As a safety speaker or safety professional most of our interactions in the field of safety are about persuasion. We need to persuade employees to embrace the latest techniques and equipment and policies, which will help them stay safe. We must persuade managers from the first level all the way to the CEO to understand their important role in supporting and maintaining a safe workplace. The list could go on and on. Another way of thinking of what we do is to think of it as selling or marketing. Selling is the interaction between you and an individual or group that causes them to “buy” what you are selling. Consider reading articles on the internet which teach sales techniques. I encourage safety speakers to be experts in persuasion, motivation, sales and marketing.

Have You Ever Thought of Yourself as a Salesperson or Marketer?

Marketing is about keeping your brand or product in front of the people in the marketplace. Keeping safety, personal protective equipment, safe driving, safety on the job, and safety off the job are things you want people to be constantly aware of.

More and more corporate and organizational leaders are committed to keeping the workplace safe. One of their challenges is they don’t always know what you need to improve safety performance; more equipment, more training, more safety team members, or bringing in a great safety speaker like John Drebinger 🙂 From your perspective, these are investments in better safety performance; to your management, they are costs or expenses. Many corporate leaders divide what their company spends into two categories, expenses and profit generators. When they spend money on the sales and marketing department they expect a certain return on the dollar. They see those expenditures as revenue-generating or profit. Everything else from the maintenance of your physical plant to the support staff are expenses. For most managers, safety is seen as an expense.

We need to think like a manager and see that safety is a profit-generating venture in addition to being the right way to care about employees and their families.

Do You Save Your Company Money or Do You Make Money?

As a safety speaker, I hear over and over again from safety people they “saved the company money last year.” While this may be true, there is a more appropriate way to state the facts. Remember, communication must be designed with the listener or the audience in mind. When you are talking to the corporate leadership about safety performance, remember what is important to them. Corporate leaders are responsible to produce profits. They manage production and sales in order to maximize the profits their owners or shareholders realize.

Safety professionals have made a mistake for years in how they talk to the leadership of a company about safety performance and its effect on corporate profits. Now, since we know they are focused on profits, it becomes clear that is the language we need to use when discussing the safety budget.

People and leaders get much more excited about “making” money than about “saving” money. In fact, we are not great savers in this country. If you have ever been to Las Vegas, Nevada, you have seen clear evidence of this. The giant billboards on the Strip scream out how much you will WIN! They know people will be emotionally persuaded by this approach. Yes, it is true there are some signs touting a cheap buffet but they aren’t the high priced signs because they know people want to make money not just save it. Safety speakers and safety team members must always remind management that we generate profit for a company in a profound way.

Your company leadership needs to hear how much profit the safety team generated last year. Remember, if something isn’t an expense, it is profit. You are either creating profit or you are a part of the cost of doing business, an expense that can be cut or eliminated.

No one ever wants to weaken or eliminate the profit-generating element of any company. Create the image of being one of the profit centers of your company and you will have a larger budget to invest in protecting your workers.