Safety Speaker Insights – Caring and Productivity

Safety Speaker Insight – Do They Know You Care?

As a safety speaker I am often asked to motivate supervisors and leaders to adopt safety as a value.

The essence of motivation is to have a big enough reason to take action. When you want to motivate others you must give them a good reason to do or believe that which you want them to believe.

Some leaders have learned the hard way how important safety is to them. They have had someone who works for them sustain a serious injury. They never want that to happen again because after the dust settles they will realize there were several things they could have done personally which would have prevented the injury. While I do mention this to new leaders or supervisors I don’t consider it the best motivation for making safety a value. I prefer creating motivational reasons which are positive.

The problem with stories of injuries or lives lost, damaged, or family suffering don’t have the long lasting impact that changes personal values and behavior. The reason why negative motivation or warnings fail is deep down people don’t believe it will happen to them or they are better than the person telling about their injury. Sure they can hear someone tell how an injury changed their life but it’s still someone else and not them. The belief that bad things will happen only to others may be a fundamental part of human nature.

Rather than trying to overcome the, “it won’t happen to me,” mindset, I prefer to focus on positive reasons why you and I and others would want to follow a safety procedure and avoid shortcuts.

Every manager would like their operation to be the most productive. One way to do this is to truly care about the people who work for you.

Production and Lighting

As a safety speaker I am always reading. I found a study was conducted years ago called the Hawthorne Study. It was done to prove that improving lighting in a factory would result in higher production. Current production was measured and then the lighting was improved and made brighter. The result hoped for by the lightbulb company doing the research was that production would increase with the brighter workplace. That was the first result, after the workplace was brighter production increased. Now they had to prove it further. The next step was they dimmed the lighting expecting production to go down. To their surprise production increased even higher. Once again the lights were turned up and production continued to increase.

What Was Happening

There seemed to be no correlation with brighter lights and production but something was happening. Employees were interviewed and it was discovered they had the belief that the changes in lighting was an indication that management was trying to improve their workplace and conditions. They perceived this as caring. When employees believed their managers cared about them they worked more productively. When the lights dimmed they thought they were just fine tuning for the best conditions for the employees.

The study ultimately showed what you and I probably instinctively knew, that people will do more and work harder for people who care about them as opposed to someone who doesn’t care.

Safety Shows You Care

Safety gives managers a great opportunity to show they care. Perhaps the best way to show this is to take safety home with them. When you talk about safety off the job it is perceived as caring. While you may only be concerned about safety on the job because it costs the company money when someone is injured, talking about safety off the job shows you care about the overall health of your employees.

Off The Job Safety Ideas

Here are some ways I have seen clients help people work safely off the job. As a safety speaker I know how important it is that we instill safety as a 24 hour a day behavior.

Provide free safety equipment such as safety glasses, hearing protection, hardhats, gloves and other low cost items. One of my construction clients did something smart. They put together safety equipment which could be checked out and returned. These included the more expensive PPE such as respirators. The smart part of this was that someone wouldn’t take PPE out of the workplace and forget to bring it back. Also this kept the site PPE in better condition.

I remember one office where I spoke the meeting began with everyone getting a pair of safety glasses. Not one job in that office required safety glasses so the message was clear, we care about your eyes.

Have fun thinking of ways you can help people with safety off the job to let them know you care.

Solutions For Your Safety Challenges
When you need solutions for your safety challenges give Diane Weiss a call at 209-745-9419 and bring John to your site to discover injury preventing solutions. You can email her at diane@drebinger.com
Until next week,
I’ll be, “Watching Out For Everyone’s Safety™”
John
© 2017 John Drebinger Presentations
Permission to use granted when credited and contact information included. www.drebinger.com +1 209.745.9419