Kevin Burns Blog

Selling safety meets resistance. It’s not about shoving safety down their throats. It’s about helping them see that safety improves their lives. Use the word "sell" and safety managers get their backs up. The belief is that safety shouldn’t have to be sold. The word “selling” gets in the way of the true purpose of safety.

Here are three compelling arguments for choosing safety. Call it the “Diesel Strategy” because it is powerful and goes a long distance. The safety department complains that it’s difficult to get workers to buy-in to safety. Employees resist buying-in to a program of checks, forms and paperwork.

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:

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.

Stop discussing the negatives of not being safe. Instead, focus on the positives of buying-in to safety. The words “Make Safety Sexy” might conjure up the image in the photo for some. But that’s not at all what the phrase means.

Safety managers and safety supervisors complain that their employees won't buy-in to safety. They also complain about employees' lack of engagement and a lack of accountability in the safety program.

When marketing of safety goes up, safety-incident numbers go down. Plain and simple, this works. Raise awareness of safety, sell the idea of safety and you will increase safety results. People choose safety when asked to.

Just because they wear safety gear doesn't mean they will choose safety in every moment. Do not confuse an employee's willingness to abide by safety rules as proof that they accept safety as a personal value. Just because they have never had an incident doesn't mean they choose to buy-in to safety.

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.