Kevin Burns Blog

When you have achieved successful buy-in, your people can help turn a company’s mundane safety program into a movement built around a set of values, rather than rules.

Pick any night of the week and you’re likely to stumble across a repeat broadcast of the TV shows Shark Tank (USA) or Dragon’s Den (Canada, UK, Australia, etc). Entrepreneurs pitch their business ideas to secure investment finance from a panel of venture capitalists. If the pitch is a good one, there’s a good chance of getting buy-in from one or more of the Dragons or Sharks. If the pitch misses the mark, they go home empty-handed.

Take this idea and apply it to safety. Instead of looking at a safety meeting as a place to pitch stats, figures, reports and procedures, view your safety meeting attendees as potential investors. If your pitch misses, your people won’t invest themselves in safety. Your presentation won’t yield the buy-in you’re looking for. But if you pitch successfully, you’ve offered plenty of benefits and helped eliminate the mental barriers to improve safety culture. If you want to build a solid safety culture, you’re going to need employee buy-in.

Here are three strategies that can get you started in improving buy-in to the safety program:

Your people deserve your best communication effort. Their safety depends on it.

The need to be effective in safety communications is perhaps the most important skill any supervisor or safety person can have. It has been proven that managers (including safety managers) and supervisors spend 50-80% of their day in actual communication. 50-80%! Communication is seriously important. If you have to repeat yourself, you're not being effective. And when your effectiveness is lacking, your people aren't buying-in to what you're saying. They're tolerating safety the rules. What you say and how you say it matters. You need to maximize your communication skills.

Here are four personal strategies that you need to embrace to begin implementing effectiveness in safety communications:

If you want to be passionate about safety, first be passionate about people.

Successful workplace safety culture lies in the relationship between the frontline employee, the employee’s immediate supervisor, and the bond among the entire crew. No senior level initiatives, safety department compliance measures, or culture improvement ideas can have positive results if the frontline supervisor hasn’t established real working relationships. The supervisor needs to be a tipping point between safety compliance and safety success.

If you want to impact safety performance and buy-in, you are going to have to make a heartfelt connection.

Finding a way to get front-line employees to buy-in to safety is tough. Communications can be a bit uncomfortable too, especially during the awkward one-on-one, heartfelt moments.

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To move people toward safety, you have to get the communications part right first.

Safety performance is only as good as the quality of the communication. Communication matters. How you communicate can matter even more. It has been studied that 50-80% of a supervisor’s time is spent communicating. Since it is the biggest job supervisors and safety people do, you need to be good at it.

In safety, you will find warnings, communications and marketing. What’s the difference? Warnings warn. Communications inform. Marketing moves. For this article, we are going to focus on the communications part, especially how you communicate.

Here are four strategies that can immediately improve the level of your safety communications:

Without employee motivation, you have little chance of success in building a culture of safety.

If employees aren’t motivated, it doesn’t matter how good your intentions or how good the safety program. Without motivation to want to do their best, employees will give just enough performance to not get fired. Without motivation, you have little chance of success in building a culture of safety.

Change the perception from HAVING to attend safety meetings, to WANTING to.

Nowhere in the Occupational Health and Safety Code does it state that a safety meeting has to be enjoyable. But what if the requirement was that safety meetings had to be engaging? What if that was written into the Code that you could be fined or jailed if you did not engage your people in safety meetings? Would you finally stop the archaic, mind-numbing practices of lousy safety meetings? Would you, instead, spend some time raising the standards of the meeting?

There are standards for working at height, with dangerous goods, in pits, underground. You are required to ensure that employees understand and comply with these standards. But, where are the standards for holding engaging, uplifting safety meetings? Does there have to be a law passed before you will do it?

You claim to want to have a workplace with a strong safety culture. But you continue to turn your safety meetings into dull, half-hearted events. Safety meetings are a key rallying point of your culture. If you want to build safety buy-in, you’ve got to utilize your safety meetings as a key tool to do that.

Here are three ways you can use your safety meetings to build buy-in:

To build a successful, strong and supportive safety culture requires a foundation of employee buy-in. 

Safety has, traditionally, set itself up based on the compliance model of checks and balances. It is then presented to employees as paperwork and meetings. Then the focus gets placed on reporting and tracking. It’s difficult to get employees to buy-in to a program of checks, forms and paperwork. Employees can't see what's in it for them. As a result, buy-in to safety is marginal.

Companies re-brand and re-launch consumer products in an effort to be relevant again. Laundry detergent, new models of car, the latest iPhone. They're "new and improved." These companies give their old products a new spin with new improvements. And they make sales.

To build a successful safety culture requires a foundation of employee buy-in. Without it, you will spend large amounts of money and never achieve great success. But like any consumer product, before it can be bought, there has to be a benefit to the consumer. They have got to see how this product makes their life better. When they find it, that's when they buy-in.

Safety management is a paid position. Safety leadership is voluntary - yet infinitely more rewarding.

It’s time to take stock of where you are in your safety career and to find ways to tweak, adjust and fine-tune your performance. There is, in this post, already an assumption that you’re up to date on legislation, rules and procedures. If you’re missing that part, you can add those items to this list. But I don’t want to discuss your knowledge of safety. I want to help make you a better safety leader.