Touch in Workplace Safety (page 115 if you’re following along). It’s in Chapter 6, “Creating Employee Buy-in.” We talked a bit about it in more detail because the DSL Strategy is intended to be used in place of “shock and awe” campaigns of gruesome photos, gut-wrenching videos and stories of “don’t do what he did.”

The people we seem to respect the most are the ones, the leaders, who are not afraid to wear their hearts on their sleeves. Last week on the national TV news, there was a feature about a ten year-old autistic boy who had a love of Star Wars Kraft Dinner macaroni and cheese. The problem was that the Star Wars promotion was running out of stock. A plea went out from the boys parents on social media to help find more boxes of the the Star Wars mac and cheese. William Shatner, Captain Kirk from Star Trek, connected with the manufacturers to have many year’s supply sent to the boy. It was a heartwarming story.

Safety marketing is what creates value and motivates people to action. In the summer of 1974, a tractor in a rocky field was cutting the soil and dropping 200-foot long lines of copper wire in the ground. When completed, there were five miles of 200-foot sections spreading out like a spider web. At the center of the wire web was a radio broadcast tower. The copper wire strands connected to the base of the tower grounded and dissipated energy from potential lightning strikes. This was my Dad’s radio broadcast tower in our hometown. I learned a lot of things about both marketing and communications in that first year the radio station went on the air, especially the difference between marketing and communications. The simplified version is this: if you’re listening to the news, the weather or a talk-show on the radio, that’s communications. If you’re listening to a commercial, a contest or an on-location broadcast, that’s marketing. Communications inform. Marketing moves you to an action. And this is where most safety programs make their biggest mistake. They assume that informing (communications) is enough. But it isn’t. PowerPoint slides, inspection reports and incident reviews are information (communications). Statistics, lagging indicators and white papers are information (communications). But none of them move people to take an action. It is information; nice to have and good to know. And although this information may influence your decision (or not) to take an action, in and of itself it does not move people.

Safety is a shared responsibility. It’s not exclusive to one person. It still exists. There are far too many people who still believe that safety is the responsibility of the safety department. They think Safety is responsible for completing forms and paperwork, interventions and observations, and making sure employees are wearing their PPE. The safety department will also supply them with their eye protection, hearing protection, gloves and will pony up cash for other parts of the required and mandated safety equipment. But, just like a rental car, they treat the company-purchased safety protection in the same way. Misplaced regularly, they expect the company to replace their lost PPE items. Even though they may use their own power tools on a construction site, for example, the hands that hold the tools should be covered by gloves purchased by the company. The safety guy must do all of the paperwork because, “that’s his job.”

Selling is about solving a problem or uncovering a benefit of safety in a way that makes people want to buy-in. Safety shouldn’t have to be sold. That comment is typical right across the varying types of safety personnel. People get hung up on the word selling as though selling is a bad thing, a manipulative thing. Truthfully, what now seems like a lifetime ago, I used to sell photocopiers. But, my clients would never buy the photocopier. They bought what it could do. And more importantly, what it could do for them. Prior to photocopier sales, I sold radio advertising. Again, people weren’t buying commercial time. They were buying the foot traffic to their business that the commercial time created - what it could do for them. You must sell safety the same way too. It’s not about shoving safety down the throats of your people. It’s about helping them see that safety improves their lives in a way that they are probably not seeing it. As a supervisor or safety person, you have to help employees see what safety does and can do for them. Selling anything takes a communications skill-set and trust. Rarely are the best salespeople the newest salespeople. The best salespeople are the experienced veterans who always keep the interests of the client at the forefront. They know that the product or service they are selling will help to eliminate a client’s pain-point. And the client knows it, too. No one buys anything that doesn’t make their lives better in some way. It’s why we buy homes, vehicles, vacations, education, insurance and investments. Those things make our lives better, more comfortable, less uncertain. So, why wouldn’t we buy-in to safety too?

When you have achieved successful buy-in, your people can help turn a company’s mundane safety program into a movement built around a set of values, rather than rules. Pick any night of the week and you’re likely to stumble across a repeat broadcast of the TV shows Shark Tank (USA) or Dragon’s Den (Canada, UK, Australia, etc). Entrepreneurs pitch their business ideas to secure investment finance from a panel of venture capitalists. If the pitch is a good one, there’s a good chance of getting buy-in from one or more of the Dragons or Sharks. If the pitch misses the mark, they go home empty-handed. Take this idea and apply it to safety. Instead of looking at a safety meeting as a place to pitch stats, figures, reports and procedures, view your safety meeting attendees as potential investors. If your pitch misses, your people won’t invest themselves in safety. Your presentation won’t yield the buy-in you’re looking for. But if you pitch successfully, you’ve offered plenty of benefits and helped eliminate the mental barriers to improve safety culture. If you want to build a solid safety culture, you’re going to need employee buy-in. Here are three strategies that can get you started in improving buy-in to the safety program: