Kevin Burns Blog

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?

Like conferences, safety meetings should inspire people to want to be safe in future - not scold them for not being safe in the past. I have received several notices this week of upcoming safety conferences across North America. In fact, I am proud to be speaking at a couple of them: Workplace Safety North and Safety Services Nova Scotia.

Safety awards should not focus on years or milestones of safe service. Safety awards exist in almost every workplace. Someone once came up with the idea that awards for safety would help build safety culture and keep workers wanting to work safely. But like safety meetings themselves, awards events come off as hastily-assembled and minimally organized.

The best safety meetings have both conviction and experience. The safety meeting is far too important to hand off to an inexperienced person and hope that it goes OK. Can employees lead the safety meeting? It is an idea that hopes to lead to increased engagement. The thinking is that if a new voice speaks, people will listen. If a staffer leads the meeting, then others will engage better. It might be true. But there is a stronger case for not putting the responsibility onto employees.

Being in a position of authority doesn’t automatically make you a leader. Your safety management positon doesn't automatically elevate you. Managers, who have no self-confidence about their abilities, cling to the rules. The reason for that is simple: the rules are always on your side and when you stick to the rules, you will always be right. That's why safety meetings cling to the rules, the statistics and the reports; they are irrefutable. They are proof. They are results. By clinging to the rules and statistics, there is no room for employees to challenge the person delivering them.

Improve the individuals and the organization as a whole gets better. Improve personal skills and the collective safety culture improves. Safety meetings, should solve problems and make the organization better. They are not meant to bore, to disengage or to frustrate. But they do. Meetings don’t have to entertain. But there is nothing wrong with entertaining employees and making work fun, even safety. Fun meetings engage employees and increase uptake.

You need to get down to what matters in safety meetings: talking WITH your people - not AT them. Safety is about preparedness - yet the safety meeting does not meet that standard. All too often, safety meetings get thrown together at the last minute. This does not inspire confidence from employees.

Workers bring their own values to the workplace. But what happens when those values run into conflict with corporate safety values? Trying to get employees to embrace safety as a personal value is one of the toughest things that safety personnel are faced with. It's not impossible, but it will take skills, commitment and perseverance.

Safety is too important to be paralyzed by a fear of being judged by your co-workers. “According to most studies, people's number one fear is public speaking. Number two is death. Death is number two. Does that sound right? This means to the average person, if you go to a funeral, you're better off in the casket than doing the eulogy.” ― Jerry Seinfeld

Highly engaged employees aligned with the safety program make the company money, reduce turnover and lower incident rates. Safety is fast becoming the best tool to recruit, hire and retain good people. Simply put, when yours is the best and safest place to work, you will attract and retain the best employees. But if your employees identify with even a few points on the list below, you will have some work to do in finding good people and, more importantly, hanging on to the good ones you have.