The Safety Leader Podcast

www.KevBurns.com

Why aren’t production and safety working out of the same office yet? Start with the common ground between safety and production. On this Episode 51, how production and safety can work better together.

Companies associate the success of the operations department with efficiency, productivity and profits. But, in safety, success is determined by a complex formula ending in TRIF rates and with the prevention of occupational injury and illness. How do you make these two necessary parts of a company work together if they are not even measuring the same things?

Here are five ways to marry safety and production.

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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

Be positive about your safety program and the way it helps to protect and value your good people. On this Episode 50, four ways to promote your safety program positively.

To promote something is to advance a cause or a program; to support it or to actively encourage. So, when you tell your people to be safe, you are promoting safety. When you pepper your workplace with posters as safety reminders, you are promoting safety. When you hold a safety meeting, you are promoting safety. When you recognize good behaviors, you are promoting safety. And in order to build a solid safety culture, you can't do it without promoting safety.

But how do you ensure that you are doing it positively in a way that doesn't undermine the safety program? Here are four key areas to promote your safety program and employee safety and make sure that you're doing it in a positive way.

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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

Good employees who have special skills and talent take pride in their work and they protect that pride by engaging in safety. Here on Episode 49, 3 Ways to Improve the Effectiveness of Your Safety Program.

Without getting into long descriptions, good workplace safety culture is the result of attitudes and personal and corporate values aligning. If there's apathy in the workplace, very little attention and care will be given to safety. You can't change the safety culture without addressing the underlying attitudes and values.

To be an industry leader, to have an engaged workforce, you will need to do three things to improve the effectiveness of your 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.

Effectiveness in safety is about how little effort it takes to inspire people to do the right things. On this episode, 3 key tips to help you become a more effective safety leader.

As a safety person, manager or front-line supervisor, you already know that your work can be thankless. But you still have a responsibility to drive down the best practices and advice onto those employees at the front-line.

Just because you may have the position or title doesn’t mean that you’re effective at what you do. Being effective is not about being armed with a set of clever quips to trot out, or an ability to use guilt or threat of harm to make your point.

Let’s assume that you already have a working safety program in place and that yours is a workplace that hires good people to do good work; work that has earned you a decent reputation of quality performance.

Here are the top 3 strategies to help you, as a supervisor, manager or safety person, become more effective in 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. www.KevBurns.com

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.

-- 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.

-- 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

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. 

On this episode, we are going to look at four different ways that you can connect safety to leadership. Leadership is not forced or thrust upon anyone. It’s voluntary. And personal safety leadership builds great teams.

A commitment to teamwork and safety. It’s all you need to go from newbie or lowly front-liner to leader. To become a safety leader requires a commitment to the welfare of your teammates. You can't build a strong team without caring about the safety of the members of the team. In this way, you can use safety build leadership in safety and teamwork.

Here are four ways that you can connect teamwork and leadership to safety.

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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

To be a safety leader, you have to be not only better at the job than the others, but willing to pick yourself up when you stumble. Coming up, three reasons safety leaders stumble.

The best organizations give world-class safety performance. They don't do it with a mediocre effort, mediocre standards or mediocre supervisors and safety people. They do it by surpassing industry average targets, a focused engagement with employees and with safety people and supervisors on top of their game.

You don’t build championship teams by shooting for the middle of industry averages. You don’t instill a positive safety culture by settling for average performance. World-class safety is not achieved by a mediocre effort, standards or people who don’t seek to be exceptional. 

Here's the problem. Not every safety person is a high-performer. 

Here are three main reasons that many stumble in their pursuit of becoming safety leaders.

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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

You may not be talking about it, but you have to. On this episode, get your people engaged in safety by talking about four things at your safety meeting.

Safety meetings started out as a legal requirement. You had to have them, they had to be recorded and the subject matter had to satisfy the Code. But nowhere does it state that you can’t add items to the safety meeting or that you can’t have fun and to speak-up in the meetings.

The problem is, safety meetings traditionally focus on meeting the legal requirement of the code. That's it. No more. So, to make sure they meet the bare minimum of the code, companies buy templates for their safety meetings that are white-bread and innocuous checklists because they’ve been dumbed-down to appeal to as many industries as possible.

Employees don’t buy-in to the safety program because it is presented as a set of rules and policies. Employees resist anyone who appears to want to force them to comply. And it's tough for employees to warm up to someone who incessantly talks about procedures, processes, inspections, and incidents.

To change the perception of safety, you must change the conversations. Here are 4 things you should be talking about in safety meetings.

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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.