While Leadership is the engine that drives a healthy safety culture, leadership is a huge subject. To provide the right kind of leadership requires breaking it down into actionable tasks. The main, most obvious feature of an organizational culture is that its members communicate. Its leaders have the main responsibility for keeping the communication healthy, facilitating it and focusing it on the organization’s objectives. That sounds easy, but so do many business concepts, and like many others, the complexities and dynamism of modern business make them often seem like ten pounds of tasks in a five pound bag.
In terms of volume, safety communications will always be at a disadvantage versus most of the other required business communications. I don’t mean loudness; I mean amount. It’s hard to imagine any business startup that begins with the idea that we’ll have a really good safety program and then figure out what we’ll make, service or sell. That emphasis on what we sell can only be minimized at risk to the business’ viability. So, ninety percent of the day-to-day, hour-by-hour communications will be on schedule, delivery, cost, and the immediate challenges of doing what we do – and oh, by the way, “be safe” gets squeezed in. Unless the problem of volume is understood and dealt with, that’s just the way it’ll go. Unless safety communication is Planned, Deliberate and Checked for effectiveness, the message on safety gets drown out. Remember the David Hume quote: “The strong image is the image believed”.
How many great safety communications ideas have you run across? If you get around much, you’ve probably seen lots of safety scoreboards announcing how many days since the last lost time or recordable accident. These are excellent at communicating commitment, reminding everybody how important safety is and showing pride. Unless, of course, they are not maintained and not updated since three managements or three safety teams ago came up with the idea.
Have you heard the idea of starting every meeting with safety? If so, is it a good quality discussion or just a rehashing of the last accident (usually accompanied with comments like “what were they thinking? or “we’ve told them a million times”)? How are the posters – fresh, changed regularly, relevant to the work being done? What goes on in safety meetings or during the safety topic in other meetings – meaningful discussion with results? How about that message “Safety Is Our Top Priority!” – is it believed?
Done properly, these are great individual elements of a communications effort, but individually, they are not a plan or strategy. Since most employees didn’t take up safety as a trade, or go to school for safety, or (hopefully) have not had some incident in their lives that has programmed them to really think safety first, it doesn’t usually come first. That is a norm that has to be created. Maybe in the long run I have to brush my teeth to survive, but the more immediate concern is eating. The brushing though, is a well communicated norm – so well in fact that it has become so habitual that it requires next to no thought. Getting a culture for whom working safely is so habitual that people do it naturally and can’t imagine not, takes the three elements of a effective communications. Effective communication: uses every medium, is frequent, and is repetitive. Let’s take each of those individually.
Every Medium
“Different folks, different strokes” certainly applies to how people receive information. Depending on their psychological makeup, upbringing, education, generational culture, what works for me, may be ineffective to the point of invisibility to the next person. Some people are very graphically oriented and love pictures, flow charts and maps. They may go unconscious when faced with a long text procedure or check lists. (For those so inclined, a mind map of this subject is attached.) On the other hand, I’ve seen people just shut down when faced with a mind-map. They need something much differently structured, like check lists, specifications, etc. Need is often not an overstatement with both types!
Some people will walk past a dutifully maintained bulletin board for years and its existence not even register. Others will read every word on it and know as soon as something is updated. Message boards and posters are a good way to get short messages to a lot of people, but some people won’t even notice them. The scoreboard at the entrance and the banners proclaiming the commitment to safety are good reminders as people enter each day and there’s not much downside to them unless they’re not credible. I’ve run across many employees who are aware of the scoreboard but don’t know what a “recordable injury” means.
Emails as communication have some very specific ways to be effective, and many ways in which they are a complete loss. In addition to the information retention afforded by a written form, concise emails allow the recipient to prioritize any actions required and take the time to fully understand. This is not always the case in face-to-face verbal communication. In the case though, where immediate impact and immediate feedback are paramount, face-to-face is infinitely better.
Who’s communicating may be extremely important depending on what level of culture health exists in the organization. At first, for credibility, more frequent communications from senior leadership should be planned . Later, as people are more confident in the group norms and organizational commitment, more faces on the communications will help get the messages across. Of course peer communications are essential, but management must not simply shunt the responsibility to employees until the organization is completely confident that the peers are empowered to truly speak for the organization. In one organization I know of, they even got the employees’ children to help by creating safety posters, which were proudly displayed throughout the workplace.
