Picture this scenario, you are the Safety Manager sitting at a conference room table with several other people and the conversation goes something like this…
Operations Manager: "I'm working eight people short between day and evening shift, I need more people!" Human Resources Director: "Turnover is 28%, we can't get enough qualified people!" Finance Director: "We are paying too much in overtime, we are well over budget for the quarter. We need to cut back on overtime!"
And the CEO receives a text message reminding her that she is overdue on her business conduct policy training just as the door swings open and the Communications Director storms into the room announcing that a story is about to break on Action 5 News at 6:00 "that a major competitor is about to move into our backyard."
OK, that's a bit over the top, but I suspect that sounds familiar? Safety can be a tough sell to leadership in any situation. If everything goes right, nothing happens immediately. No one gets hurt. Profits don't go up, costs don't go down, inventory doesn't turn over any quicker, etc. There are many reasons that upper management may not be engaged, but often they feel satisfied with the current performance and any problems will get handled on the floor. Handling usually means disciplinary action. Fire the perpetrator and the problem is easily fixed.
In addition, their schedules are jam-packed and they often must make high level, high impact decisions with little time to consider alternatives. And you are just one of several streams of people, information and problems hitting the leader at one time.
In general, safety is not seen as sexy, it is something to be tolerated, endured. It's a set of procedures to be followed. If everyone would just follow procedures we wouldn't have a safety problem.
So, how do you make safety important to leadership? How do you communicate and influence leadership? How do you "sell" safety to leadership? You can have the best plan, but if you can't communicate the benefits or the impact of your plan to the leaders who make decisions, if you can't sell leaders in a convincing way on safety, your plan will simply sit on a shelf.
