http://www.kevburns.com
Helping employees overcome their tolerance to safety rules paves the way for them to see their own win for buying-in to safety. On this week's episode, how tolerance to safety rules may be worse that complacency.
Tolerance should become a serious consideration for supervisors and safety people. We all know that there has been plenty of talk about the hazards of complacency in safety. And the whole complacency conversation is gaining attention. But when you look for the actual definition of complacency, what you read may surprise you. Here's what the Merriam-Webster dictionary had to say about complacency: Complacency is self-satisfaction especially when accompanied by unawareness of actual dangers or deficiencies. In other words, when people get comfortable with their performance, they may pay less attention to risks. And when people are satisfied with their performance, there is a risk of complacency.
Tolerance, on the other hand, is the willingness to endure rules and procedures no matter how annoying they may be or how much you may disagree with something. When safety becomes an annoyance that needs to be tolerated, you are moving away from building a strong safety culture.
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Kevin Burns is a management consultant, safety speaker and author of "PeopleWork: The Human Touch in Workplace Safety." He is an expert in how to engage people in safety and believes that the best place to work is always the safest place to work. Kevin helps organizations integrate caring for and valuing employees through their safety programs. http://www.kevburns.com/peoplework
Ep 24 - Effects of Respect, Optimism and Happiness on Safety Leadership
On this episode, we will explore more of the Traits of Safety Leadership. This is Part 3. This time, the Effects of Optimism, Respect and Happiness.
Nothing affects an employee’s engagement levels more than the supervisor or manager (including safety people). The example set by the supervisor, safety person or manager is key to establishing the tone and culture of safety at work.
Overbearing, critical and negative-focused supervisors can take their toll on employees. And these supervisors and managers cause employees to lose their motivation.
This week, I want to offer you three softer skills that can connect you to employees in a way that gives them what they want from the job. This will help you build a better team relationship and create more influence in buying-in to safety.
Kevin Burns is a management consultant, safety speaker and author of "PeopleWork: The Human Touch in Workplace Safety." He is an expert in how to engage people in safety and believes that the best place to work is always the safest place to work. Kevin helps organizations integrate caring for and valuing employees through their safety programs.
Buy Kevin's book PeopleWork: The Human Touch in Workplace Safety
Ep 023 - Traits of Safety Leaders - Part 02
We are continuing to talk about the traits of safety leadership and on this episode, the next three traits you need to acquire. Safety leadership has little to do with position or title. You don't need to be in a management or in any kind of a supervisory position to be a leader. In fact, some of the best leaders are just ordinary employees who happen to be extraordinary people. They just happen to possess certain personality traits.
Safety leadership is about the decisions you make and the example you set for others to follow. To become a leader requires more than how many years you've been on the job or what kind of seniority you have in the company. Leadership is the right collection of specific personal skills and traits that is led by a lifelong commitment to self-improvement. Leadership is about being outward-focused; your level concerned about the well-being of others and how you help them to be better.
In the last episode we featured the first three traits of safety leadership. So, on this episode, we start at #4.
Kevin Burns is a management consultant, safety speaker and author of "PeopleWork: The Human Touch in Workplace Safety." He is an expert in how to engage people in safety and believes that the best place to work is always the safest place to work. Kevin helps organizations integrate caring for and valuing employees through their safety programs.
Do you have the traits of a safety leader? Let's start to find out. On this episode, the first of a series of podcasts on the traits of safety leaders.
Leadership requires no title or position. In fact, some of the best workplace leaders are just ordinary employees who happen to possess certain traits that causes others to look up to them and to seek their advice. Leaders are not managers necessarily although some management people may actually have many of leadership skills that this series of episodes is going to outline.
Do you have the traits of a safety leader? Why not use this series of episodes on safety leadership as a self-assessment tool to determine how well you score? Here are the first three traits of safety leaders.
Kevin Burns is a management consultant, safety speaker and author of "PeopleWork: The Human Touch in Workplace Safety." He is an expert in how to engage people in safety and believes that the best place to work is always the safest place to work. Kevin helps organizations integrate caring for and valuing employees through their safety programs. http://www.kevburns.com
Are you aware that a front-line supervisor has more influence on safety performance than senior management? On this episode, we're going to discuss how front-line safety leaders can harness that influence to improve safety culture.
The front-line supervisor, as the name would imply, lives at the front-line. And as a result, the front-line supervisor has more frequent contact with front-line employees - far more contact than anyone in a senior management position. That affords them the opportunity to have more influence in the safety culture at the front-line than senior management ever would.
