The Dangerous Truth About Safety
From the first prehistoric hunter to employ someone as saber-toothed tiger bait to today's modern leadership issues, we have learned two big lessons.
- Employee safety has clearly (and mercifully) become more important.
- People who don't like their job probably don't do a very good job.
According to Evolve Performance Group, a spin-off organization of Gallup that conducts employee surveys and turns the data into safety-focused solutions, employees who are engaged on the job and respect their leaders are 48% safer than those who don't.1
This brings to light three important things to consider
- Safety leaders need personal influence skills so they can consistently engage employees. If you don't know how to get people to believe, it doesn't matter what you say.
- Unhappy workers on a dangerous mission make kind of a bad combination. Any undercurrent of dissatisfaction can make employees less attentive to safety policy and less focused on the job in general. One way to rectify this is through high-quality employee surveys that ask the right questions and are easy to comprehend. Close analysis of responses will shed light on ways you can understand and improve your employees' level of engagement.
- Safety training must be more than just informative and comprehensive. It must also ensure that employees feel valuable and understand how they contribute to the organization's overall success. When was the last time you were eager to learn that you're not very good at something...and possibly irrelevant?
You shouldn't need any research to tell you that injured or dead employees are almost never productive! It comes down to a dangerous truth: It is very easy to focus on the wrong things, inadvertently creating more danger than naturally exists. Without knowing current employee opinions, and without the leadership skills to create a sustainable culture, we can invalidate the workforce and prevent buy-in. That will unfortunately lead to reduced awareness on the job site. After all, if I think my boss doesn't care how I feel and if I consider the safety program to be unclear and condescending, why am I still paying attention? To put it in less direct terms, employee engagement is the foundation on which all safety initiatives should be built.
Without influential leaders focused on making employees feel valuable, the best safety programs don't stand a chance. The core of safety lives within your people, not in your plans, programs, or ideas. This is really good news-it means that when your managers and supervisors take the credit for the company's safety success, they'll actually deserve it!
1 Evolve Performance Group. "The Case for Engagement." Employee Engagement Resources, 26 February 2016. Available at http://evolvepg.com/About/Whats-Evolving/ArticleID/36/The-Case-for-Engagement.
Safety and Human Resources Professional
5yLove it. I have a few thoughts I would interject to enhance your position. 1. Why do companies employ routine maintenance on some assets(equipment) and not others(employees)? Conceptually speaking, wouldn’t they both need it? 2.Having the same safety values across the entire enterprise, regardless of position. Example 1: Why do companies rush to put a driver into a cmv, but are hesitant to use an under qualified person in a crane or dozer? Example 2: Jobsite workers are required to wear certain ppe, but visitors both internal and external are allowed to travel the jobsite unchallenged... a hazard is a hazard regardless of title or position. 3. Tone at the top. Pretty much sums up a safety program. If the Boss isn’t walking the talk and holding the next level of management accountable to the values and principles, who is ensuring the employee’s safety. So, how does this change? My answer would be to start with #3.
Safety & Health Consultant Customized Workforce Education at South Central College
5yFront line leadership. If front line leaders knew the impact they have on safety, and were held accountable for the safety record of the crew, like they are for production, we would see that next big drop in incident rates across the workforce. Some companies have better accountability measures than others, but most have no idea how to get the core message to their leaders, and gain buy in. Educate and assess your front line leaders so they know their own personal gaps in Safety Leadership, and then help them to help themselves.
Amazon #1 Bestselling Author, Consultant, CSP Leadership, Change and Safety Speaker
6yTruth: Safety programs without engaged employees do not succeed. Danger: You can actually increase incidents by reducing existing buy-in when you roll out a program that does not validate those who would implement it. So it's possible to actually make things worse while thinking you are making things safer.
HR-MDS patients need something similar to Glivec in CML
6yWhat is the truth about safety? And why is it dangerous?
Amazon #1 Bestselling Author, Consultant, CSP Leadership, Change and Safety Speaker
6yI agree Christopher, but many do not like mixing the idea of doing whats best for employees and showing ROI. You can keep people safe and not get knocked off the vendor list becasue your safety record is bad... with the same campaign.