Selling Safety to Your Employees - Part 1

As a business owner, you may be struggling with the role that safety should play in your day-to-day operations.  By “safety,” I am referring to proactive measures you take as a manager to reduce the possibility of your employees getting hurt or killed at work.  There is a spectrum of responses to that question, ranging from doing nothing to pushing for an overhaul of your company’s safety culture.  The fact that you are reading this article is an indicator that you want to change the way you’ve approached this question in the past, and you recognize that your biggest challenge could be getting your employees on side with the changes.

Experience tells us that safety is often a tough sell.  We should ask ourselves why this is so.  Aren’t the benefits of safe work practice self-evident?  For many of us, it seems as though the rewards aren’t a sufficiently compelling story.  We remain convinced that safety will cost us more than we gain, and thus we hesitate to disrupt the status quo.  Your employees are no different.  Their skepticism will often be founded on an assumption that safety only serves to slow them down and will never directly benefit them.

Time to do some soul-searching.  What was it that convinced you that changes need to be made in the way your company approaches safety?  It could very well be that your insurance carrier had a big influence on this decision, and if this is the case, there is no need to apologize.  The reality is that the majority of business professionals have decided to work safely because it is proven too costly to do otherwise.  Your employees will be no different.

To nourish the safety culture of your business, your employees must believe that they are better off when they choose to work safely.  You can enact rules and consequences that are intended to change their behavior, but what will they do if they think nobody's looking?  If the worker isn’t convinced that they will benefit from following the rules, they are just as likely to break them when they are left on their own.  So how do you convince the skeptics that safety does, indeed, pay off?  This can be accomplished by engaging, equipping, and partnering with your employees on how safety is implemented in your business.

Engage

The first step is to engage your employees by providing them with relevant safety information.  Start with this critical piece of data - 80% of workplace injuries are caused by unsafe acts, as opposed to unsafe conditions.  While some of these injuries take place due to ignorance (perhaps a lack of training), the majority happen when workers who know better, choose to act in an unsafe manner.  This fact sets the tone of the conversation, because it establishes the role that personal responsibility plays in workplace safety.

I would suggest that an employee is in business the same way as their employer.  Both parties are trying to maximize their revenues and minimize their expenses.  Having said that, the reason that many workers don’t take safety seriously is because they have not taken into account what an injury could cost them.  These costs go far beyond the financial, and will  impact the worker in ways they never imagined.

Everyone needs to understand that they won’t be the only one affected if they get injured. There is a “rogue wave” of consequences that will engulf their family, friends, and coworkers if they get hurt at work.  These aftereffects (known as indirect costs) can far exceed the financial costs of an injury.  For more information on this point, see my “True Costs of a Work-Related Injury” article on the searchautoparts.com website.

Ask your employees this question: why are you willing to put yourself at risk to get your job done?  Each individual in your organization should spend time struggling with this personal matter.  Engagement on this subject can only lead to good things, because it will put everyone on the road to greater awareness of their own thinking when they make safety decisions. 

To view the remainder of this article, see “Selling Safety to Your Employees - Part 2”

For more information on these and other ideas regarding workplace safety, go to www.tuningintosafety.com. Tuning In to Safety is a book written for all employees in an organization, and is available on Amazon in paperback, eBook, and audiobook formats.