Kevin Burns Blog

The position of safety person is no more important than any other employee position. No one job is more important or carries more weight than another. When you’re trying to get employee buy-in to the safety program, you are trying to advance an ideal. You are, in essence, selling a point-of-view and the safety program. Selling an idea takes tact and strategy. This is where safety people can make a big mistake. They assume that safety will sell itself. They also assume that employees will respect the safety person’s position. Neither can be assumed. In twenty years of consulting with safety people, senior managers, and front-line staff, I have encountered two big reasons why employees don’t respect safety, the safety program or the safety person. These are by no means absolutes. However, the first is that employees can feel manipulated by safety, the safety people or the safety program. The second is that they feel that the safety person can demand undue respect.

The move toward personal leadership-focused safety culture requires that supervisors have management skills. Front-line supervisors are not only responsible for safety performance but almost all of the production activities. In addition, supervisors are responsible for assigning tasks, ensuring quality production and providing technical expertise. They have to do that while finding ways to help employees find their internal motivation and desire to do the job well. Employees also expect their supervisors to offer positive performance feedback. That's a key requirement to keeping employees engaged and motivated. Any shortfall in employee training falls onto the supervisor to fix. Poor employee skills training means the supervisor must fix that - on the fly. And the front-line supervisor is expected to fix safety procedure issues on the fly as well. Plus, the supervisor is expected to take employee concerns up to the appropriate middle manager. The execution of training (or lack of it) falls upon the shoulders of the front-line supervisors. Most times, these folks are thrust into their jobs without any preparation.

When you commit to the safety of employees, you commit to the empowerment of employees. You commit to unlocking their personal leadership capacity. Compliance safety leveled the playing field and ensured some basic minimum standards for workers to remain safe on the job. It meant getting employees to follow protocols even if they didn't mesh with the employee's own personal values. Compliance safety did what it was supposed to do. It was good while it lasted. But the days of a corporate culture built around compliance-based safety are numbered. Today, there are a lot of discussions on safety; most of it on the process-side. Never before in history have we had better processes and procedures in safety. Never before in history have there been more certified safety professionals. So why isn’t the industry at Zero? Because safety is not a process problem. It is a people problem. The processes work - but only when people use them.

Employees who don't care about their job, don’t care about safely doing the job. There is a lot of talk of leadership on the job these days; specifically, safety leadership. Why? Employee leadership raises personal standards and contribution especially in safety. Leadership is an attitude. People who own the attitude of personal leadership do better, conscientious work. Old-style, top-down management is fast becoming ineffective and giving way to teams, mentoring and coaching. Involvement is key to shifting the safety paradigm. Managers telling employees what to do is outdated. Companies are coaching employees to voluntarily step up their personal safety leadership capacity. Companies are attempting to improve employee safety buy-in. As a result, there is much discussion on responsibility and accountability. Personal leadership capacity in safety is the next level of safety engagement. Disengagement levels hover around 70%. Companies are attempting to fight back to help their people engage.

Not all safety people are vital to an organization’s success. I received an email this week from a young safety professional. It was his intention to finish up a series of safety certifications he was working on. Then, he would embark on getting some solid management skills training. He wanted to ensure that, even at his young age, he would vault himself into a position of becoming “vital” to his employer. He knew that management skills are crucial to becoming a leader. Good leaders are vital.

Blame senior management’s perceived lack of commitment to safety, and you won’t get front-line crews to buy-in to the safety program. Gallup says that only 31.5% of North American workers are actively engaged in their work. That means 7 out of every ten people are not fully engaged in their work. This includes safety managers and front-line supervisors as well as senior management. But, as the survey points out, senior managers still engage in higher percentages than their employees. Still, these are a disturbing numbers. It’s easy to complain about how tough it is to be a safety person when senior managers are seemingly disengaged with safety. But it is tiresome that some safety people use senior management as a scapegoat. “Until senior management improves their commitment to safety, our safety culture won’t improve,” you hear some safety people chime. So they give up trying to get over the hurdle. And that’s all it is; a hurdle. It’s not a closed road. It’s not a barricade. It’s something you have to either get over or go around. It's not insurmountable.

Every safety person could ask themselves whether what they are making is what the company deems they are worth? I received an email this week from a reader. As a safety person, he had concern that his employer didn’t support him in continued learning. There were courses they wouldn’t pay for and time-off not granted. So, he dug into his own pocket, paid for his own courses and found a way to get the learning. What he discovered was that he felt he was worth more than the company perceived. John Earl Shoaff once said, “What you earn is not all the company pays. It’s what they pay YOU!” Every safety person could ask themselves whether what they are making is what the company deems they are worth? The key is your perceived value; what others think your value is worth. Until you change the perception, you will wallow in mediocrity. You will not be taken seriously as someone who has great perceived value.

As a safety person, are you distinguishing yourself from others and making yourself indispensable? Safety people in several sectors are having a tough time finding new work. The pickings are tough. Safety jobs in oil and gas, for example, have dried up while the world price stays low. That’s had a domino-effect in other industries too. It’s a tough time to look for work. Why should we hire you? It’s the question asked when you are interviewed. Potential employers will ask the same question when surfing through your LinkedIn profile. Employers looking for safety people search for something that distinguishes that person from others and makes them indispensable. Unfortunately, safety people have a lot of boring profiles on LinkedIn.

Trying to run a safety program on rules enforcement is meeting with stiff opposition. Today’s worker has no appetite for being constricted by rules. Safety is at a crossroads; where the old safety cop is being forced to give way to the new safety leader. It's a bit of a bumpy ride right now but one that we will be over in a few years. Safety leaders will emerge to begin coaching better safety performance from their teams. Safety cops in future will have a tough time finding work. The market is changing and so are the players. This year (2015), finds that over 75% of the North American workforce is either over the age of 50 or under the age of 30: Millennials (Generation Y - under age 32), comprise 45% of the total workforce. Baby Boomers (over age 50) make up only 31% of the market. And Boomers are retiring in droves. As Generation X (21%) moves into the more senior positions of influence, they are siding more with the Millennials. Gen X understands them better.

The “management” part of safety management is as important as the “safety” part. It’s no surprise that safety managers spend a great deal of time staying current on safety legislation. In fact, they invest hours upon hours every month into ensuring they understand rules, processes and procedures for safety. What they don’t do though, is invest an equal amount of time in developing their management and communications skills. It is safety management after all. It’s two equal parts - safety and management. As a result of little attention paid to the management side of skills development, here is a list of seven things that safety managers, supervisors, and advisors do wrong when it comes to managing the safety program and building respect with employees: