Safety Speaker Insight – Is Your Focus Incidents or Best Practices?

The Best Safety Speaker Will Focus on Best Practices

As a safety speaker I will be discussing issues over the next few weeks regarding how we approach achieving success in the field of safety. I have been to many safety meetings where a past incident is being discussed. Slides and reports are presented about injuries and property damage. I question the wisdom of this approach. In all my studies about motivation the clear approach is to focus on what you want to achieve (best practices) rather than what you want to avoid. Showing everyone the details of how an injury occurred is showing them how to be hurt. Our unconscious mind moves towards our predominate thought and focusing on an injury or incident moves us in that direction.

Analyze What Went Wrong And How To Prevent It

While it is vital for an incident analysis team to discover the causes of an incident so they can develop policies, procedures, personal protective equipment and engineering designs that would prevent an incident in the future. I am also in favor of being open and honest about what occurred. I believe the best approach is to publish the results of an analysis online so curious employees can check it. They must be assured a completely fair and thorough study has been done. The key is the creation of new ways to avoid the injury or incident in the future. The next step is to focus on those new policies and procedures.

A Better Approach

You can tell people that as a result of analyzing a previous incident new and improved methods are being introduced. Then cover the changes you are making and how they will make the job safer. Be sure to include the reasons why these new methods will improve safety performance. Without the why people tend to lack motivation to make a change.

Stories of Injuries Don’t Get The Results You Expect

The focus needs to be on the actions you want people to take instead of what you want them to avoid. That is one of the biggest difficulties of safety speakers who share how they were injured and how it has changed their life. Their focus is on the unsafe behavior, condition etc. In addition to incorrect focus, no matter how moving a presentation is everyone in any audience believes the same tragedy would not happen to them.

As an expert in motivation and a professional safety speaker, it scares me when safety teams listen to an emotionally moving presentation about an injury and its impact and believe that audience reaction equals a change in behavior. People can be brought to tears and empathize with the speaker but deep down they believe that given similar circumstances it wouldn’t happen to them.  Regardless of how powerful the speakers story is, people will insert an action, behavior, or thought that would prevent the same thing from happening to them. This audience response virtually negates the effect of the story.

Understanding this allows us to change the focus from the incident to any new or existing procedures which would prevent an injury in the future. This shifts the discussion from reactive to proactive because it deals in the world of what people can do and control.

If I can be of assistance to you in achieving your safety outcomes for this year please give us a call at 209-745-9419 today. 

Safety speaker John Drebinger