Kevin Burns Blog

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.

Have you thought about the value and benefit that a well-run safety meeting can bring to your organization? There is no other department in your organization that brings together every single staff member as often as a safety meeting does. No one should be exempt from attending safety meetings. Safety applies to everyone. Even the receptionist should be involved in safety meetings. The purpose of a safety meeting may have started as a legal requirement but have you thought about the value and the huge benefit that a well-run safety meeting can bring to your organization? Let’s start with three benefits that your safety meetings create ... but only if you do them right:

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.