Kevin Burns Blog

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.

There is a people problem in safety, a mindset problem in safety and a decision-making problem in safety. Four workers were attempting to lift the fourth wall into place on a home construction project. The wall was too heavy for the four to lift and so three let go crushing the fourth under the weight. The worker died.

When you don’t ask your people to do anything with the information you are giving them, you are creating the same safety apathy you say you want to overcome. Are you asking your safety meeting attendees to be participants or spectators? Just because the bodies show up at the safety meeting doesn’t mean that their minds do. They might look like they’re paying attention, but you really can’t tell. It must be OK. You’re not asking them to do anything except sit there.

200 people will die in workplace incidents this year - one every 43 hours. Every second day, someone is going to die. The roofer stood 3 stories up on the roof and surveyed his work. On his back was his fall-arrest harness. At his feet was the clip supposed to be connected to his harness. I called the company OH&S Manager. He explained he would take action immediately and mentioned that any contractor in contravention of OH&S regulations are fined $100.

If you want to change the culture of safety within your company, start not with how you DO safety, start with how you celebrate safety. We've all been to safety meetings that missed the mark—topics irrelevant, sessions too long, disorganization was the rule.

In safety, there is a mistaken belief that in order to motivate employees to buy-in to safety, you have to “go negative.” After delivering a keynote presentation at a safety meeting of electrical linemen, I ended up chatting with Don, a veteran of electrical installs. At one point, Don made a laughing reference to the fact that he had lost his right thumb in a farm accident many years before.

Before you plan your next safety meeting, ask yourself if your intent is to scare your workers into compliance. Do you want them to be afraid, or to get them to voluntarily buy-in to safety as a personal value?

Accidents don't happen in the safety manager's office. They happen in the field. That's where the management of safety must take place. High safety performance doesn't magically come about in organized safety meetings, although good safety meetings are part of the solution. Safety performance happens when you deal with safety issues, decisions and behaviors one on one.

Senior managers who only want to put in an appearance at safety meetings should just stay away. Senior managers can't just show up halfway through a safety meeting, glad-hand a bit and then leave in favour of a meeting that is supposedly "more important." If safety is not the most important meeting for senior managers, then it sends a terrible message to employees.

If safety meetings are not fun or engaging for attendees, they won’t remember it. Part of the overall strategy for safety communication and meetings should be a requirement to avoid mind-numbing and boring your people whenever possible. But that's tough when the subject-matter and even worse, the presenters, are boring. You make it so much more difficult for employees to engage and stay sharp if you insist on throwing every boring statistic, figure, graph and performance chart that you can lay your hands on at them in one meeting - and expecting any level of recall. Boring presenters are not born - they are made by the example of those boring presenters who they've observed. Over time, bad meetings evolve into something worse by exposure to mind-numbing safety meetings featuring a parade of PowerPoint armed, personality-deficient robots.