Kevin Burns Blog

If you’re going to bring employees to a safety meeting, involve them, engage them, ask them. It’s their meeting too.

“These meetings are so boring. I’d rather be working.” That’s a comment actually overheard in a safety meeting. There’s a difference between safety meetings and engaging safety meetings. Safety meetings are typically information dumps and are full of ineffective things that other people use in their safety meetings. Those meetings don’t get results either. Then there are engaging safety meetings, ones that build teamwork and motivation for safety.

To fix safety performance, you must first fix the engagement issue.

Gallup pegs the disengagement rate of employees and workers at around 70%. 7 out of 10 employees, workers and contractors are not actively engaged in their work. Here’s why that spells big trouble for safety. If a worker is not engaged in their work, then they are not engaged in safely doing their work. You cannot be disengaged from the job but still engaged in safety. To fix the safety performance, you must first fix the engagement issue.

PeopleWork lays out a new safety model. It changes the discussion from rule-based enforcement to performance-based culture focused on mentoring, coaching, and inspiring teams.

In my work as a safety management consultant, I’ve seen that when frontline supervisors buy into safety as a personal value, they better understand their role in keeping the workplace safe. In fact, if crews themselves can become safety leaders, the need for safety inspectors almost disappears altogether.

So, I wrote PeopleWork - The Human Touch in Workplace Safety to introduce the next level in safety. In the book, I lay out The M4 Method for taking workplace safety to the next level. The M4 Method combines four elements: Management, Meetings, Marketing and Motivation. All parts depend on the other parts to take safety from a compliance-based focus to one that is more people-based. The people-based approach helps employees to buy-in to safety.

Here are a few snippets from the book now on sale worldwide on Amazon....

People don’t buy-in to safety because they get a prize.

Once upon a time I was photocopier salesperson. Our sales manager would run regular sales contests. The most cold-calls would win a cash prize. The most sales in a month would win a hotel stay and dinner. The top salesman annually would win a big cash bonus. The winners were usually those who were top of the heap anyway.

At management level meetings, safety isn’t about rules. It’s about how safety advances the organization.

Companies are including safety more often in general meeting discussions. It’s commendable. Safety people have wished for a long time for safety to be a top agenda item in management and general staff meetings. Now it’s starting to happen in more and more organizations. But is there a plan on behalf of the Safety department to maximize the effectiveness of this new position? Is safety prepared for their moment in the sun?

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:

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 simple ideas that can transform your safety meetings from boring to engaging - and build respect:

Change the perception from HAVING to attend safety meetings, to WANTING to.

Nowhere in the Occupational Health and Safety Code does it state that a safety meeting has to be enjoyable. But what if the requirement was that safety meetings had to be engaging? What if that was written into the Code that you could be fined or jailed if you did not engage your people in safety meetings? Would you finally stop the archaic, mind-numbing practices of lousy safety meetings? Would you, instead, spend some time raising the standards of the meeting?

There are standards for working at height, with dangerous goods, in pits, underground. You are required to ensure that employees understand and comply with these standards. But, where are the standards for holding engaging, uplifting safety meetings? Does there have to be a law passed before you will do it?

You claim to want to have a workplace with a strong safety culture. But you continue to turn your safety meetings into dull, half-hearted events. Safety meetings are a key rallying point of your culture. If you want to build safety buy-in, you’ve got to utilize your safety meetings as a key tool to do that.

Here are three ways you can use your safety meetings to build buy-in:

Could workforce disengagement levels be a contributing factor to ineffective safety meetings?

Safety is the only department in an organization that has a legal requirement to hold meetings. No other department is legislated to meet. Meanwhile, there is no OH&S requirement to make safety meetings boring, disengaging, frustrating or ambiguous. That is done voluntarily.

Having attended hundreds of safety meetings in the last ten years or so, my anecdotal observations have noted:

• five percent of safety meetings could be considered highly-effective and engaging
• twenty-five percent of meetings are pointed in the right direction with some adjustment needed to make them more effective
• seventy percent of safety meetings could be considered ineffective and in need of an overhaul

Coincidentally enough, Gallup reports 70% disengagement levels across the North American workforce. Is there a correlation? Could disengagement be a contributing factor to ineffective safety meetings?