Kevin Burns Blog

To change crew-code in safety will require you to win the hearts and minds of your good people.

In addition to the Occupational Health and Safety Code, every company has its own corporate safety manual. These are the processes and procedures specific to a company that meet or exceed the minimum standards of the OH&S Code. There’s also an unspoken Crew-Code of “how we do things around here.” This is how workers and supervisors interpret the processes and procedures in the safety manual. The crew-code is powerful, perhaps more so than even the company safety manual. Depending on the crew, in some instances, it’s basically a “what we can get away with” code. Crew-codes that shortchange safety are illegal and dangerous—the opposite of a culture of safety.

Crew-code happens at the crew level. That’s good news for safety people and supervisors. You really only have to be able to influence your small crew in order to shift the crew-code. But, the inexperienced supervisor who doesn’t know how to motivate and develop employees, will have a harder time influencing crew-code.

As a front-line supervisor or safety person, here are three ways you can begin to influence the crew-code in safety:

The M4 Method is meant to directly help supervisors and safety people build on-the-job relationships that support safety from the ground up.

Focus on enforcement and your people are focused on rules. Focus on helping people integrate safety into their lives and they focus on being part of the safety solution. Different tactic, different outcome. But so much time, effort, and money is wasted on enforcement tactics because so little time is spent on encouraging employees to buy into safety. The energy spent on enforcement could be better spent building teamwork, morale, and camaraderie.

A team that has adopted safety as a personal value is better equipped to make the kinds of decisions on the job to ensure safety. Instead of mere compliance with procedures, programming, and production, a safety-oriented crew draws from a deep well of mutual caring and connection. When crews themselves become safety leaders, the need for safety cops disappears. What you have instead is a team of solid safety leaders who perform and produce at a higher level.

In my book PeopleWork: The Human Touch in Workplace Safety, I present The M4 Method for improved safety culture. It’s a way of integrating people into the strategy of building solid safety programs. The M4 Method is meant to directly help supervisors and safety people build on-the-job relationships that support safety from the ground up.

The M4 Method marries four critical components to achieve the next level of your organizational safety culture:

Shifting your safety culture from one of compliance and rules enforcement to one of human engagement will require marketing.

If you think that marketing is all about sales, advertising, and late-night infomercials, then this post should change your mind. Marketing is a way to communicate the “why,” the meaning and importance of safety.

A sign in the workplace that reads, “Stop. Do Not Proceed,” is a warning, and nothing more. It’s a type of communication, but it doesn’t communicate the “why.” Memos, PowerPoint slides, emails, toolbox talks, and safety training are all forms of communication.

You need to take communication to the next level; to create communication that motivates employees. This is where marketing comes into play. In my book, PeopleWork: The Human Touch in Workplace Safety, marketing is discussed as the third critical component of the M4 Method.

Here are three reasons your safety program should have a marketing strategy:

To fix safety performance, you must first fix the engagement issue.

Gallup pegs the disengagement rate of employees and workers at around 70%. 7 out of 10 employees, workers and contractors are not actively engaged in their work. Here’s why that spells big trouble for safety. If a worker is not engaged in their work, then they are not engaged in safely doing their work. You cannot be disengaged from the job but still engaged in safety. To fix the safety performance, you must first fix the engagement issue.

If you want to change the safety culture, you have to change the way you do things around here.

There has been a lot of talk on the subject of safety culture recently. But for those that have a hard time defining what safety culture really is, let’s turn to Wikipedia’s definition. “Safety culture is the attitude, beliefs, perceptions and values that employees share in relation to safety in the workplace. Safety culture is a part of organizational culture, and has been described by the phrase "the way we do things around here."

The battle for safety is not about safety at all.

Engagement, or a lack of it, is the biggest problem in the workplace today. The Gallup surveys tell us that 71% of employees are NOT fully engaged. Safety suffers when engagement is missing. How could it not be? If people aren’t engaged in their work, then they aren’t going to be engaged in safely doing their work.

Why has this not become a massive battle by companies to re-connect their people with their work? Because the command-and-control model of management pushes rules-enforcement instead of relationship-building. In my new book, PeopleWork: The Human Touch in Workplace Safety, I write that more rules, more procedures and more processes heaped on to people who aren't engaged, aren’t connected and aren’t paying attention just isn’t going to work. If you want people to pay attention to safety, you first have to get them to pay attention. That means engage first.

A 71% level of disengagement is a serious drop in focused-attention productivity. This should be the battle you’re fighting in your efforts to improve safety performance. Lost productivity and disengaged safety performance creates a huge financial mess forcing companies to continue to pay more and get less. You'd think that there would be a hue-and-cry from the corporate executives to find solutions intended to curb this very real problem that is plaguing our workplaces and costing us money. But there isn't.

Engagement isn’t being talked about in safety circles. They’re still talking about more processes and procedures to fix an obvious engagement problem. But because it’s called an "employee" engagement problem, safety doesn’t know how to fix that.

Here are three ways you can begin to improve engagement levels with employees:

PeopleWork lays out a new safety model. It changes the discussion from rule-based enforcement to performance-based culture focused on mentoring, coaching, and inspiring teams.

In my work as a safety management consultant, I’ve seen that when frontline supervisors buy into safety as a personal value, they better understand their role in keeping the workplace safe. In fact, if crews themselves can become safety leaders, the need for safety inspectors almost disappears altogether.

So, I wrote PeopleWork - The Human Touch in Workplace Safety to introduce the next level in safety. In the book, I lay out The M4 Method for taking workplace safety to the next level. The M4 Method combines four elements: Management, Meetings, Marketing and Motivation. All parts depend on the other parts to take safety from a compliance-based focus to one that is more people-based. The people-based approach helps employees to buy-in to safety.

Here are a few snippets from the book now on sale worldwide on Amazon....

People don’t buy-in to safety because they get a prize.

Once upon a time I was photocopier salesperson. Our sales manager would run regular sales contests. The most cold-calls would win a cash prize. The most sales in a month would win a hotel stay and dinner. The top salesman annually would win a big cash bonus. The winners were usually those who were top of the heap anyway.

At management level meetings, safety isn’t about rules. It’s about how safety advances the organization.

Companies are including safety more often in general meeting discussions. It’s commendable. Safety people have wished for a long time for safety to be a top agenda item in management and general staff meetings. Now it’s starting to happen in more and more organizations. But is there a plan on behalf of the Safety department to maximize the effectiveness of this new position? Is safety prepared for their moment in the sun?

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“What matters most is that everyone goes home safe each day.”

Is making sure people go home safe really what matters most? Because if that’s what matters most, then it’s the least you can do. It's the bare minimum of things you are allowed to do by law when it comes to safety. You are not allowed to do less. You can be fined or jailed if you do less.

Employees have a basic expectation that their workplace and their employers will do what is necessary to protect them from harm. So when you tell your people that what matters most is that they go home safely, they know that. That’s their expectation.

So really, is sending people home safely the most important thing you do each day? Or could you be doing a lot more?