Kevin Burns Blog

Be positive about your safety program and the way it helps to protect and value your good people. Promote. A scary word for safety people and supervisors. For the ones who don’t understand what it means, it feels disingenuous. But to promote something is to advance a cause or a program; to support it or to actively encourage. So when you tell your people to be safe, you are promoting safety. When you erect posters as safety reminders, you are promoting safety. When you hold a safety meeting, you are promoting safety. When you recognize good behaviors, you are promoting safety. And in order to build a solid safety culture, we cannot do it without promoting safety.

Data is not how you build a safety culture. Leadership is. Safety is about preparedness - yet most times even the safety meeting does not meet that standard. How many times have you seen your own safety meetings get thrown together at the last minute? This does not inspire confidence from employees. If the organizer is not engaged in delivering an engaging safety meeting, attendees won't engage either. Why would they? Employees take their cues, not so much from what you say in meetings, but from what you do with them and your level of conviction about safety. As motivational speaker, Larry Winget, once said: "When you stand in front of a group of people, they won't care what you have to say. In fact most won't even believe what you have to say. But they'll be checking you out to see if you believe what you have to say." In other words, you need conviction when it comes to organizing and executing the safety program - especially the meetings. If you don't have convictions about both the value of the program outside of the rules (the content and discussion points) and the purpose (the outcome - what you want them to do with the information), you will have a hard time getting employees to engage. If you want to engage employees to participate in the safety program and to own safety as one of their guiding principles, you have to give them what they want.

Leadership is not forced or thrust upon anyone. It’s voluntary. And personal safety leadership builds great teams. A commitment to teamwork and safety. It’s all you need to go from newbie or lowly front-liner to leader. To become a safety leader requires a commitment to the welfare of your teammates. You can't build a strong team without caring about the safety of the members of the team. In this way, you can use safety build leadership in safety and teamwork. While it might be easy enough (with applied work) to lift yourself up from the front-line to leader in the real world, the safety world hasn't been terribly well-equipped for it. It has been focused on compliance, following rules and filling out paperwork; all treated very scientifically and meticulously. Historically, it’s been all business. Add a top-down model of management and you have a system that doesn’t look particularly attractive to want to buy-in to. Where's the teamwork? you might ask. While the focus in on processes and procedures and rules, there is little of the “person” in personal safety.

When people engage in these four things at your safety meeting, they will buy-in to safety. Safety meetings started out as a legal requirement. You had to have them, they had to be recorded and the subject matter had to satisfy the Code. But nowhere does it state that you can’t add items to the safety meeting or that you can’t have fun and to speak-up in the meetings. Companies buy templates for their safety meetings that are white-bread and innocuous because they’ve been dumbed-down to appeal to as many industries as possible. But generic safety meetings that talk about safety reports, inspections, incident reports, processes, procedures and protocols while numbing the mind with text-laden PowerPoint slides don’t build safety buy-in. Employees don’t buy-in to the safety program because it is presented as a set of rules and policies. Employees resist anyone who appears to want to force them to comply. And it's tough for employees to warm up to someone who incessantly talks about procedures, processes, inspections and incidents. (Sure, it's important but not engaging in a conversational way). When your safety meetings are a re-hash of everything they've already heard on PPE, driving, lockouts and slips-trips-falls, you're going to lose their attention - and desire to want to warm up to safety.

Safety meetings are not supposed to be boring. People, more specifically presenters, make them that way. Talks from the TED conferences are engaging. If you are not familiar with TED (Technology, Entertainment, Design), they are a global set of conferences that bring together the world's most fascinating thinkers and doers, who are challenged to give the talk of their lives in 18 minutes or less. Eighteen minutes or less. Some of the world’s greatest thinkers will change the world with their ideas in under 18 minutes. So the question becomes, if world-class thinkers and thought leaders are only given eighteen minutes to make their point, have the learning stick and ultimately change the world, why are mediocre safety presenters given 60-90 minutes to make a point or two about safety? If issues like fighting world hunger and jumpstarting world economies can be addressed in 18 minutes, why are safety meetings running longer than that? Safety complacency is a big problem today but never moreso than safety meeting complacency: the lack of focused engagement in preparing engaging safety meetings. The problems outlined below identify the real reasons safety meetings are traditionally so boring and what to do next.

If you want to improve safety meetings, you have to improve the level of respect you have for your people first. Mark Cuban, television personality and owner of the NBA’s Dallas Mavericks once said, “Never take meetings unless someone is writing a check.” He might be onto something there. Safety people would make a bigger effort if they got paid for the quality of their safety meetings. But that’s not happening anytime soon. So, for now, you will have to accept that safety meetings are notorious time killers. They usually start late, discuss too many topics, and end up running long. Poor planning combined with poor presentation skills make them difficult to endure. If your people can’t wait to attend the next safety meeting, and are excited when it’s meeting day, then you’re doing it right. But that’s not you is it? So how about you invest a few minutes and give some consideration to some new ideas. Like a good safety meeting, it’ll be short and to the point. Here are three easy steps that can transform your safety meetings from boring to engaging - and build respect:

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:

People cannot recall everything they are exposed to in a single message but safety people think they are. This year, the cost of a 30-second Super Bowl ad was $5 Million. And advertising availabilities were sold out … again. Companies lined up to spend millions of dollars for a single 30-second time-slot. But, do you think that expenditure of $5 Million for a single ad drives enough revenue to the sponsor to pay for that ad? Nope. It will not. At least not alone. Advertisers who take a 30-second time-slot on the Super Bowl are not expecting to drive tens of millions of dollars of sales from a single ad. No. They are using that expenditure of a single TV ad as a showcase for their product. But it is only a small piece of the overall mix of their marketing tools. In addition to the ad buy, companies will spend millions of dollars more marketing attention on their ad. In other words, they will tease their customers that they will be unveiling a new ad during Super Bowl. They will employ millions of dollars on social media strategies to engage people to watch the ad both prior to the Super Bowl and even more after the Super Bowl is over. They will look for the media to talk about their ads (giving them more free publicity), hope people will share social media links (more free publicity) and even wait for others to mock the ads with spoof ads (even more free publicity). Thousands of people will go to work to get people to take an action: to watch the ad during the game, to share the ad with their social media network, to click links to watch the ad online. And it’s all done in the hopes of driving more foot traffic through the doors to sell more product. People buy what they are aware of and what intrigues them.

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.

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: