Face to Face Safety

When you want to influence someone the best way to do it is face-to-face. When you want to build trust and loyalty with your workers, make time to talk with them.  Face-to- Face is the right way to build a safety culture. 

Behavior based safety is arguably one of the best ways to change poor safety habits into good ones.  It has been successful because it is done face to face.  Cultures with exceptional safety cultures have management that often visits with their employees about safety.  Great leaders want employees to know safety is important to management. They want to make it clear to them that they never want to put safety at risk in some attempt to drive performance.  If good performance is to be sustainable it must be done with an eye on zero accidents.

When management doesn’t want to engage their employees face-to-face about safety they send the message that “Safety Isn’t Important.”  Great safety cultures begin when you give a consistent and continuous message about the importance of safety.  Do it early and often.

Here are some examples of how to reinforce your safety message:

·       Begin new hire orientation with your explanation of your safety culture. 

·       All meetings began with safety as the first item on the agenda.

·       Regardless of the department, start every meeting with a review of safety efforts and progress. 

·       Start all training, employee appraisals and introduction of projects with a talk on safety.

·       Schedule time for supervisors, managers, etc. to be in the field or on the job and perform face-to-face safety talks

The Gallup organization and other poll groups have questioned employees about how they want to receive information at work and what their preference is for communication.

Face-to-face is always the number one answer.

Employees know management only invests time on what’s important. If their immediate boss doesn't regularly set aside time to talk safety, it's hard not to get the impression that safety doesn't matter to them.

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