Parents Influence With Unsafe Actions

Safety Attitude extends beyond the company walls and far beyond the 8-4 workday. Safety Attitude is what you need to help your people develop so that they can go home and stress the importance of a Safety Attitude amongst their family members.

I followed a car on the highway for about 20 miles last weekend. The car had originally passed me while a 30-something female driver was text messaging on her phone. Once past me, she pulled into the lane in front of me and drove the same speed as I was driving. I watched her SUV sway from side-to-side in the lane, occasionally hitting the shoulder or putting two wheels over the line. After witnessing this stupid behavior for some 20 miles, I pulled alongside (never exceeding the speed limit since in addition to side-to-side driving, her speed was erratic) and finally blew my horn while wagging my finger at her. She finally put her phone down because she knew what she was doing was wrong and she had been caught.

Yep, she's going to be a great mom - showing her children the unsafe way to drive. Any advice she gave to her children to the contrary would be hypocritical.

Please, please, please start an initiative at your workplace to educate your people about the dangers of texting while driving as well as the dangers of talking on the phone while driving. Teenagers don't normally use their phones for talking - unless they're driving. If they need to talk with someone so badly, encourage them to travel with a friend who can text for them. Do something to help the kids understand that they're flirting with disaster.

Suggest to your employees to check their kid's phones and to be diligent about matching up texting times with driving times and to take their phones and car privileges away if they break the rules. 

The last thing your workplace needs is to be attending the funeral of a co-worker whose child was tragically killed while texting or talking on the cell phone in the car.

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Kevin Burns - Corporate Safety Attitude/Culture Strategist
www.safety.kevburns.com
Toll Free 1-877-287-6711
Creator of the 90-Day System To Improve Safety Culture!

140 Character Safety Meeting

I keep hearing from Safety Supervisors how the new Gen Y workers seem to have a great distaste for safety manuals. And they should. They've never really had to read anything over 140 characters long in the last few years. Oh sure, there was that University thing, but other than that...

Gen Y is the interactive, YouTube-video, short-burst, short-attention-span, make-it-entertaining generation of workers. The old binders full of pages and dividers aren't going to do it for this group.

You have a problem: you need to get what's in those manuals into their heads. They have a problem: it's freakin' boring.

SAFETY ATTITUDE ADJUSTMENT: How about doing what they're doing? Use the technology they're already using to get them where they are. How about text-messaging (SMS) a safety regulation in under 140 characters? Or how about setting up a Twitter account for your safety regs and force them (as a condition of employment) to subscribe to your Twitter feeds. Set up a "hashtag" like #yourcompanysafety and get your Gen Y's to get on board.

Every time they check their cell phones for either text messages or Twitter, you will have placed at least one new safety regulation/tip and it will help them to develop that Attitude of Safety that they need to help get your company to Zero.

Sample ideas:
PPE check. Hat, boots, gloves, eyes, hearing, all good? Look around. Who isn't good? What can you do to fix it right now? (124 characters)
Stop. Look up and all around. There's a potential hazard somewhere. Are you going to ignore it or address it? You choose. (125 characters)
Toolbox meeting at 3pm today. Just inside front gate of site. John has new info on yesterday's near gas breach. (111 characters)

Safety Attitude is about doing what's necessary to make sure crews are safe. Do what you've got to do. And stop thinking about how you've always done it. That's not working anymore.

Try SMS Text Messaging For Gen Y Safety

Have you got a crew that includes a few green hands? How Baby Boomers learn and how Millenials (Gen Y) learn are completely different. Are you expecting your new hires under 25 to sit down and pour over the Safety Manual with the same enthusiasm that an older worker would?

Remember, Gen Y is the video game generation – where things have to be fast and exciting to keep their attention. A safety manual is not a riveting read. The one thing this generation does well is Text Messaging or SMS. So why not use that technology to get your safety messages through to them?

PowerPoint (aka Corporate Karaoke – that’s my trademarked term) is not a learning tool that appeals to Gen Y. But short bursts of information will get through to your younger workers. So why not set up a program of daily (or several times daily) Safety Text Messages of 145 characters or less?

Here are some samples of Text Messages you could send right now.

• “PPE check. Gloves? Hard hat? Glasses? Hearing? Got them?”
• “Stop. Look around. Find a hazard and fix it right now.”
• “Have you read the MSDS of everything you’re handling today?”
• “Got a question? Ask! Don’t prove you don’t know what you’re doing.”
• “What did you discuss at today’s tool-box meeting?”
• “What have you done to make “zero” a possibility today?”

You could also include specifics from your Safety Manual – things that are specific to the job and you can repeatedly address points that you really want to drive home.

SAFETY ATTITUDE ADJUSTMENT: Most young workers check their cell phones at break time. Why not have something worth saving their life waiting for them when they break? Sure, there is a cost to this program. But it’s far cheaper than the cost of bad publicity for your organization as the result of an incident. Keep all of your workers focused on the task at hand. Don’t expect the tool-box or tailgate meeting to be retained any longer than about an hour. Gen Y’s can be good workers and you can help them instill a Safety Attitude if you only figure out a way to speak to them in a way that they will listen.