Kevin Burns Blog

To be respected and trusted will require you to become a safety leader. Safety people can hold various positions within an organization. All have varying degrees of supervisory, management and advisory responsibilities. Some administrate. Some manage. Some supervise. Some advise. Some hold senior management positions. And yet others, hope to one day hold one of these positions. So, what things can be done by any safety person in any safety position that would universally make them better at their jobs? Improve their personal skills. If all you really want to do is to enforce rules, then you will become a safety cop and your future job options will be very limited. But to be respected and trusted will require you to become a safety leader. You will need to hone your safety leadership skills. Here are four things you can do right now to be become a more effective safety leader:

Exceptional performance is always noticed. Exceptional front-line performance in safety comes from effective supervisors. Business gets better when the people IN the business get better. In other words, nothing improves until the people tasked with doing the work improve. In order for there to be an improved result requires an improved effort. At the front of the line is the effective supervisor. Effective supervisors create loyalty and a positive team attitude among employees. Knowing the rules of safety may be important. But that’s not enough if you want to improve the culture and performance. Effective supervisors understand that there is only safe production. Production is never separate from safety. Effective supervisors quickly rise above those who enforce only the rules. There are far too many people in safety pushing rules, processes and procedures. There are too few who have the skills to help employees perform better in safety. Anyone can be a safety cop. Not many have the skills to be an effective supervisor.

To build a successful, strong and supportive safety culture requires a foundation of employee buy-in. Safety has, traditionally, set itself up based on the compliance model of checks and balances. It is then presented to employees as paperwork and meetings. Then the focus gets placed on reporting and tracking. It’s difficult to get employees to buy-in to a program of checks, forms and paperwork. Employees can't see what's in it for them. As a result, buy-in to safety is marginal. Companies re-brand and re-launch consumer products in an effort to be relevant again. Laundry detergent, new models of car, the latest iPhone. They're "new and improved." These companies give their old products a new spin with new improvements. And they make sales. To build a successful safety culture requires a foundation of employee buy-in. Without it, you will spend large amounts of money and never achieve great success. But like any consumer product, before it can be bought, there has to be a benefit to the consumer. They have got to see how this product makes their life better. When they find it, that's when they buy-in.

Safety management is a paid position. Safety leadership is voluntary - yet infinitely more rewarding. It’s time to take stock of where you are in your safety career and to find ways to tweak, adjust and fine-tune your performance. There is, in this post, already an assumption that you’re up to date on legislation, rules and procedures. If you’re missing that part, you can add those items to this list. But I don’t want to discuss your knowledge of safety. I want to help make you a better safety leader.

Zero is more than a measurement. It is a philosophy. Zero has become a divisive term. There are those who believe in Zero and there are those who believe that Zero cannot be sustained. Speak out loud your belief in Zero and you open yourself to attack from those who believe that Zero cannot sustain - and vice versa. Both sides look at Zero as a result. But Zero is more than a measurement. It is a philosophy. If you truly believe in safety, you ultimately believe in Zero. “Safety Second” doesn’t roll off the tongue as a strong corporate value. “Be almost safe” doesn’t inspire anyone to take safety seriously. But how often do you see organizations celebrating “almost safety?” Industry-average safety performance does not inspire anyone to embrace safety as a personal value. Acceptable risk is not acceptable. Companies preach Zero Harm. But do they really mean it?

Organizations that align themselves with negative messaging struggle to improve their safety results. Of course negative reinforcement doesn’t work. But then safety people do just that. You reinforce your safety message negatively without even realizing it. Negative reinforcement does not automatically create safety. In the last 20 years of studying human behavior, motivation, engagement and safety, I’ve discovered that organizations that align themselves with negative messaging struggle to improve their safety results. A recent series of off-topic statistics got my attention.

Companies claim to value safety over all else but unknowingly engage in activities that undermine that desire. Good companies want to protect their people from harm in the workplace. Of that there is little doubt. A problem exists, however, when deed does not align with word. Over 70% of North American workers are not fully engaged in their job. Without being fully engaged in the job, there is little likelihood that an employee will be fully engaged in safely doing the job. Companies claim to value safety over all else. But they unknowingly engage in activities that undermine that desire. Companies want to become world-class performers in safety but measure themselves against industry averages. Companies say they make safety the top priority but then don't invest in peripheral training. Many don't have support materials to own the hearts and minds of their employees. Eventually employees clue-in and say, "don't tell me how much you care - show me." The safety world is moving away from simple compliance models. Integration of omnipresent safety (permeating throughout the organization) is the next level. Here's where the real work needs to be done. Let's start with the 3 things that organizations must do better before safety performance can improve.

You don’t instill a positive safety culture by settling for performance within the average. The best organizations give world-class safety performance. They don't do it with a mediocre effort, mediocre standards or mediocre safety people. They do it by surpassing industry average targets, a focused engagement and with safety people on top of their games. They search out and employ supervisors and managers who set a higher standard for themselves. They seek out those who want to inspire their own crews to be better, to reach farther, to achieve at a higher level. You don’t build championship teams by shooting right for the middle of industry averages. You don’t instill a positive safety culture by settling for performance within the average. If you want to lead, you have to do not just what others are not doing, but by doing what they’re not even prepared to do. World-class safety is driven by having higher standards than the average. Higher standards drive a greater effort to set themselves apart. Greater effort is driven by high-performing safety people. World-class safety is not achieved by a mediocre effort, standards or people who don’t seek to be exceptional. Without exceptional people, you're shooting right for mediocrity. You will not, and I repeat, NOT get there by luck.

Do not underestimate the power of a well-crafted safety campaign for supporting your safety initiatives. Federal elections are in full-swing in Canada, USA, Argentina and Hong Kong. But then, there are elections always going on somewhere. But it’s the national elections that dominate the TV and radio airwaves. All of the political parties fight for attention of voters in the hopes of swaying their ballot “X.” The political parties constantly assess their messages’ effectiveness. If the message isn’t resonating with the voter, they change it up in the hopes that the new message does. They engage polls and surveys. They take random sample sizes and ask questions. And they buy advertising. Advertising is a one-way street: outward. It talks at us not with us. There is no conversation. There is no engagement. However, to improve safety communication is not about buying advertising. To build engagement, especially in safety, requires more than just banners and signs, or a few words at the monthly safety meeting.

Safety managers, engagement just became your department! Engagement is the biggest problem in the workplace today. The surveys tell us that 70% of employees are NOT fully engaged. And it's not just Gen Y - they only account for 34% of the workforce forcing you to explain the other 36% to make it add up to 70. Stop kidding yourself. The problem is not just young workers. You would think ... You would think that a 70% level of disengagement, a serious drop in focused-attention productivity, would be cause for grave concern for companies. After all, lost productivity creates a huge financial mess forcing companies to continue to pay more and get less. You'd think that there would be a hue-and-cry from Corporate North America to find solutions intended to curb this very real problem that is plaguing our workplaces and costing us money. But there isn't. It's apparently still not painful enough. If it were painful enough, companies would be doing something about it. But they're still not getting it and here's why: because it an "employee" engagement problem (terribly named as though it's all the employees' fault).