For the supervisor, it’s imperative that they understand that authority and influence are two very different things. Anyone can be the boss and throw their authority weight around. That takes no skill or talent ... or even confidence when you think about. Influence, though, takes a lot of skill and the right mindset. So, what comes first? Skill or mindset? I would say mindset because it will determine how you acquire your skills.
Here are three strategies to adjust your mindset so that you, as a front-line supervisor or safety person, a safety leader, can develop better influence.
Kevin Burns is a management consultant, safety speaker and author of "PeopleWork: The Human Touch in Workplace Safety." He is an expert in how to engage people in safety and believes that the best place to work is always the safest place to work. Kevin helps organizations integrate caring for and valuing employees through their safety programs.
Two years is a long time to be trying to get it right as a supervisor. Especially when it comes to safety. On this episode, the three C's to becoming a better safety supervisor.
Does your workplace take the most senior employee in a crew and promote that person into a supervisory position? And then leave them to hang without skills, training and basic supervisory tools? Has it maybe happened to you?
You know, there's a sense of irony that your company requires any employee or contractor on your job site to have proper training to operate a piece of machinery? But to supervise the people who are actually operating the machinery doesn't require any supervisory training?
Workplaces want their supervisors to mentor and coach the younger, less-experienced workers. But a lot of those same supervisors don’t get the skills and tools to do the job with any kind of competence. It can take a new supervisor up to two years to find his or her own workable management style.
So, let's see if we can't shorten that two-year curve. Here is a 3-part formula to improve your effectiveness as a supervisor or safety person. Each part of the formula starts with the letter C.
Kevin Burns is a management consultant, safety speaker and author of "PeopleWork: The Human Touch in Workplace Safety." He is an expert in how to engage people in safety and believes that the best place to work is always the safest place to work. Kevin helps organizations integrate caring for and valuing employees through their safety programs.
http://www.kevburns.comOne of the most pursued issues by safety people is getting employees to commit to the safety program. On this episode, 3 ways to get better commitment to safety.
You need commitment to safety from especially the front line employees. Here's why. The majority of safety incidents happen at the front line. The largest numbers of workers are at the front line. The most amount of activity is at the front line. And so it's at the front line where the focus on safety needs to take place. It is at the front line where safety leadership is needed most.
Now, let’s be clear. Leadership is not another word for management, even though managers hijack the word and use it interchangeably with their own title. The truth is, you don’t need to have a management title to be a leader. In fact, some of the best job-site leaders have no title at all.
Every employee is quite capable of demonstrating some form of safety leadership. There are three more areas where you can get to work to build employee commitment to safety.
Kevin Burns is a management consultant, safety speaker and author of "PeopleWork: The Human Touch in Workplace Safety." He is an expert in how to engage people in safety and believes that the best place to work is always the safest place to work. Kevin helps organizations integrate caring for and valuing employees through their safety programs.
People cannot recall everything they are exposed to in a single message but for some reason, safety people think they are. On this episode, we're going to explore some strategies and ideas that commercials on the Super Bowl can teach us about building better safety communications.
People are simply not able to recall everything they are exposed to in a single message. But for some reason, safety people think they are. That’s why so many safety meetings feature full information-dumps and endless streams of bullet-points in the hopes that meeting attendees will be able to work through, figure out and distinguish the urgent, from the important from the filler material.
The purpose of a well-designed marketing strategy is to get people to take a specific action. That's what TV advertisers want. That's what you should want for your safety program. What is the action that you are expecting from your safety meetings and communications?
The answer to that question is part of your overall safety marketing strategy. Here are three things you need to include in your safety marketing.
Kevin Burns is a management consultant, safety speaker and author of "PeopleWork: The Human Touch in Workplace Safety." He is an expert in how to engage people in safety and believes that the best place to work is always the safest place to work. Kevin helps organizations integrate caring for and valuing employees through their safety programs.
On this episode, how using negative tools will never build a positive safety culture.
Do you think that by using guilt, fear and manipulation, your people can get a really good sense of how much they are cared for and valued? Safety has to get a new tactic. They've got to get past the lazy effort of downloading anonymous Internet photos of injury, guilt and fear-inducing videos, and “don’t do what he did” stories of workplace injury. Because it doesn't work.
Scaring people straight may work for troubled teens when they visit prisons. But fear and guilt are no way to honour mature adult employees with families at work. Your people deserve so much better than that, don't they?
