*** Safety Attitude's New Reality

Safety has become a big issue these days with not only the manufacturing, construction and heavy industry sectors, but also with a growing number of office-bound organizations. Safety is an issue that I take seriously. After all, I believe that safety is an Attitude – in the same way Leadership is an Attitude and Customer Service is an Attitude. Hey you can’t put on a hard hat, safety glasses and steel toes for an eight-hour workday and then go home and mow the lawn on your flip-flops. Safety is a concept your either own or simply tolerate. If you own it, safety is as important to you at home as it is at work. If you simply tolerate safety and safety procedures, then you’re a huge risk to the wellbeing of your co-workers. And somebody’s going to get hurt.

Now let me say that there are some people whose contribution to safety prevention I admire: accident victims who speak to schools, parents of children involved in accidents or injury who then take up the cause of making the world a safer place and finally, those who have lost a family member because of an accident and make it a life’s purpose to create a groundswell of change in laws and perception. These are all worthy causes and all commendable.

I’ve had several conversations this week with safety managers and safety conference organizers in preparation for several Safety Attitude Adjustments that I will be delivering. In past, many of these conferences have featured presentations from injured workers who now make their living on the speaking circuit warning people of the dangers of not being safe on the job. I think it’s commendable that people who have been injured on the job wouldn’t let their injury completely victimize them. Warning others of impending dangers on the job by witnessing the actual consequences of past mistakes (physical injury or dismemberment) can be a powerful message – for certain age-groups.

But here’s where I am becoming a little troubled. The labor market is changing. Baby Boomers are retiring and Gen Y’s are taking over. This is the same group (Gen Y’s) who have been raised on a steady diet of some of the world’s most violent video games – where dismemberment and blood-spurting graphics are used in delivering “entertainment.” Then there are the blood-spurting movies. Check out the video rental stores and count the number of horror/slasher films on the shelves. The new breed of worker is desensitizing to the concept of injury. To really drive home my point, look at the movies Jackass and Jackass II – films entirely about self-injury. And we sit at home and laugh.

The truth is that the message of “don’t do what I did” doesn’t hold the same punch that it used to. That message may have been very successful with Boomers but Gen Y thinks differently.

Think about this for a moment: an injured worker who may have been paid eighteen dollars an hour for doing a labor job now collects thousands of dollars per hour for simply telling the story of how he or she got injured. That is definitely sending the wrong message. The message you end up sending is that if you do the job safely you get eighteen bucks an hour but if you get injured you can tell your story for thousands. That message may actually be helping to glorify injury, not prevent it. I’m going to step out on limb here (with a tether and harness of course) and suggest that this is not the message you want your people to take away if you want to keep them safe.

You wouldn’t pay money to address your own organization’s business growth from someone who consistently went bankrupt. You wouldn’t pay money to learn leadership from a CEO who was just fired for being a tyrant. And you sure wouldn’t pay money to get the advice of a financial planner whose own investment portfolio is well below what your goal is. So with that thinking, why would you pay money to hear a safety message from someone who didn’t do it correctly on the job?

I would gladly be willing to listen to a former injured worker talk to me about how they overcame the loss of a limb and loss of a livelihood and turned their life around – how they managed to overcome adversity and find success regardless of their circumstances. That, I think, would be a great message. But don’t preach to me about finances if you’re broke. Don’t preach to me about leadership if no one wants you to lead their organizations. Don’t preach to me about how to grow a business if your history is primarily comprised of failures in business. And don’t expect me to buy into your safety strategy if it didn’t work for you. You need to start paying more attention to the message you’re sending your people.

Attitude Adjustment: Safety managers had better clue in to this and quickly. If you’re a safety manager, OH&S supervisor, department head or even CEO, take a look at your safety statistics. Are you finding the highest number of reportable or lost-time incidents with your younger workers? Then that should be a clue that your old way of training your people in the attitude of safety just isn’t working like it used to. Don’t blame the work ethic of Gen Y. If you want to improve your safety performance in your new workers, you have got to help change their attitudes on safety. And you had better be able to speak their language if you ever want to get through to them.