Safety is the only department where, when performance drops, it’s common practice to bring in an outside speaker to sling platitudes for an hour in hopes that performance will improve afterward. When production lags or when revenues fall or when hiring slows down, companies don’t pay consultants to talk about those issues with front-line staff for an hour. But safety does.
In their attempts to get people to comply with safety rules, safety speakers tend to use a lot of graphic images, gut-wrenching stories, and guilt in their presentations. Those scare tactics are ineffective, though. Safety managers would actually have more success if they used strategies that connect with their teams in positive and meaningful ways.
- Supervisors need to have the skills and tools to communicate safety at a personal level. After all, supervisors have far more influence over employee engagement in safety than some stranger with a sad story to tell.
- Safety managers should help their frontline teams become so tight together that they each know the other’s next move and can compensate for any misstep before it happens.
- Companies should focus on helping safety departments create an internal movement around safety—something that causes employees to pay more attention to the work they do, the way they do it, and the people they do it with.
None of these goals are achieved by telling employees sad stories for an hour.
Companies don't need more rules and reminders about safety. They need more of their employees to buy in to safety. That happens when safety managers figure out the prime objective, get their supervisors on board to lead the charge, simplify the communications so the messaging is clear, and engage their people to ensure that employees get what they want and need from the job.
Once safety buy-in is achieved, employees will deliver better production, more efficiently and with greater safety. And then no one will need safety speakers any more.