Safety is a shared responsibility with each individual being accountable for their actions. On this weeks episode, how safety leaders define responsibility and accountability.
On a recent LinkedIn post about accountability, I was asked to explain the diiference between responsibility and accountability in safety.
I too, used to think they were two interchangeable words. In fact, the dictionaries interchange them at least once on each word. So, it's not surprising that your clients and colleagues struggle with it. But to me, they are not interchangeable at all. In fact, each word has very specific differentiators.
Be forewarned, these definitions may not be the classic dictionary version of the words.
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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. www.KevBurns.com
Stop discussing the negatives of not being safe. Instead, focus on the positives of buying-in to safety. On this episode, 4 ways to make your safety program more positive.
Ask employees about how they perceive the safety program and they will most likely answer that it's dull, boring, repetitive, mind-numbing, disengaging, and it tries to scare you into compliance. That's because safety has been focused on following rules and avoiding injury or accidents. But like everything else in life, safety evolves.
As organizations are becoming more people-centric, they are integrating people-development programs. You cannot develop your people without including safety. The best-managed companies and employers-of-choice still value a profit but not at the expense of their good people. They are organizations that attract the best employees and hang onto them. As I say regularly, the best place to work is always the safest place to work.
Here are the four most important ways to focus your safety program on positives.
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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. www.KevBurns.com
Data is not how you build a safety culture. Leadership is. On this episode, 4 things that employees need most from safety.
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Safety is about preparedness - yet most times even the safety meeting does not meet that standard. Seriously. How many times have you seen your own safety meetings get thrown together at the last minute, start late, run long and be so full of stuff that it left attendees wondering what was the important stuff?
Every part of safety needs to be engaging. Yes, even the mundane stuff. Employees take their cues, not so much from what you say in meetings, but from what you do with them and your level of conviction about safety.
You need conviction when it comes to organizing and executing the safety program - including the meetings. If you want to engage employees to participate in the safety program and to own safety as one of their guiding principles, you have to give them what they want by delivering the example that you want.
Here are the four things that employees want from the safety program.
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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.