Safety is not a discussion of logic. People don’t choose to be unsafe logically. They do it illogically.
I got my start as a professional speaker very early on. I entered radio when I was fourteen years old; my father owned a small-town radio station. Some refer to radio as the media. But radio is only a part of media as is television, newspaper, bus benches, billboards, Yellow Pages and on the list goes.
Near the end of my radio career, I moved into the sales department. Some think sales and marketing are interchangeable terms but marketing is so much more than just sales. Sales is part of the marketing process as is advertising, positioning, logo development, web sites, campaign development, social media strategy, communications, public relations and the list goes on.
Safety makes this same mistake too: using broad brush strokes to call itself safety when it may only have a loose affiliation with safety.
Here are ten commonly-used definitions that are not safety in its entirety:
- OH&S Code - is not safety nor does it define safety. The OH&S Code is a set of basic minimum standards and uniform procedures designed to remove ambiguity from expectations around procedures and process development. Like a municipal building code determines basic minimums, so does the OH&S Code.
- Personal Protective Equipment - is not safety. PPE is meant to be a last line of defense against harm. PPE, however, is useless if you decide to act unsafely. It does not make the wearer impervious to harm.
- Injury - is not safety yet companies continue to expose their people to an injury message (gruesome photos, videos or a don’t-do-what-I-did messages from injury survivors). Fear of injury is as effective as trying to convince someone that bankruptcy will be the guaranteed result of not having a financial savings strategy.
- Meetings - are not safety especially if you waste your meeting discussing injury or waste attendee’s time by showing them dull and boring slides of safety performance numbers. Meetings are venues for communication and discussion, not as one-way scolding lectures.
- Training - is not safety. Training is skills development and it is very different from safety education. To illustrate the difference, you were given sex education in high-school, not sex training. Very different.
- Paperwork, forms and assessments - are not safety. These are record-keeping and tracking mechanisms - usually used to assess a number with a particular series of performance issues.
- Compliance is not safety. Compliance enforcement simply ensures adherence to rules set out in manuals and the OH&S Code (which, as indicated above, is not safety).
- Certification is not safety. Even those who have position and titles that are based on being certified in safety choose occasionally to not act safely - claiming that it’s impossible to be safe 24/7.
- Signage - is not safety. Warning of a hazard is basic information which can either be ignored or acted upon by an individual.
- Campaigns are not safety. Campaigns are marketing strategies to convince people to choose safety over all else. There is no guarantee of success with any campaign.
The commonality of ten items above are that they are all terribly impersonal: without any emotion or that icky, touchy-feely part attached to them. They are cerebral and are meant to appeal to the logical brain only. But safety is not a discussion of logic. People don’t choose to be unsafe logically. They do it illogically. And although each of the items described above may be a part of safety, they are not safety unto themselves.
The wholistic view of safety also includes the human elements: personal choice, personal values, attitudes, beliefs, behaviors, judgments, management interaction, communications skills, information dissemination, research, observation, human interaction, courtesy, teamwork, care for your co-workers, and the list goes on.
If you want your safety program to become more effective, you can’t do it successfully without appealing to the softer side of human emotions. And until safety professionals get good at dealing at an emotional level with their employees, something more than trying to scare them into compliance, safety will always be hit or miss.
You might never know it based on accepted safety presentation practices, but safety is allowed to be fun and funny, emotional, uplifting, spiritually enlightening, inspiring, motivating, joyful and contagious. Personally, I think it makes safety easier to buy-in to. That’s why I try to bring all of these to my safety speaking presentations. You should try it.