You know, it's ironic that you have will hold your spouse and children in your arms and tell them that you love them and care about them deeply. But then you force your good people, who you also say you care about, to instead, sit through gut-wrenching sessions of fear and guilt. Do you think that's an effective way to let your people know how much they are valued and cared for?
Resist the temptation to download Internet videos and photos to shock your people into compliance. That’s not leadership. In fact, it’s particularly bad management. It’s negative and negativity is never uplifting. It’s de-motivating and drives down morale.
So what do you do instead? Well, here are three positive strategies you can start to implement immediately to take your safety culture in a more positive direction.
Kevin Burns is a management consultant, safety speaker and author of "PeopleWork: The Human Touch in Workplace Safety." He is an expert in how to engage people in safety and believes that the best place to work is always the safest place to work. Kevin helps organizations integrate caring for and valuing employees through their safety programs.
http://www.kevburns.com
As safety continues to move away from enforcement and a lot closer to engagement, on this episode, we’re going to look at a 3-part strategy to create better buy-in to the safety program.
One of my clients recently brought up the DSL Strategy in my book, PeopleWork: The Human Touch in Workplace Safety (page 115 if you’re following along). It’s in Chapter 6, “Creating Employee Buy-in.” We talked a bit about the DSL strategy in more detail because it is intended to be used in place of the “shock and awe” campaigns of gruesome photos, gut-wrenching videos and stories of “don’t do what he did.”
Safety has traditionally been focused on pointing out what workers could lose if they make decisions outside of safety: a limb, an eye, their life. These gruesome images and threats are found more at safety meetings than anywhere else in the safety program. There are still some safety folks and supervisors that really believe that this stuff is some sort of effective motivator. But scaring people into compliance only gets temporary compliance with rules.
If you’ve not had the chance to read Chapter 6 in PeopleWork and all about the DSL Strategy, here’s a brief overview.
Kevin Burns is a management consultant, safety speaker and author of "PeopleWork: The Human Touch in Workplace Safety." He is an expert in how to engage people in safety and believes that the best place to work is always the safest place to work. Kevin helps organizations integrate caring for and valuing employees through their safety programs.
Have you ever noticed that the people we seem to respect the most are the ones, the leaders, who are not afraid to wear their hearts on their sleeves? On this episode, we are going to talk about soft-skills in safety and how heartfelt safety is a real thing.
We are connecting with our hearts more than ever before; including how we connect with each other at work. our people care about things that make their communities better, and uplift people who need a hand and they are connecting with their hearts more than ever. Does your safety program connect with your people in the same way? If it doesn’t, you’re missing the bigger picture to connect your people to a common cause that looks out for each other.
In safety, while your technical skills may get your foot in the door, your soft people skills are what will keep you there. Your ability to empathize, to connect and to feel are the soft skills that will help you excel as a leader. Problem-solving, motivating, and team building are all much easier if you have good soft skills. Knowing how to get along with people, a positive attitude and genuinely caring are skills crucial for success.
Kevin Burns is a management consultant, safety speaker and author of "PeopleWork: The Human Touch in Workplace Safety." He is an expert in how to engage people in safety and believes that the best place to work is always the safest place to work. Kevin helps organizations integrate caring for and valuing employees through their safety programs.
But wait. There's more. The words you hear in those awful late-night infomercials. And if you think that's what marketing is, on this episode we'll show you that safety marketing is actually what creates value and motivates people to action without the cheesy lines.
Communications inform. But marketing moves. And this is where most safety programs make their biggest mistake. They assume that informing people, the communications part, is enough. But it isn’t.
Here are three strategies that can get you started in improving your safety marketing effectiveness.
Kevin Burns is a management consultant, safety speaker and author of "PeopleWork: The Human Touch in Workplace Safety." He is an expert in how to engage people in safety and believes that the best place to work is always the safest place to work. Kevin helps organizations integrate caring for and valuing employees through their safety programs.
http://www.kevburns.com
When engagement is missing, so is quality, pride and, sadly, safety. On this episode, three ideas and ways to connect safety to quality and, of course, pride in a job well done. It really matters.
Kevin Burns is a management consultant, safety speaker and author of "PeopleWork: The Human Touch in Workplace Safety." He is an expert in how to engage people in safety and believes that the best place to work is always the safest place to work. Kevin helps organizations integrate caring for and valuing employees through their safety programs.
On this episode, a little relief for safety folks who have to put up with unproductive opinions that safety is the exclusive responsibility of the safety person.
