Convincing Employees of New Safety Culture/Program: Part 1

I received the following question recently:  "We revamped our safety program nearly a year ago and are trying to make over our company culture to one that values and embraces safety.  We’ve added technology to make reporting of near misses and incidences quick and easy; have bi-monthly safety meetings; send out bi-monthly emails on safety & wellness and hold company-wide safety phone calls with our executives taking turns doing the call.  Despite all of this we just don’t seem to be making headway with our employees and their safety practices and perception that safety does truly matter.  Any advice?"  Below was my reply:

First of all, congratulations are recognizing the need to make safety a priority for your company.  Although you did not say it directly, I assume that prior to this revamping, safety was not a priority for your company.  If this was the case, then changing culture, attitudes and perceptions does not happen overnight and it can easily take more than a year. 

Whether it’s implementing new safety programs or rolling out other programs or technology, getting employees to adopt and accept the new practices as part of their work is always a challenge.  I can’t tell you how many times I’ve heard something like this from management:  “We’ve spent an awful lot of time and money on this program (technology, system, machine…), but I still see people working the old way.”  The result is often a widely deployed program that no one actually does effectively.  Why does this happen?

When these programs are introduced, organizations too often focus only on implementation/deployment and not adoption. It’s remarkable how commonplace it is for leaders to lose sight of the true ROI of their investments: collaboration among actively engaged employees, smarter decision making, increased sharing of best practices and, over time, sustained behavior change.

There are 3 related problems to most program/culture roll outs.  First, the leaders too often take a limited view and measure success on deployment metrics like announcements made, training completed, etc.  They consider adoption someone else’s job, but all too often no one is made accountable for it.  Second, the person(s) promoting the new program often oversell or are overly optimistic on the time table and outcomes the new program will achieve.  The one thing I tell leaders over and over is that “day 1 is easy, it’s day 2 through infinity that you need to worry about.”  And finally, the bottom line:  employee adoption programs cost time and money.  Nothing happens overnight and nothing happens without much work and effort of “program champions” and company leaders to make it so. 

The real return on safety transformation comes from embedding new work practices into the processes, work flows, and ultimately the culture of organizations. But even in cases where the value of adoption is understood, companies are faced with limited budgets and focus on the most tangible part first –deploying the new processes of the program. Adoption is left for later, and often “later” never comes.

This drives negativism that can spread through the organization. Employees naturally are either resistant, don’t see the value or skeptical of new programs and fail to engage in the program. Then what happens:  the new program is itself is blamed for the failure. Cynicism sets in. Every new program attempted down the road gets negatively scrutinized and the whole transformation down.

When you have a great “day 2 process”, the benefits become obvious. Sometimes adopting a new program can even become an irreversible movement. Has your CEO stated plain as day “We have started a ‘safety movement’ that affects all aspects of our company and requires all of our people to be engaged in the program. We will only succeed together.”  If not, that’s a program failure right there.

Safety as a value has to be led. So what do you need to do?  Stayed tuned for Part 2.