Safety Buy-in Starts with a Single Thought

By Kevin Burns

Most companies focus on business development opportunities. They hone and adjust their marketing messages to attract more revenue by getting more customers, making more sales, and upselling existing clients. Business doesn't develop until someone buys something, whether that something is a product, a service, an idea, or something else entirely. But in order for someone to buy, someone needs to sell.

Job seekers are selling themselves. Lawyers are selling their arguments to juries. Someone who is asking for a raise is selling their value and experience. Consultants and experts (sometimes self-proclaimed) are selling their expertise. And when companies try to get their employees to improve their safety performance, those companies are selling their way of doing things. Their goal is to get their internal customers -- that is, their employees -- to buy into safety.

When employees simply don't understand what exactly is expected of them, they may end up working at cross purposes. If they feel disengaged from or even hostile toward their own company, they might not want to give their all to an employer who doesn't seem to value them or their contributions. Internal marketing can mitigate these concerns, though, by helping employees make a powerful emotional connection to safety, which in turn makes them much less likely to undermine (either intentionally or unconsciously) safety practices and programs.

Every organization should have a vision for safety -- a unifying idea that employees can "live" in their day-to-day activities -- because when employees live that vision, they are much more likely to experience their own participation in safety in a way that's consistent with working toward the vision and goals of safety. When employees believe in the mission and buy into the plan to achieve that mission, they're more motivated to work harder, and their loyalty to the company increases.

An organization that doesn't understand internal marketing will struggle to unify its employees around a common safety theme. Many companies keep people informed about their safety strategies and directions. But very few organizations understand the need to convince employees why safety is necessary to achieve the employees' own goals.

What's more, the people who are charged with internal safety communications (such as the safety team and HR department) and even the frontline supervisors don't necessarily have the marketing skills to communicate safety goals successfully. Instead, they usually rely on PowerPoint slides, bar graphs, charts, and lots of talk about numbers. Those tools aren't designed to convince employees of the uniqueness of the company's safety strategy. They are best for telling people what the company is doing, not for selling them on an idea.

The first step toward achieving employee buy-in to the safety program is to get rid of distractions and to stop assaulting employees with superfluous numbers. Every good communications strategy must revolve around a single idea that becomes the foundation for how all communication is structured. This foundational statement needs to be seven words or fewer in length so it is memorable, actionable, and effective. An organization that can't boil down its safety message to a single, short phrase will struggle to achieve buy-in from its employees.


About the author:

Kevin Burns is the president and CEO of KevBurns Learning, where he works with smart, caring companies to energize safety culture, build teamwork, and get employee buy-in. He is the author of PeopleWork: The Human Touch in Workplace Safety and can be reached at kevin@kevburns.com.