It's not unusual to hear from safety professionals that they still run into resistance from some members of the supervisory staff or even upper management that safety is the responsibility of the safety person. Most of this is usually centred around who does the paperwork, who fills out the forms and who handles reporting procedures. Nobody likes doing paperwork. People hate having to do more of it.
And while there are paperwork requirements associated with safety, some supervisors and foremen still want the safety people to handle the safety conversations or to apply the rules. There are far too many people who still believe that safety is the responsibility of the safety department. That comes from not fully integrating safety into how we train our people, supervisors included. There are still too many workplaces that separate production and safety and treat safety rules as an add-on to the existing procedures.
Here are 3 things you can do at toolbox and tailgate meetings or crew huddles to improve the level of personal responsibility on your job site.
Kevin Burns is a management consultant, safety speaker and author of "PeopleWork: The Human Touch in Workplace Safety." He is an expert in how to engage people in safety and believes that the best place to work is always the safest place to work. Kevin helps organizations integrate caring for and valuing employees through their safety programs.
http://www.kevburns.com/peoplework
Selling is about solving a problem or uncovering a benefit of safety in a way that makes people want to buy-in. So the question becomes, do you want people to buy-in to safety? If so, what are you prepared to do to make that happen? On this episode, we are going to deal with the beliefs and misconceptions about selling safety to employees.
It’s not about shoving safety down the throats of your people. It’s about helping them see that safety improves their lives in a way that they are probably not seeing it. Supervisors and safety people, you have to help employees see what safety does and can do for them. You can improve employee commitment to safety by understanding that selling safety is good thing.
Kevin Burns is a management consultant, safety speaker and author of "PeopleWork: The Human Touch in Workplace Safety." He is an expert in how to engage people in safety and believes that the best place to work is always the safest place to work. Kevin helps organizations integrate caring for and valuing employees through their safety programs.
http://www.kevburns.com/peoplework
On this episode, we're going to change how you look at safety meetings and help you get better at getting employees to buy-in to the safety program.
Taking a play from how to pitch to angel investors and venture capitalists, safety can make a pitch for buy-in to the safety program by shifting how they do meetings. Instead of looking at a safety meeting as a place to pitch stats, figures, reports and procedures, you should instead view your safety meetings as investment pitches. Safety meeting attendees become potential investors.
They either buy-in to what you're selling or they reject your idea.
You have to show your potential investors that your idea and plan improves their lives and their work. If you want to build a solid safety culture, you’re going to need employee buy-in. And to get investors to buy-in, you need to work on three things specifically that can help your cause and secure your investors.
Kevin Burns is a management consultant, safety speaker and author of "PeopleWork: The Human Touch in Workplace Safety." He is an expert in how to engage people in safety and believes that the best place to work is always the safest place to work. Kevin helps organizations integrate caring for and valuing employees through their safety programs.
http://www.kevburns.com/peoplework
Safety meetings are typically information dumps and are full of all of the ineffective things that other people use in their safety meetings. Those meetings don’t get results. Then there are engaging safety meetings, ones that build teamwork and motivation for safety. Which ones are you organizing?
My new book, PeopleWork: The Human Touch in Workplace Safety features two full chapters dedicated to building better safety meetings as part of an overall strategy to help build a better safety culture. Part of the overall strategy for safety meetings should be a requirement to avoid mind-numbing and boring your people whenever possible. So, here are three top strategies for building effective and engaging safety meetings.
Kevin Burns is a management consultant, safety speaker and author of "PeopleWork: The Human Touch in Workplace Safety." He is an expert in how to engage people in safety and believes that the best place to work is always the safest place to work. Kevin helps organizations integrate caring for and valuing employees through their safety programs.
http://www.kevburns.com
Whether you want to get a good start on the New Year or whether you want to find a little nugget of information that helps you become more effective as a supervisor, manager or safety person, on this episode we are going to be exploring 3 ways to help supercharge your effectiveness.
Supervisor, managers and safety people, you really do have a choice to make for the next year. You can choose to be only as good as you were last year; to allow yourself to be complacent in your learning and effectiveness. Or you can choose to supercharge your effectiveness this year.
Kevin Burns is a management consultant, safety speaker and author of "PeopleWork: The Human Touch in Workplace Safety." He is an expert in how to engage people in safety and believes that the best place to work is always the safest place to work. Kevin helps organizations integrate caring for and valuing employees through their safety programs.