Kevin Burns Blog

In safety, there is a mistaken belief that in order to motivate employees to buy-in, you have to “go negative.” The focus of safety marketing has been wrong. How do scare tactics, gruesome photos and videos and data and charts provide inspiration, motivation and encouragement to buy-in to safety directly?

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.

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.

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.

Before you plan your next safety meeting, ask yourself if your intent is to scare your workers into compliance. Do you want them to be afraid, or to get them to voluntarily buy-in to safety as a personal value?

Accidents don't happen in the safety manager's office. They happen in the field. That's where the management of safety must take place. High safety performance doesn't magically come about in organized safety meetings, although good safety meetings are part of the solution. Safety performance happens when you deal with safety issues, decisions and behaviors one on one.

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.

If safety meetings are not fun or engaging for attendees, they won’t remember it. Part of the overall strategy for safety communication and meetings should be a requirement to avoid mind-numbing and boring your people whenever possible. But that's tough when the subject-matter and even worse, the presenters, are boring. You make it so much more difficult for employees to engage and stay sharp if you insist on throwing every boring statistic, figure, graph and performance chart that you can lay your hands on at them in one meeting - and expecting any level of recall. Boring presenters are not born - they are made by the example of those boring presenters who they've observed. Over time, bad meetings evolve into something worse by exposure to mind-numbing safety meetings featuring a parade of PowerPoint armed, personality-deficient robots.

Advertising is a one-way street: outward. It talks at us not with us. Memos and surveys at work are one-way communication. There is no conversation. There is no engagement. Because to build engagement, especially in safety, requires a relationship.