The last medium I’ll cover here (there are many more) is the communication of meetings, celebrations, rallies and other employee get-togethers. Effective meetings communicate not only explicit messages but group cohesion. It’s probably hard to have an ineffective celebration, but it can be done. There are myriad validated processes for having effective meetings, yet too many meetings:
- experience absences of the right people (shows lack of commitment/caring – whether you like it or not);
- fail to make decisions;
- get too easily sidetracked (what’s the mission?);
- don’t tolerate or can’t accommodate free exchange of ideas (got ground rules?)
When this happens, there is clear communication that says “we don’t care”. This message spreads like Kudzu in Georgia – except it is easy to prevent. These days there is no excuse for serial bad meetings – occasionally with quick recovery is normal; three in a row usually means doom. Remember: “Actions speak louder than words.” You must put thought and effort into making meetings effective. People in a room with coffee and donuts doesn’t make a business meeting, and it sure doesn’t communicate credibility.
On the subject of actions that speak louder than words, one action that is indispensible but drives a lot of passions and is volatile if not done well, is insisting on following the safety rules. I avoid the words enforcement and discipline here, because they carry so much baggage. You don’t need to resort to disciplinary action except when all else fails. However, people usually want to work in a just culture. I have heard numerous times from line employees, in cultures where “disciplinary action” is extremely incendiary, that they strongly resent it when they follow all the rules, but see others flaunt them without consequence.
Enforcement is a topic for much more in-depth consideration, but what stronger statement of commitment and caring is there than insisting on following safety rules? Who wants confrontation? There may be hard feelings, in many organizations the effort is procedurally or bureaucratically undercut and it may be much easier to just turn a blind eye. But at best, the message communicated is “I don’t really care about people’s safety – not all of them anyway – or not compared to getting the job done.” It seems obvious that it needs to be done consistently and fairly, even if later the effort is undercut by the bureaucracy, but it will be extremely challenging if the message “we care unless it’s too much trouble” and “we allow double standards” infects your safety culture. The majority will recognize the right thing is being done.
Frequent
Effective meetings don’t have to take over your business, but effective communication has to be part of its fabric. Think about the problem statement. You want every person to ask themselves “what’s the safe way to do this?” before they start every task and “what else needs to be done to make the job safer?” – all the time. Is it reasonable to believe this can be accomplished with occasional reminders? Any effective communications campaign must include planning for how to keep the message fresh. When up against overwhelming odds (90% production / maybe 10% safety – or insert your own numbers, but you know it’s not the inverse) you need every bit of the people’s available attention to get the belief ingrained. A sign at the gate, a few minutes at the start of a “real” meeting, an occasional blurb in the company newspaper, won’t do it. One thing this means is the supervisors need to be very involved. My immediate boss drives my priorities. If his message to me is “git-r-done”, leaving the safety, not only in my control, but at my discretion, then my motivation can become very simplistic. That is:
- he doesn’t talk about safety;
- “git-r-done” can’t be any clearer;
- if I have to choose between doing something the safe way even if it means not gitt’n-r-done and taking that safety shortcut where I know “it won’t get me” and I will git-r-done, that’s an easy call. Heck I might even get a pat on the back for gitt’n-r-done and doing it safely! (assuming it didn’t get me). He won’t know about the shortcuts unless I have to report an injury.
Repetitive
I would like my wife to believe I love her. I’m sure I told her that many years ago and it’s probably documented somewhere. If I were to rely on that (perfectly logical!) belief, I’m pretty sure I have had to write that in the past tense. Remember: “The strong image is the image believed”. She’s no dummy. She doesn’t have memory problems. Neither are your company’s people. It is just positive reinforcement. Perhaps in the beginning of developing your healthy safety culture, it is what you want people to believe. But assuming you are working on all the other aspects of your safety culture, over some time, it will become what they believe.
Sound like selling soap? True, advertisers certainly are repetitive (because it works), but reframe it to something you passionately believe in. Do you tell people about it every chance you get? Does your business have any problem with repeating (a lot) that you need to be more efficient, cut cycle time, improve quality? Here’s one to repeat as often as possible: “I care about your safety” or “nothing we do is worth you getting hurt!”
All this assumes of course, you are working the rest of your culture. Here’s a message for you as a leader: you can’t choose to have a culture or not; you can only choose whether you want it to be healthy.
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