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The Safety Leader Podcast

The Safety Leader Podcast introduces the next level in safety. A safety leader takes safety beyond rules compliance to a shared goal that recognizes the importance of each individual on the job. Supervisors and safety people are uniquely positioned to become safety leaders and to bring workplace safety past compliance and across the threshold to where safety becomes personal. The front line is where the culture of an organization is made and reinforced. Past all the processes and procedures are people. Safety starts with people. I commit to you to give you my best ideas, tips and strategies to help make your job as a supervisor or front-line safety person easier and more effective. That's what the Safety Leader Podcast is all about.
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Now displaying: March, 2017
Mar 30, 2017

http://www.kevburns.com

One 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.

Mar 22, 2017

http://www.kevburns.com

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.

Mar 19, 2017

http://www.kevburns.com

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.

Mar 3, 2017

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.

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