Are you frustrated that others aren't as passionate about safety as you? Discover the ways to motivate others. Learn how to incorporate fun and great communication skills into all your safety messages. Find out how to raise the expectations, vision, and passion of your workforce, making them safer and more productive. John brings the ASSE a new presentation each year. Don't miss out on what you can learn this year.
As with every year, I look forward to sharing with you and our colleagues the latest insights regarding safety communication I have come up with since we last met. If you have a chance to read this prior to the PDC, be sure to come by and say hello. In addition to these insights, I thought I would dedicate these proceedings to the subject that motivates each of us to be successful in communicating safety, passion.
To begin with, let's look at the role emotion and logic play in motivating people to work safely. How often have you ever thought about whether emotion or logic is more motivational to your audience? It turns out that even for engineers, mathematicians, and scientists, etc. emotion drive actions over logic. One of the best tests of this is to study where your company and the other companies around the country spend their advertising and marketing dollars. Advertising is emotional in nature; it is where all the dollars are spent. Why? People have studied what drives human behavior and they are looking to get results. I know that sometimes this flies in the face of what we may believe or would like the world to be but it is important to know your audience and what works best with them. As safety professionals, we constantly remind people that wisdom is learning from other people's experiences. We need to learn from other professionals' experience what motivates people and emotion is it. Marketing, sales, and political professionals all know that emotion will drive actions so that is where they spend their time and money. I wonder how much more effective we would be if we followed their lead and looked for the emotional motivators for our employees.
How many of your safety talks involve an emotional element? The more emotion you add, the more successful you will be in getting the desired behavior and result. Remember, all communication is about your audience so you need to find the element that is emotional to them. For me, safety is all about getting parents home safe to their children. In my case, that is because I have worked with youth since I started in the Boy Scouts of America 46 years ago. For you, it might be something else. For your employees, entirely another item, such as being able to participate in sports or their favorite recreation might do it. Ask yourself, "What would motivate them?"
For me, all communication is enhanced and driven by passion.
