If you can get your people to be courteous to each other, you can get them to improve safety at the same time.

My travel takes me to the four corners of the North American continent as a safety attitude and safety management speaker. I get to witness, first-hand, some of the best and some of the worst safety behaviors - but none more prevalent than that of drivers.

Until you start addressing the underlying attitudes of your people, you will always struggle with compliance, behaviors and communication.

This week, here in Calgary, we experienced our first blizzard of the season. It’s not winter yet but we have experienced plenty of blowing and drifting snow. My three appointments on Monday all got canceled. No one wanted to venture out. Can’t say I blame them. I am an Alberta Safety Speaker. Be safe right?

Any safety meeting, large or small, must start with two basic purposes: to get your employees’ attention and their participation.

My newest book (in e-Book format), The Perfect Safety Meeting, is being downloaded around the world. Since safety never seems to get a big budget for learning and development, I made the e-Book free.

Throwing together a safety meeting at the last minute does not inspire confidence or preparedness.

Safety Managers stress about organizing safety meetings and annual stand-downs. They struggle with the organizational aspect and so they end up leaving much of it to the last minute, scrambling just enough to pull something off that looks like there may have been a rudimentary amount of thought put into the meeting.

Your job is to change the perception from HAVING to attend safety meetings, to WANTING to.

Imagine receiving a pair of tickets to the best seats in the house to watch your favorite sports team play. You’re primed and excited for the event but once you get there, you find out that there is no game. There are only stats, and numbers, and data and reports and transactions. Sure, stats and numbers and data are a part of sports but it’s not the enjoyable part.

The Safety Meeting is the most important tool in helping employees to buy-in to safety, quickly.

Stop thinking that safety meetings are a legal requirement. It's bigger than that. How your people approach safety meetings is the same way they approach safety. How you approach safety meetings is evident to in how they are perceived.

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.

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.

Your incentive program may actually be preventing your employees from buying-in to safety. Here are 5 reasons why.

You may have fallen under the impression that safety incentives, paying your people (in either cash or prizes) to achieve Zero, may actually work. Well let me say right here that safety incentives do not work - ever.