Kevin Burns Blog

People take the advice and guidance of the people they respect. As a person with a strong commitment to safety, you may have an opinion about senior management’s commitment to safety. A safety person scolding their bosses on social media for a lack of commitment to safety accomplishes nothing. But it does display a lack of respect for co-workers, even if they are your bosses. Many safety people believe safety cannot improve without senior management’s support and commitment. Unfortunately, that’s simply not true. The Forest And The Trees I've been working with a few forestry companies lately so pardon my forest analogy. Senior management is responsible for ensuring the health of the forest. Front-line supervisors and safety personnel are responsible for ensuring the health of each tree. The jobs are very different. At the front-line, if each tree is healthy, the forest is healthy.

Motivation plays a role in engagement and, subsequently, safety. As a front-line safety person or supervisor, you have tremendous impact on employee motivation. The words you use, your facial expressions, and your demeanor all speak without words on how much you value the people you work with. People can feel when they are not valued. People can read between the lines of what their bosses think about them. And when you work for someone like that, it’s tough to find your own motivation to do your best. After all, if you don’t feel valued, why bother? Championship sports teams value their team mates. They play as one. They value each other. They recognize each other’s strengths. They depend on their team mates and their coaches. They are in-sync. And when that happens, motivation to give their very best performance is high. When an employee lacks motivation, there is a corresponding reduction in engagement. That affects productivity. Without motivation to give their best, an employee will be more apt to take shortcuts. Shortcuts impact safety. Keep employees focused, engaged and motivated to do their very best. It can build a team of high-performers willing to value themselves and each other. The best way to protect their value is by ensuring each others’ safety. Motivation plays a clear role in engagement and, subsequently, safety. Here are four ways you can improve the motivation of your team:

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 are requirements to cover in safety meetings. They require a balanced approach. Engagement and safety have to work together. No one has ever complained that the safety meeting was too short. In fact, cheers go up when the safety meeting somehow magically ends early. Safety meetings are the only legally required meetings of an organization besides the shareholders’ Annual General Meetings. But nowhere in the OH&S Act does it require safety meetings to be dull, dry, boring or long. This article addresses longer format meetings like safety days, stand-downs, or any other multi-hour safety event. Safety meetings can either be effective or confusing. Yes, there are requirements to cover in the safety meeting but it has to be a balanced approach. Engagement and safety have to work together. Here are three ways that you can shorten the length of the safety meeting and still be more effective at engaging your people:

The quality of your work as a supervisor or safety person is tied directly to the kind of person you are. Management is key to the success of any organization - especially in safety performance. After you hire the right people and you train them, how you manage them will determine your success. No company ever achieved great success with mediocre management. Front-line is where the real work gets done. Front-line supervisory is one of the most important positions within an organization. You either make or break your safety culture reputation at this level. If it fails at the front-line, it fails all the way up the chain of command. Front-line is where the real work gets done. Before get to the four tips to be a better supervisor, if you'd like to get started on improving your ability to lead your team, then take the Free Preview of the Safety Communications & Coaching for Supervisors course. 40-minutes of video instruction, summary sheet download PDFs and a companion MP3 audio version to take with you on the go. And it's free to get started. Here are 4 tips and strategies to help front-line supervisors and safety people be better and more effective at the job:

Without employee motivation, you have little chance of success in building a culture of safety. If employees aren’t motivated, it doesn’t matter how good your intentions or how good the safety program. Without motivation to want to do their best, employees will give just enough performance to not get fired. Without motivation, you have little chance of success in building a culture of safety.

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.

The legacy you create in safety must be on-purpose. Legacy. It’s what you leave behind after you're gone. You want a purposeful legacy. Those ones are positive. The legacy you leave behind by accident is usually a negative one. No one will remember the safety systems you built after you're gone. Nor will they remember that you were responsible for the security lock on a door or a new design for lock-out tags. Those are lifeless objects. And although they play a part, forms, rules, paperwork and procedures can be replaced. They are temporary at best. Safety systems are not legacy things. That is unless you’ve done something so radically different that it’s now referred to as The (your name) Manoeuvre. Then it’s a legacy. But those things don’t come around often. Instead, consider the easier way to create a legacy, by being remembered for who you are instead of what you’ve done. Here are three tips to consider in building a legacy in safety:

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.

Everything that matters in "the way we do things 'round here" rests almost solely with supervisors. Senior management doesn't create safety culture. It's impossible for senior management to be connected with every nut and bolt, every shovel full of dirt and every connected wire. It's impossible to see that from the senior management perch. But this is the world that supervisors live in; one connected wire at a time, one shovel of dirt, one torqued nut and bolt. It is for those reasons alone that supervisors have far more influence over the safety culture than a CEO. There is no doubt that senior management can influence a safety culture. But senior management neither creates safety culture nor reinforces it. The best they can do is commit to it and support it. Everything that matters in "the way we do things 'round here" rests almost solely with supervisors. But not all supervisors are given proper management-skills training courses. They may not know how to manage people, how to inspire them, or how to help them find their motivations for safety. Too many supervisors ascend into their positions without the tools to help them do the job effectively. But supervisors are certainly responsible for production, safety and teamwork. And if none of it happens, the supervisor is to blame. If you're a front-line supervisor, here are three reasons that your position can make or break safety and the crew culture: