Hello and Welcome to this week’s edition of Safety Pro Weekly.

I’ve seen it many times before.

A new safety professional walks into an organization and their first instinct is to change everything, preferably back to the way things were done at their previous employer.

“Back at ABC company we used to do this …” is how they start every conversation.

New policies, new procedures, new checklists, a (not so subtle) tweak to the management system …

And all this happens long before they’ve taken the time to truly understand what the company is already doing and why.

Their goals and expectations are lofty and well intentioned. Problem is, in the rush to prove their worth, these new leaders leave everyone else behind.

Before long everyone around them is confused, exhausted and no safer than before.

Why this Matters

The first 90 days are absolutely crucial for a new safety leader.

This is where they set the tone for long-term effectiveness. Within 90 days, they either build momentum or completely lose credibility and flame out.

And frankly, this is where many flame out.

The critical thing to understand as a new safety leader is that influence, not enforcement, is what drives real change.

By walking into a new situation, guns blazing, ready to show the world what they’re made of, they quickly alienate established employees who are used to doing things a different way.

Change can be beneficial, but it’s crucial that you manage the pace of change, especially in a new setting.

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The Mistakes

There are 3 key mistakes that new safety professionals often make in a new setting are:

• Trying to “fix everything” too quickly. The vibe they give off is, “Everything is wrong, this company is in deep trouble.”

• Over-reliance on policies, procedures, and enforcement. Many safety pros can quote chapter and verse of even the most obscure regulations, but fail to understand the work being done or the pressures, stakeholders and culture of the business.

• Focusing on systems before understanding people. Your job is to keep people safe, and to do that, you need to understand why they do what they do. Production pressures, shift changes, and personal issues (to name a few) all impact people’s behaviour. Get to know your fellow employees as people and your job becomes so much easier.

Why It Happens

We all come into a new job wanting to do well. As safety professionals, we care and we know the importance of doing things right. So why do so many make these mistakes? It’s a combination of factors:

• Pressure to prove value quickly. It’s quite normal to want to prove your worth, and you will. Just be careful of the pace at which you try to change things.

• Misunderstanding of the safety role. Many safety professionals still feel that their role is to be an enforcer of rules, when they should be influencing behaviour. Enforcing rules is the supervisor’s responsibility. You are there to coach and advise.

• Lack of a clear onboarding strategy for safety leaders. There is so much to learn when you start a new role, the first months are always a huge challenge. Without a clear plan for how to proceed, it’s easy to get lost in the day to day and lose your effectiveness.

What Great Safety Leaders Actually Do

Here’s a realistic plan to get you through the first 90 days.

1. Listen Before You Act

Spend time with workers, supervisors, and managers. Ask: “What makes your job harder or riskier than it needs to be?”

Build trust before introducing change. The greater trust you establish, the easier it will be to create the change you want to make.

2. Identify the Real Influencers

The best leaders in a company don’t always show up on the org chart. For example, a machine operator with 20 years of experience who knows the equipment inside out, trains new hires informally and who employees tend to go to before their supervisor often has more influence on worker behaviour than the company President.

Informal leaders shape behaviour more than policies.

These individuals are key. Build relationships with them early and they can be a tremendous resource.

3. Focus on One Visible Win Early On, then Build on It.

Select one quick, meaningful improvement (not paperwork) that you can make in the workplace. For example, fix one recurring hazard or simplify a process or report form. Establishing one big win early on allows you to build credibility and momentum for future changes.

4. Activate Supervisors Early

Front line supervisors are the most important people in any business. Establish those relationships early and make sure you are on the same page in terms of expectations. Provide simple tools (checklists, conversation prompts) or help them simplify a process. Remember, supervisors are constantly pressed for time. Make their life easier in some small way and you’ll build an important ally.

5. Observe Work as It Actually Happens

Go to the floor, job sites, real environments. Compare “work as imagined” vs “work as done.” Often there’s a big difference. Look to identify system gaps, not just worker behaviour. You can’t make a job safe until you know how it’s (actually) being done.

6. Avoid the Compliance Trap

Don’t start with policies and audits. Everybody hates those, and they rarely change behaviour. Use compliance as a foundation, not the strategy. Instead, focus on behaviour, decisions, and leadership actions. This is where you’ll get the biggest bang for your buck in terms of accident prevention.

7. Communicate Early and Often

Share what you’re seeing and learning with workers and management. You’ll need both on your side if you are to succeed. Reinforce that safety is a shared responsibility and everyone’s contribution is important. Position yourself as a partner, not a police officer.

The more you build trust and communication, the more likely people will share with you how the work is really being done and what the real challenges are.

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The Takeaway

This week, schedule 3–5 conversations with frontline workers or supervisors. Ask one question: “What’s the hardest part of doing this job safely?”

Use this info to create a small win you can share with workers and management alike. Each small win builds your credibility, trust and influence within the organization. Actions like these build the foundation you need to accomplish what you want to do in your organization.

That’s it for this week.

I’d love to hear what steps you’re taking to succeed in your workplace. Let me know in the comments.

Cheers,

Dan.

Hello and welcome to this week’s edition of Safety Pro Weekly.

Most organizations say they care about safety. And they do, but many times they don’t know what it means to have an effective and robust safety program.

Sure, they have policies, procedures, training records. They may even have regular safety meetings. But somehow, they still aren’t getting the results that they want. No matter what new system or program they try, underneath the surface, something still isn’t working.

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Most often the signs are there if you know where to look:

• Supervisors nod in agreement but don’t follow through.

• Toolbox talks feel flat, boring and repetitive.

• JHSC meetings check the boxes but rarely spark real discussion.

• Workers comply if they have to, but they’re going through the motions. The minute you walk away, it’s right back to the way they were doing things before.

And this gap between compliance and participation is the engagement problem no one talks about.

The Myth: If We Just Communicate More, Engagement Will Improve

Many safety professionals respond to low engagement by increasing communication. They respond by adding volume:

• More reminders to workers and supervisors.

• More emails to management.

• More policies, (as if anyone read the last batch).

• More training (that costs time and money and still doesn’t stick).

It’s as if they’re trying to ram as much information as possible down worker’s throats.

But communication volume does not equal ownership. You can (and probably have) tried to talk things through with workers and management until you’re blue in the face.

We’ve found out the hard way that it rarely works. Engagement isn’t created by pushing more information.

Engagement is created when people feel responsible for outcomes.

To do that, you need to make safety personally relevant to your audience. And the message has to be targeted for the group you’re trying to influence.

Here are 5 ways you can get people to buy in:

1. Make it Relevant

Most safety programs are communicated in an abstract way. You’ll hear a lot of discussion about things like:

• Zero harm.

• Target TRIR.

• Corporate commitment (blah, blah, blah).

If your audience can’t understand what that means for them, whether workers, supervisors or senior management, the message doesn’t feel personal and is easily ignored.

Instead, shift the framing of your message to include language such as:

• “How does this task affect you? Let me explain …”

• “Here’s how this will make your job easier and safer.”

• “Here’s a scenario where someone almost got hurt last week.”

• For management, “Here’s the financial impact of a lost time injury vs. the cost to reliably prevent it.”

2. Give Supervisors Real Accountability.

Safety engagement suffers when it’s the safety professional’s responsibility to enforce safety. The safety pro can’t be there on the job site all the time like the supervisor can and often doesn’t have the authority to enforce safe behaviour. The safety department is there to act as a resource and a coaching and planning role, not as an enforcer. They simply are not able to do that on a consistent basis given the role.

If supervisors are the ones to lead safety talks, follow up on hazards, close corrective actions and address unsafe behaviour, workers begin to see safety as operational rather than an optional add-on program to be disregarded whenever convenient.

3. Let Workers Influence Decisions.

People support what they help to create.

When workers see that their input has an impact, they will be so much more likely to buy in. If they feel like they have some control over safety their situation, they’ll start to contribute more consistently and reliably.

Some ideas to try:

• Involve worker in risk assessments.

• Have crews give input on procedures.

• Do a pilot test on control measures before rolling out a plan that maybe sounds great in theory but doesn’t hold up in practice.

• Publicly close the loop on safety related suggestions and thank workers for their ideas, whether they are implemented or not.

Nothing kills worker engagement faster than, “Thanks for the feedback,” … and then nothing happens.

4. Make it Safe to Speak Up.

When a worker comes to you with a safety concern, your initial reaction is critical.

If your first reaction is an eye roll, an argument or finding a way to make them feel like the problem, you immediately kill any hope of meaningful dialogue.

Make it safe for people to speak up, and they will begin to feel responsible for the outcome.

5. Tie Safety to Professional Identity

People protect what gives them a sense of pride.

Don’t just tell workers to “Follow the rules.” (And keep in mind that we do this in many different ways, both spoken and unspoken).

Instead, shift the language to something like, “Professionals work this way.”

Frame safety as a sign of competence:

• “Skilled tradespeople design a clean and organized workspace.”

• “Good operators always inspect equipment before using it.”

• “Strong teams don’t tolerate unsafe work.”

When safety becomes part of your team’s identity, they take responsibility without external enforcement.

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The core message is that people engage with safety when they have:

• Clarity. The message is clear, direct and personalized.

• Accountability. Give people a sense of responsibility and ownership.

• Control. Some ability to influence the outcome.

• Influence. Workers know the job. Give them a chance to contribute ideas to how things can be done safely.

• Pride. Personal responsibility goes a long way, especially when the safety professional or supervisor is not around to direct behaviour.

Compliance is often surface level and performative. Engagement, true engagement, is what keeps people safe. And when you understand the difference, you become far more than a compliance manager, you become a driver of real change in your organization.

That’s it for this week, let me know in the comments how you build engagement in your organization.

See you next week,

Cheers,

Dan.

Hello and welcome to this week’s edition of Safety Pro Weekly.

It’s a situation most of us have faced at one time or another. The Ops manager expects you to be the rule enforcer, that your primary function in safety is to catch people doing something wrong. In their mind, your job is to be on the shop floor all day pointing out everyone’s mistakes.

You’re expected to be the “Safety Cop’, responsible for policing workers, enforcing rules, and correcting unsafe behaviors. This is, of course, incorrect, and worse, it damages workplace safety culture in insidious ways.

Now, of course, as a safety professional, if you see a worker doing something that could lead to an incident, you should absolutely call it out. But this should be the exception rather than the rule.

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The truth is, the Occupational Health and Safety Act clearly states that front line supervisors are the party responsible for enforcing safety and providing a safe working environment for their employees.

And there’s a very good reason for that.

Let’s look at a couple of scenarios to illustrate this point:

Example 1

You walk the shop floor on your daily rounds. You see a worker without eye protection and remind them. They put their glasses back on. Seems simple enough, but there’s a subtle psychology at play when this happens.

The worker learns: “I need glasses when the safety guy is around.”

The supervisor learns: “Safety handles PPE.”

Everyone involved comes think of the Safety Department as an external policing mechanism, rather than a coaching and hazard prevention resource. However, when the supervisor stops the job and says, “We don’t start work like this. Get your glasses.” The worker learns, “This is how our crew works, this is the expectation for how I do my job.” Doing it right becomes the expectation, not a separate rule to be discarded whenever you can get away with it.

Example 2

As the safety pro doing a hazard assessment, you find a machine guard removed. You escalate. You document. You remind.

The worker’s perception becomes: “This safety department rule is slowing me down.”

The supervisor’s view is: “Safety is being difficult again.”

But when the supervisor says, “Put the guard back. We don’t bypass equipment on my shift.” Now it’s no longer a safety rule, it’s a production rule.

Do you see the difference in culture?

The Unintended Culture Shift

When the safety professional enforces rules as their regular job over the long term, you unintentionally create a host of undesirable circumstances:

• Supervisors who abdicate responsibility. Preventing risk to workers becomes the safety department’s problem.

• Workers who perform safety for appearances. The safety manager isn’t on the shop floor all the time like the supervisor, so it becomes a game of avoiding getting caught.

• A culture where safety is separate from operations, rather than part of the way things are done.

• Unrealistic expectations for senior management, supervisors and workers. Everyone has their own expectations of what safety should be and how it should be run. But without training or knowledge of the legislation, those expectations are misinformed. The regulations make it clear that supervisors are the ones charged with enforcing safe behaviour in the workplace.

• Constant frustration for the safety professional. You’re caught between management and workers and not really trusted or accepted by either. You know what needs to be done, but convincing others is a perpetual pain point.

The Role You Should Actually Be Playing: Advisor and Influencer

Instead, I recommend a different approach.

The safety professional’s role is to serve as an advisor and influencer.

Someone who has the training and experience to spot risk in the workplace and advise solutions. Someone who can be seen as a neutral party between workers and management. A coach who can guide workers and management without being beholden to either one.

As an advisor, you become someone who can help leaders and workers avoid incidents, avoid paperwork, and avoid more serious consequences. You become someone they call for advice before there’s a problem. Workers begin to speak up about potential hazards instead of hiding them. Management starts to see you as a strategic partner rather than simply an administrator.

What This Looks Like in Practice

With a more positive culture shift, the safety professional shifts into a role the regulators initially envisioned.

The true role of the safety manager is to:

• Coach supervisors instead of correcting workers. Instead of, “Don’t do this, it’s against the rules,” the message is, “Here’s why this is risky and here’s how to do it safely.”

• Help management understand risk and liability. You advise leadership on the hazards in the workplace and become part of the solution.

• Ask questions instead of issuing directives. Understanding the why is the first step in fixing the problem. When you lead with a directive, you miss an opportunity for deeper understanding.

• Participate in planning rather than reacting to incidents. So many safety professionals are stuck simply reacting to incidents after the fact. Instead, as a trusted advisor, you plan ways to prevent accidents before they happen.

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That’s it for this week. I hope I’ve given you some ideas to consider and begin to execute in your workplace.

Let me know in the comments how you’ve implemented some of these ideas in your business.

Cheers,

Dan.

Hello and welcome to this week’s edition of Safety Pro Weekly. I hope you had a great holiday season.

Authenticity is hard to define, but easy to recognize. You know it when someone has it, and you feel it immediately when they don’t.

Early in our careers as safety professionals, many of us feel pressure to fit a certain mold. We assume there is a “right” way to show up in the role, and we try to live up to an image of what a safety professional should be. Over time, this can pull us away from our natural strengths and, ironically, undermine the very thing we need most: trust.

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Most safety professionals tend to drift toward one (or more) of these familiar roles.

The Expert

• Can quote regulations chapter and verse

• Relies heavily on legal or technical arguments

• Often comes from a culture that values documentation over influence

• May struggle to connect on an interpersonal level

The Enforcer

• Focuses heavily on rule compliance, especially minor infractions

• Has little interest in understanding why rules aren’t followed

• Views safety as a matter of right and wrong

• Often operates from a fear of losing authority

The Nice One

• Hesitates to speak up, even when something is clearly wrong

• Avoids confrontation at the expense of safety

• Looks the other way on “small” issues

• Feels caught between leadership expectations and frontline realities

The truth is, most of us have elements of all three. Each of these roles contains something useful, and none of them are inherently wrong.

The problem arises when we try to perform one of these roles instead of showing up as ourselves. When we lead from a place of inauthenticity, our message weakens. Trust erodes. Credibility suffers.

If you’re like most safety professionals, driven, conscientious, and hyper-responsible, it’s worth remembering this: no one expects perfection. What people do expect is honesty, consistency, and genuine care.

Authenticity doesn’t mean being casual or unprofessional. It means aligning what you say, what you believe, and how you act. When you do that, trust follows.

Here are four practical ways to build trust and credibility while bringing more of your authentic self into your safety work.

1. Understand the Work

You cannot make meaningful safety recommendations without truly understanding the work. Not at a surface level, but in detail, as it is actually performed.

That understanding only comes from spending time with the people who do the job every day.

• Observe the work. Ask questions. Listen more than you talk.

• Learn how the job is really done, not how it looks in a procedure.

• Use curiosity to build credibility. No one expects you to know everything, but they do expect you to care enough to learn.

When workers see that you are making an effort to understand their reality, trust begins to form.

2. Communicate for Your Audience

Front-line workers and senior leaders process information differently. If you want your message to land, you must adapt how you communicate.

With front-line workers:

• Use clear, practical, respectful language

• Focus on how the safe way can also become the easy way

With senior leaders:

• Speak in terms of risk, exposure, cost, and reputation

• Connect safety issues to business outcomes

Authentic communication is not about saying the same thing to everyone. It’s about translating risk in a way that makes sense to the listener.

3. Be Consistent

Consistency is one of the fastest ways to build (or lose) credibility.

Apply standards fairly across all roles. If PPE is required in an area, it applies to everyone: the CEO and the new hire alike.

Your message must also be consistent in public and in private. If you don’t believe in the rule or expectation you are enforcing, people will sense it immediately.

And if you truly don’t believe in it, change it.

4. Learn in Public

Nothing damages credibility faster than pretending to have all the answers.

Strong safety professionals are willing to admit uncertainty, ask for input, and learn alongside others. When you invite people into the problem-solving process, trust grows.

Paradoxically, people trust you more when you are honest about what you don’t know.

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Practical Takeaway

At the end of the day or week, ask yourself:

• Did I listen more than I talked?

• Did I understand the work before making recommendations?

• Did I translate risk appropriately for my audience?

• Did someone trust me with a real problem?

Safety work is built on trust and influence, not authority. Regardless of your title, credibility is earned through how you communicate and how clearly people can see that you care about what matters most: keeping workers safe.

That’s it for this week.

I also ghostwrite newsletter and social media content for professionals, owners, and founders who want to build their online presence and attract more opportunity. If that’s something you’re considering, message me and we’ll talk.

Safety Pro Weekly is published every Tuesday on LinkedIn and Substack.

Cheers,
Dan

Hello and welcome to this week’s edition of Safety Pro Weekly.

In my 14 years as a safety professional, I can’t tell you how many times I’ve heard the phrase, “Safety is just a matter of common sense.”

Usually this comes from a seasoned worker or manager trying to understand why a seemingly preventable incident has just occurred. “If only the worker had just used their common sense, it would never have happened.”

It’s understandable. It sounds reasonable. It quietly shifts responsibility onto the workers.

And it’s wrong.

In this is issue:

• Why common sense is highly dependent on past experience and training.

• Why relying on common sense makes your communication less clear.

• 4 steps you can take to fix it.

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The reason I challenge this notion of ‘common sense’ is that common sense is entirely dependent on prior knowledge. Knowledge a worker may or may not have.

What might be obvious to a worker with 20 years of experience is definitely not obvious to a rookie in his first week.

For example:

An experienced forklift operator can feel when a slightly raised load on a turn becomes unstable, even before it tips. A new operator hasn’t yet developed the muscle memory to sense when things are about to go astray. When a supervisor tells them to ‘just use common sense’, the rookie hears ‘drive slowly and be careful’ and misses the important cue of ‘keep the load low and slow down when turning.’

The instruction becomes general rather than specific because common sense means different things to different people.

Relying on common sense assumes that everyone sees risk the same way. Worse, it offers no guidance in unfamiliar or high-risk situations. “Use your common sense” doesn’t mean much if you’ve never encountered a situation like this before.

In safety, assuming common sense often means assuming knowledge that was never taught.

Common Sense is not a Strategy

Common sense is not a strategy, a control, or a substitute for instruction, yet this type of thinking is common in many workplaces.

If your workplace is one of them you might hear phrases like:

• “Everyone knows not to put their hand there.”

• “It should be obvious this is dangerous.”

• “They should have known better.”

The implication is that the worker should have anticipated the risk and done something differently.

But this is not about intelligence. It’s about exposure, experience, and context. The very tools that new and young workers lack.

What many label ‘common sense’ might be better called ‘proper training and hands on experience’.

Why This Happens

• Training gaps get papered over. When training is rushed or informal, “common sense” fills the gap. This creates uneven risk for workers with less background or exposure.

• Hindsight bias after incidents. Once something goes wrong, the hazard feels obvious. What can be difficult to keep in mind is that before the incident, it often was not.

• It’s a comforting shortcut. Blaming an incident on a lack of common sense often avoids harder conversations about task design, supervision, procedures, and production pressure.

What to Do Instead

1. Replace “Common Sense” with Clarity. Clearly define expectations and explain why hazards exist.

2. Design Out Guesswork. Use physical controls, signage, visual cues, and standardized procedures. If people have to guess, the system has already failed.

3. Teach How to Think About Risk. Train hazard recognition using real scenarios, not just rules and theory.

4. Model Better Language. Replace “Use common sense” with:

• “Here’s what to watch for.”

• “Here’s why this task is risky.”

• “Here’s how we expect this to be done safely.”

Strong safety systems do not rely on what people should know. They support people in the risks they actually face at work.

When leaders stop saying “common sense” and start building clarity, incidents decrease and trust increases.

If your safety system depends on common sense, it is not a system.

It is a gamble.

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That’s it for this week.

I would like to personally wish all of you the best this holiday season! Safety Pro Weekly has recently passed 400 subscribers and 1100+ followers on LinkedIn and I want to personally thank each one of you for giving me 5 minutes of your time each week to talk about safety.

By the way, I also ghostwrite for other professionals, founders and thought leaders on LinkedIn and Substack. If you’re interested in building your authority and reach to help you attract more opportunity but don’t know where to start, feel free to message me for a free consultation to see how I can help.

Cheers,

Dan.

Hello and welcome to this week’s edition of Safety Pro Weekly!

As safety professionals, we face constant pressure from all sides. Incidents, government inspections, pushback over production pressures and cost, lack of support, and sometimes more than anything, the emotional load of being responsible for preventing harm.

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Many of us feel constantly overwhelmed, frustrated, or drained.

• You’re blamed when incidents happen.

• You face resistance when you ask people to work safely.

• You often feel like you care more about safety than others.

Sometimes the most important characteristic of good safety professionals is sheer resilience in the face of all of these competing pressures.

One of the philosophies that I have found helpful in my reading is that of Stoicism.

Stoicism is an ancient Greek philosophy that teaches us to focus on the things we control, accept the things we can’t, acknowledge emotions without letting them dictate behaviour and live our lives according to our values, not our circumstances.

For safety professionals, Stoicism aligns perfectly with the job. Many of the challenges we face are unpredictable, out of our control and perhaps in no other field is there such a need to model calm, controlled leadership.

Lets look at some Stoic principles we can adapt to fit our role:

1. Control What You Can, Accept the Rest.

“Some things are up to us, and others are not.” - Epictetus

What Epictetus is getting at here is that while you can’t always control outcomes, you can control your own efforts to influence those outcomes.

You can influence behaviour, but you can’t force it. You can teach, coach, and lead to the best of your ability. You can control your preparation, communication, follow-up, and leadership presence.

Beyond that, you need to accept that things will not always go your way and fretting over that which you don’t control only wastes effort and detracts from the thing you do.

2. Respond, Don’t React.

“You have power over your mind, not outside events.” - Marcus Aurelius

It can be very easy given the pressure that comes with the job to react impulsively at times and either say the wrong things or make knee-jerk reactions that can be damaging in hindsight. As safety professionals, the stakes are too high to allow momentary emotions to influence your behaviour.

Instead, get in the habit of taking a brief pause before speaking, especially on an emotional topic. Often, asking a simple question to clarify another person’s point of view gives you the space to think clearly and puts the onus back on the other person to clearly and logically think through the problem.

Stoicism doesn’t ask you not to have emotions, but it challenges us to notice our emotions and reactions without being ruled by them.

3. Focus on Values Over Outcomes.

“Just that you do the right thing. The rest doesn’t matter.” – Marcus Aurelius

You can’t guarantee zero incidents.

What you can guarantee is consistency, honesty and leadership.

When safety professionals act with integrity by putting others first, doing what they say they will do and acting fairly and impartially, they set the tone for the entire safety culture of the business.

4. Practice Negative Visualization.

“What is unlooked for is more crushing in its effect. Unexpectedness adds the to the weight of a disaster.” – Seneca

Seneca may have been the world’s first risk assessment expert. If we expect the worst, we can only be pleasantly surprised when things go right.

By visualizing adversity ahead of time, Seneca was able to reduce fear, stay calm under pressure and not be blindsided by misfortune. This mental rehearsal allowed him to meet the challenges of the day with composure instead of panic.

Trying to anticipate what can go wrong is a big part of a safety professional’s job. Keeping potential hazards and risks top of mind allows us to prepare controls to combat them.

5. Reframe Challenges as Training.

“The obstacle is the way.” - Marcus Aurelius

Every conflict, pushback, or inspection failure is training for better leadership.

The key to this is to take time to reflect on the struggles you’re facing and look for the lesson. The most effective practice for turning obstacles into opportunities is daily journaling. Marcus Aurelius used this to great effect when he lead Rome through some of its darkest times. By writing down the events of each day and his personal reflections, he was able to make sense of the struggle and devise ways to learn from it and use difficult situations to his advantage.

Within every challenge you face lies the opportunity to become a better safety leader and a better person.

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That’s it for this week, if you’re interested in learning more about Stoicism, I highly recommend the work of Ryan Holliday, an American author who has written extensively on Stoicism, including books such as The Obstacle is the Way, Ego is the Enemy, and Courage is Calling. You can check out his work here.

Safety Pro Weekly is published every Tuesday morning on LinkedIn and Substack.

If you enjoy Safety Pro Weekly, I also ghostwrite thought leadership articles for busy professionals to help them present their ideas, build their reach and attract opportunity. DM for details.

Cheers,

Dan.

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Hello and welcome to this edition of Safety Pro Weekly.

On March 23, 2005, a massive explosion ripped through a Texas oil refinery during the startup of an isomerization unit, killing 15 workers and injuring 180.

It was one of the worst industrial disasters in US history.

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After several investigations of the incident and others at the same refinery, some serious safety culture failures were identified as contributing causes:

• Workers recognized serious hazards and near misses were frequent, but did not feel safe reporting them.

• They believed raising concerns would lead to blame or retaliation.

• The culture rewarded “getting it done” and budget compliance as the most important factors.

• Management had ignored or dismissed past warnings.

While this was an extremely tragic example, this pattern can be seen on a smaller scale in many workplaces.

Let’s take a look at some of the mistakes that can lead to these types of conditions, why they happen, and what you can do about it.

The Bridge Between Psychological Safety and Physical Safety

This incident is a clear example of how psychological safety (the comfort level that employees have to voice their opinions and speak their minds without fear of negative consequences) can directly influence physical safety in the workplace. A lack of psychological safety creates real physical danger when:

• Workers stay silent about hazards, near-misses, or unsafe conditions they might otherwise have raised.

• “Silent workplaces” develop invisible risk: problems nobody mentions until an incident forces the truth into the open.

• Leaders believe the lack of incident reporting is a “no news is good news” situation. Instead, it usually means people are afraid, disengaged, or don’t believe speaking up will lead to action.

Why It Happens

So with this in mind, why wouldn’t a worker speak up when they see a danger in the workplace? It seems a no brainer that raising a hazard concern would lead to a safer workplace, right?

Often it’s one of the following:

• Fear of consequences. Discipline, blame, being labelled as “the difficult one” can be powerful disincentives for sticking your neck out. People often worry more about interpersonal risk (not wanting to be ostracized) than physical risk.

• Past experience. If past warnings have been ignored, workers often feel there’s no point in speaking up.

• Cultural norms. “Don’t snitch,” “Just get it done” “We were too busy”. If this is the dominant mindset in your workplace, your incident rate is likely higher than normal.

• Workload pressure. Busyness and pressure are the greatest cause of employees taking shortcuts or skipping procedures such as pre-shift inspections.

• Leaders unintentionally shutting down discussion. A leader’s reactions, tone, or dismissiveness can easily and unintentionally dissuade workers from speaking up. Belittling employee’s concerns is a sure way to choke the lines of communication.

How to Fix It

There is no quick fix to changing workplace safety culture, but there are small steps and actions you can model on a daily basis to influence things in a positive direction.

• Model curiosity. Leaders who believe that they know it all are not likely to encourage alternative views. Ask open-ended questions daily and be willing to listen to and fully consider the responses.

• Reward speaking up publicly. This needn’t be a monetary reward. A little recognition goes a long way.

• Respond constructively. Thank the person for raising the concern. Take action in a timely fashion and follow up to ensure completion.

• Use micro-openings. Stay in touch with your team via quick verbal safety check-ins during shifts.

• Make hazard reporting easy. Are your workers going to report many hazards if it requires a 16 page report and a 60 minute interview with HR? Not bloody likely. Instead, use simple forms, QR codes, or verbal processes.

• Train leaders to manage first reactions. This takes a bit of practice, especially when deadlines are tight, but the way leaders respond to feedback makes a huge difference. Do your best to be welcoming and present when receiving feedback, even (especially?) when you don’t feel like it.

• Share lessons learned. Take every opportunity to show that reporting leads to real change. Highlight a hazards that someone has reported and gotten fixed at team meetings, present findings and wins to management, shout it from the rooftops if you have to. The more you demonstrate that leadership takes hazard reports seriously and does something about it, the more comfortable workers will be to speak up when it matters.

That’s it for this week, thanks for reading.

Let me know in the comments some of the ways you promote clear and open communication in your workplace.

Safety Pro Weekly is published every Tuesday on LinkedIn and Substack.

Cheers,

Dan.

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Hello and Welcome to this week’s edition of Safety Pro Weekly.

Amy Edmondson is a professor at Harvard University and a world leading expert on psychological safety.

For more than 25 years, her research has shown how workplaces perform better when team members are encouraged to speak up, share their opinions and ideas and admit mistakes without fear or blame.

In this article:

· Psychological safety is crucial for high performance teams.

· There are 3 key mindsets great leaders use to level up psychological safety in the workplace.

· i) Frame work as a learning problem, not an execution problem

· ii) Admit mistakes

· iii) Model curiosity

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When it comes to workplace health and safety programs, psychological safety is crucial.

Without it:

• Employees who are afraid to speak up fail to report hazards that can lead to injury or property damage.

• JHSC members with great ideas may fear that those ideas will never be adopted, causing the business to miss out on significant improvements.

• Incident investigations may be low quality because people fail to ask the right questions.

• Trust breaks down between workers and leaders.

• Even safety leaders themselves may feel that their voice is overlooked and their efforts are wasted on employees and leaders who don’t see the importance of what they’re trying to do.

Let’s take a closer look at Edmonson’s 3 part framework for building psychological safety in the workplace:

1. Frame Work as a Learning Problem - Not an Execution Problem

When work is framed as a learning challenge rather than something to be executed perfectly, people feel safer to speak up, ask questions, and admit uncertainty.

Every situation at work incorporates ideas and frameworks that bring new variables. Even if you had a similar problem yesterday, conditions have changed since then. Maybe it’s a new customer, maybe it’s a different group of workers, maybe it’s a different location.

When you approach every task as a new puzzle to solve, it takes pressure off your team and builds curiosity and engagement.

The impact of this from a safety perspective is beneficial in many ways:

• Workers feel less pressure to hide hazards or near misses.

• Reporting improves.

• Teams collaborate more.

• People admit when they don’t know something rather than guessing.

Example:

“Today’s lift involves some unusual angles. We’re treating this as a learning situation. Let’s talk through what we know, what we don’t, and where things might bite us.”

2. Be Willing to Admit Mistakes

Leaders who openly admit their own mistakes signal that fallibility is normal, not shameful. This is one of the strongest predictors of psychological safety. Leaders who admit to being less than perfect give their employees permission to admit vulnerabilities themselves and this opens up your team’s communication quality in a massive way.

When leaders are willing to admit mistakes:

• Workers feel safe to admit their own mistakes rather than hide them.

• Shifts the focus from fixing the blame to fixing the problem.

• Builds trust among leaders and workers.

• Opens conversations that prevent recurrence of similar accidents.

Example:

“I should have communicated the new SOP earlier. That was my oversight. Let’s fix the process so it doesn’t happen again.”

3. Model Curiosity

Psychological safety grows when leaders ask questions rather than simply providing answers. Curiosity encourages open dialogue and surfaces hazards early. Having an open mind reduces knee-jerk reactions and helps you dive deeper into the true root causes of the problem you’re solving.

Here are some practical questions you might ask to model curiosity:

• “What are you seeing out there that I might be missing?”

• “If you were in my role, what would you change to make this job safer?”

• “Where exactly does this process feel risky?”

• “What might go wrong with this plan?”

• “How can we do this better?”

Building psychological safety at work is not a simple or easy process. It takes time to build trust, create new expectations and truly allow people to feel safe sharing their opinions. But the benefits can be transformative for the health and safety of your team and your business.

That’s it for today, let me know in the comments how you’re building and supporting psychological safety among your team.

Safety Pro Weekly is published every Tuesday morning on LinkedIn and Substack. Visit www.safetyproweekly.com to subscribe and view 30+ back issues on all aspects of workplace health and safety.

Cheers,

Dan.

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Hello and welcome to this week’s edition of Safety Pro Weekly.

The practice of Zen began as a form of Buddhist meditation that originated in India and gradually spread to China and Japan. It has evolved into a discipline of calm, focused awareness that emphasizes the importance of staying in the present moment and responding to reality as it is, not how we might wish it to be.

As a philosophy, the principles of Zen help improve our clarity and sense of calm which we can use to improve our influence as safety professionals.

Let’s take a look at a few of the key principles of Zen and how we can adapt them in our daily work:

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Principle #1: Presence — The Power of Being Fully There

Life is busy, work even more so and the temptation is always there to rush.

Rush through traffic, rush through inspections, rush through conversations.

While we’re doing this at work and in our daily lives, the danger is that we miss important things. We don’t hear the tone of someone’s voice that tells us they’re struggling with something, we miss a better solution to a problem because we rush through the meeting, maybe in rushing through traffic we miss a red light and cause an accident.

While a certain amount of time stress is inherent in modern life, we can apply the Zen concept of presence by:

• Slowing down your shop floor walks and inspections. Take time to really look at what’s going on.

• Put your phone away during conversations.

• Block an extra few minutes before a meeting to give yourself a chance to be calm, centered and focused on what you’re going to talk about.

Principle #2: Beginner’s Mind — Seeing the Workplace as if for the First Time

Zen encourages us to take a beginner’s mindset to everything we do. It teaches us to avoid preconceived notions of how things are or how they should be.

In the safety world, we find that familiarity makes hazards invisible. How many times do we inadvertently walk past or even step over a safety hazard that’s been there for so long it’s become part of the landscape the no one even notices anymore. Following the same old routines can cause you to go through the motions, making you less perceptive. Making assumptions about situations, people or hazards clouds your judgement and prevents you from coming up with new ideas.

Instead, strive to:

• Treat each task like it’s new.

• Ask workers what would confuse a brand-new employee.

• Change your inspection patterns regularly.

• Pair up experienced committee members with new members for inspections. A fresh set of eyes will often spot hazards more experienced people might miss.

Principle #3: Non-Attachment to Ego — Safety Without Power Struggles

Too often in corporate life, conversations turn into conflict because leaders want to be right. We become entrenched in our point of view and miss an opportunity to learn a new way of doing things or looking at a problem. Worse, excessive conflict leads to added stress, work dissatisfaction and ultimately employee turnover.

Instead, try to avoid defensive reactions.

• Lead with curiosity, not judgment.

• Be willing to set aside your ego and fear of looking bad or losing authority.

• Accept that others may have the best insight in certain situations.

Principle #4: Simplicity — Strip Away the Noise

There’s always a temptation in safety to do more. After all, we want to the best results, we want people to be safe so we should be doing everything we possibly can. More programs, more training, more polices and procedures. Right?

Wrong.

Doing a lot of work is not the same as doing effective work.

Every new program you add takes time, energy and focus from something you’re already doing, making it less effective.

Instead:

• Prioritize high-impact activities and discard the extras that don’t really move the needle.

• Reduce forms to the minimum needed.

• Build procedures simple enough for a brand-new worker. Nobody remembers complicated policies and procedures anyway. Give people a level of information and complexity they can reasonably handle and eliminate busywork.

Principle #5: Compassion & Empathy — Understanding the Human Side

I’ve known many safety professionals who could cite chapter and verse of the most obscure regulations, but didn’t really understand people and how to motivate them to actually follow those ideas.

Regulations and policies are important and are there for a reason, but if you can’t get people to understand them and buy in to the key parts of your program, you’re facing an uphill battle.

To better understand your team:

• Ask workers what makes tasks harder than they should be.

• Recognize fatigue, workflow pressure, and stress and how they affect your team’s ability to do their job safely.

• Investigate incidents with understanding, not blame. Try to de-escalate any stress an injured worker may be feeling and approach with an attitude of trying to learn how to prevent future incidents, not to establish fault.

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A calmer, clearer leader creates a safer workplace. Applying these small daily practices on a regular basis gradually compounds into substantial cultural improvements over time. Using these Zen principles in your own life can help you be a better safety leader and contribute to a healthier environment for your co-workers.

That’s it for now, thanks for reading.

Safety Pro Weekly is published every Tuesday on LinkedIn and Substack.

Cheers,

Dan.

Hello and welcome to this week’s edition of Safety Pro Weekly.

You’ve seen it all before.

Your front-line team meets a safety or production goal and senior management proposes a pizza party. The gesture is appreciated by the team and all seems well.

But the following week a target is missed and management comes down hard on the team. All of the goodwill quickly evaporates.

Subsequent rewards seem to feel less and less satisfying and eventually are seen merely as attempts to buy good behaviour. What started out as a great idea no longer seems to motivate the team and becomes either an expectation or even a cause for derision among employees.

In this article:

• Pizza parties and the like are nice enough in the moment, but the good feelings quickly disappear.

• These perks often don’t tie in to any specific systems or processes that make your team safer in the long term.

• Instead, focus on building long term habits that lead to a stronger safety culture. Lead by example, involve workers in safety programs, build 2-way communication and reinforce the right things.

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Workplace pizza parties and similar rewards are quite literally a short-term dopamine hit: it feels good in the moment, but the effect fades quickly. The excitement wears off, people get used to it and before long it stops motivating anyone.

Here’s why pizza parties don’t work and some ideas for things that will really move the needle in your safety program.

Perks vs. Culture

Look, we all love short term perks once in a while. Nothing wrong with that, but they don’t address root causes of a particular behaviour. Employees tend to see them as transactional or performative in nature and it all feels rather manipulative in the end.

If there is no tie-in to systems, processes, or accountability, the perks fade quickly.

What you actually need is meaningful change.

Here are 5 things that build your safety culture far more than any pizza party or reward system will:

What Actually Moves the Needle (5 Strategies)

1. Leaders Who Walk the Talk. There is no substitute for leaders who set the right example. When senior management buys in and shows that they are no exception to safety protocols, getting buy-in from front line workers becomes so much easier. Imagine the captain of hockey team who didn’t participate in skating drills or the star baseball player who skips batting practice. If this happens often, the motivation and morale of the team quickly disintegrates.

2. Consistent, Two-Way Communication. We often associate good communicators as people who speak eloquently. But that’s only half of the process. Listening is a much more underrated and difficult skill. It requires patience, empathy and a willingness to admit you might have something to learn. It’s not easy and takes time to learn, but the benefits of being a good listener are massive.

3. Equip Workers to Succeed. Part of our job as safety professionals is giving workers the tools they need to succeed. Not only the physical tools required for the job, but proper training, adequate staffing and the support they need to do the job safely and efficiently.

4. Worker Involvement in Problem-Solving. Your workers do their job 8 hours a day, 5 days a week for months and years. They know their job better than anyone – including you. Developing a sense of shared ownership for safe work practices builds motivation for team members and gives them a chance to really contribute to your health and safety initiatives. People support what they help to create. When workers feel a part of the safety program, they are much more likely to buy in.

5. Measuring & Reinforcing the Right Things. hat gets measured gets improved. It’s important to set the right KPIs and reinforce behaviours that align with safety goals. This doesn’t mean the “0 days without accidents” board, individual employees have little control over things like that. Instead focus on process goals such as inspections conducted, safe behaviour observations or hazards or near misses identified.

Culture is built through trust, systems, and shared ownership. Perks are fine, but they don’t replace meaningful change. Change is harder and requires a consistent, long term and ever vigilant approach.

That’s it for this week. I hope you found this useful.

Let me know in the comments what ways you’re working on to build a solid safety culture that outlasts the short term buzz of the office pizza party.

Safety Pro Weekly is published every Tuesday on LinkedIn and Substack.

Cheers,

Dan.

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Hello and welcome to this week’s edition of Safety Pro Weekly.

As safety professionals, we spend a lot of time talking.

We talk about policies, procedures, incidents, and performance. We teach, we coax, we cajole, but how often do these messages fall flat? If you’re like me, pretty damn often.

It’s a hard lesson for most of us to learn, but sometimes the real breakthroughs don’t come from the words we say. They come from the moments we stop talking and start listening.

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I learned this the hard way.

Early in my career, I thought strong leadership meant always having the answer. When someone brought me a problem, I jumped straight into solution mode. It took a few years, and a few costly lessons, to realize that the best insights often come from the people doing the work. You just have to give them space to speak.

Listening is one of the most overlooked leadership skills. And yet it’s foundational to building a strong health and safety culture.

Culture can’t be dictated.

You can’t direct someone to care about safety. Sure you can direct and enforce certain safe behaviours, but you can’t control what employees do when they’re not being watched. That’s when you have to rely on culture to get real buy-in and you can’t have a strong culture without listening to the ideas, concerns, and challenges your workers face every day.

In safety, where every conversation has the potential to prevent harm, it’s critical that we develop this skill.

Why Listening Matters: You Can’t Lead What You Don’t Understand

Most safety professionals are good communicators.

We know how to explain, instruct, and motivate. But it’s easy to forget that communication is a two-way process, and too often we mistake broadcasting for leading.

When we listen, we learn what’s really happening on the shop floor. We learn what shortcuts creep in when employees are under pressure, the frustrations workers face, and the simple ideas that could make work safer.

Listening builds trust. It signals respect. And it gives workers confidence that their experiences matter.

As one supervisor told me, “People will tell you everything you need to know, if you give them the opportunity to say it.”

The Barriers to Listening: Why We Miss the Message

Even the most experienced leaders fall into common listening traps.

We rush to fix instead of understand.

We multitask during conversations.

We assume we already know what’s being said.

And sometimes, let’s admit, we simply don’t want to hear it.

Listening requires the willingness to be surprised by what we hear. It means admitting we don’t always have the answers, and that the best ideas might come from someone else.

When we let go of the need to talk, we create space for the insights of others to emerge.

The Practice of Listening: Turning Attention into Action

Listening isn’t passive. It’s an active skill that can be practiced and refined.

Here are four habits that separate great safety leaders from the rest:

1. Be fully present. When someone speaks, give them your full attention. Put away distractions your phone, email, or clipboard. Eye contact and attention matter. Let’s put it another way, how do you feel when you’re trying to talk about something important to you and the other person won’t stop glancing at their phone? Is this the message you want to subconsciously express to others when they come to you?

2. Ask open-ended questions. Try “What have you struggled with lately?” or “What could make this job easier or safer?” You’ll be surprised what comes out.

3. Listen for meaning, not just words. This can be a tough skill to learn and it takes practice and patience. Pay attention to things like the other person’s tone, hesitation, and emotion. What someone doesn’t say can be even more important than what they do.

4. Act on what you hear. Listening without follow-up erodes trust. When workers see action, they know their voices matter. Even if it’s not the resolution the employee was hoping to see, clear follow up makes people feel heard and understood.

Real listening changes how people feel about speaking up. When they feel comfortable coming to you with a concern, you’ll learn things that will help you prevent future accidents.

Characteristics of a Good Listener

Being a good listener is something most of us have to work at. Many of us didn’t have the greatest role models growing up and listening is not a skill often taught in school or other learning scenarios. For all the professional development courses out there teaching people to speak, there aren’t nearly as many teaching us how to listen well.

Here are some characteristics to work on if you want to improve your listening skills:

• Curiosity. Good listeners are genuinely curious, ask open-ended questions, and look at conversations as opportunities to learn something new.

• Patience. Don’t interrupt when others are speaking. Let them fully express their thought and then respond.

• Empathy. Listen for emotion as much as you listen for facts. You don’t have to necessarily agree, but try to see things from the other person’s point of view.

• Reflectiveness. Good listeners take the time to paraphrase the speaker’s words so they can confirm that they understand.

• Non-defensiveness. Being defensive kills conversations. Treat feedback as information, not an attack.

• Presence. Give your undivided attention when listening to someone. This communicates respect for the other person and encourages others to open up.

• Discretion. Handle sensitive information carefully and never use it in any way that would not be welcomed by the other person.

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True leadership isn’t loud. It doesn’t need to fill every silence. It’s calm, observant, and intentional. The strongest safety leaders understand that wisdom begins in listening.

Every conversation is a chance to make work safer. But that only happens when we stop talking long enough to truly hear what people are trying to tell us. Master the art of listening, and you’ll master one of the most powerful tools in safety leadership.

That’s it for this week, let me know in the comments some of the ways you’re working on becoming a better listener. I promise to listen carefully 😊

Safety Pro Weekly is published every Tuesday morning on LinkedIn and Substack. Please share this article with someone you think would benefit.

Cheers,

Dan.

Hello and welcome to this week’s edition of Safety Pro Weekly.

Most Joint Health & Safety Committees meet regularly, take minutes, review inspections, and yet still don’t make the kind of impact they want.

I’ve seen this many times and been on committees where the members are well intentioned, come to the meeting prepared, and yet the change they seek remains elusive.

It’s not that they aren’t committed to making an impact. It’s just that they focus on the wrong things.

Key Points at a glance

• Most committees get bogged down in minor hazards rather than focusing on the most relevant hazards.

• This often happens due to a lack of training and a lack of focus.

• Instead, committees should focus on one main hazard each meeting and drive it to completion.

• This narrowing of focus on key hazards, prevents dilution of effort, establishes trust and builds a track record of success.

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What happens is the meetings often get sidetracked. Everyone has their own ideas to bring to the table, which is great, but without a filter to assess the relevance of each idea, things can get bogged down. The agenda often becomes reactive, focusing on minor hazards and housekeeping items instead of focusing on items that could really move the needle in your safety program.

Committees end up acting like suggestion boxes rather than safety leadership teams.

Have you ever served on a committee like this?

I have.

Most of us have, at one time or another.

Let’s take a look at why this happens and what you can do instead.

Why This Happens

There are many reasons for this, but it often comes down to lack of training and lack of focus.

Often when new members join the committee, they get minimal, if any, training. While it’s important to have front line employees on the committee, without clear guidance and an understanding of basic health and safety principles, they may not be clear on what to do or why they’re there.

The second reason is a lack of clear expectations. Many committees have no measurable KPI or goals. They simply meet every month, discuss a few trivial issues and then promptly forget about them till next month.

So what is a dedicated committee to do?

The One Thing JHSCs Must Do Differently

Here’s what I suggest you do differently.

Focus on one high-priority hazard at a time and drive it to resolution.

Rather than discussing everything superficially, the JHSC should identify the most serious risk and fix it completely.

The goal here isn’t to generate a long list of minutes, it’s to eliminates one serious hazard every cycle.

Why This Works

Here’s why I think focusing on one priority hazard at a time can improve your committee’s effectiveness:

• Focus beats volume. Concentrating on one hazard at a time makes it much easier to produce measurable results. Instead of diluting your focus over a multitude of minor tasks, you focus your team’s efforts into eliminating one substantial risk. This singular focus gives you a much better chance of success in tackling the problem. As the saying goes, “Do less, better.”

• Focus gets results, which builds trust. When workers see real hazards being fixed, it improves morale, establishes trust and has a positive effect on safety culture.

• Focus demonstrates due diligence. When you can show tangible results on hazard elimination, it demonstrates that you’ve taken clear steps to protect the safety of workers over time. Rather than getting bogged down in minor issues every month, you begin to build a track record of success.

How to Do It

So how do you choose the right hazard to focus on and control? Here are the steps to make it happen:

Step 1: Identify the risk. Look to previous hazard assessments, incident reports, and historical data to identify where employees are at the greatest risk and choose a risk that is relatively high in both severity and frequency of occurrence.

Step 2: Get specific. Define both the hazard and the desired outcome clearly. What exactly do you hope to avoid? How will you accomplish this? What measurables tell you when you’re successful?

Step 3: Assign an owner and a deadline. Nothing gets done without an owner and a deadline. Who is in charge of the improvement? When will it be accomplished? Avoid vague commitments like ‘management will look into it.’

Step 4: Track progress. Have a way to measure progress, build in intermediate steps to the process if appropriate and have a deadline for each one. Hold small team meetings as appropriate to keep everyone on track.

Step 5: Close it visibly. When you’re trying to establish trust and credibility for your committee’s efforts, it’s not enough just to do it.

You have to also be seen to do it.

Document the fix, take photos, and share the result with workers. Don’t be afraid to brag a little and celebrate your success.

If your JHSC can’t point to one serious hazard it has helped eliminate in the last 60 days, that’s a sign you’re not as effective as you could be. At your next meeting, ask: ‘Which single hazard are we fixing this month, and who owns it?’ If nobody can answer, you’ve found your first problem.

Let me know in the comments what big problem your committee is working on right now.

That’s it for this week, thanks for reading.

Safety Pro Weekly is published every Tuesday on LinkedIn and Substack.

Cheers,

Dan.

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Hello and welcome to this week’s edition of Safety Pro Weekly.

Atomic Habits, written by James Clear in 2018 has sold over 25 million copies, became a New York Times bestseller and has now been translated into over 60 languages.

Widely praised for it’s accessible and practical approach to building better habits, the book draws on the fields of biology, psychology and neuroscience. In it, Clear explains how small life changes can compound into significant transformations over time.

The book has lots to teach us as safety professionals.

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Here are my 5 biggest takeaways from Atomic Habits we can apply to workplace safety:

1. Focus on Systems, Not Goals

In the book, Clear says, “You do not rise to the level of your goals. You fall to the level of your systems.”

This concept of process over outcome is often seen in the philosophy of successful people in all walks of life. As safety professionals, we have much more control over the process and systems we put in place than the actual outcome of specific events.

The lesson here is instead of setting targets like “zero injuries,” that are largely influenced by outside factors, build systems that make safety routine.

For example:

• Embed pre-shift safety checks into daily workflow.

• Use regular toolbox talks to keep safety top of mind.

• Use checklists and visuals to reinforce safe behavior.

• Review processes regularly, not just after incidents.

2. Make Good Habits Obvious

Clear teaches us that habits start with cues. A cue is a trigger or reminder that nudges us toward a particular habit. People respond best to visual and environmental triggers.

What you want to do is create a consistent, visible cue tied to a natural part of the workflow and use this to reinforce the response you want to build.

For example, placing a tag on a machine’s power switch that says, “Inspect before start.” This is a perfect visual cue that triggers the habit of the pre-shift inspection.

Some other examples are:

• Place PPE reminders where work starts, not in the lunchroom.

• Use dashboards or whiteboards showing current safety metrics to keep awareness high.

• Forklift safety posters placed in view of where the machines are parked between shifts as a reminder before starting.

3. Make Safe Actions Easy

I love this one.

Clear’s instruction here is to reduce friction for good habits and increase friction for bad ones.

You want to make it as easy as possible to follow the habits you want to reinforce and as difficult as possible to follow habits you’d like to eliminate. Most of tend to go with the path of least resistance. When the safe option becomes the easiest one, you’re going to get buy-in.

Try this:

• Store gloves and goggles at point of use so they are easy to reach, not in a cabinet across the floor.

• Reduce the complexity of hazard or incident reporting forms. If it’s going to take all day to complete the forms, people will resist filling them out or provide a bare minimum of information.

• Find ways to make unsafe behaviour more difficult than the safer option. For example, use auto shutoff systems so that leaving a guard off a machine creates more hassle than leaving it on.

4. Reinforce with Immediate Rewards

Rewards have a way of making good habits stick.

When you attach rewards to the habits you’re trying to build, you automatically reinforce them. We all like receiving rewards.

The reward itself need not be elaborate or necessarily even material. Just a bit of recognition goes a long way.

The key is that the reward needs to closely follow the action you want to reinforce. Immediate positive reinforcement builds momentum faster than quarterly awards. The longer you wait, the less the reward will be tied to the action and the less effective it will be.

• Give quick, genuine recognition for safe actions, “Thanks for catching that hazard”.

• Highlight small wins at shift huddles.

• Track positive observations logged if you have a BBS system.

5. Identity Over Outcomes

For me, this is one of the most powerful lessons in the book.

Clear teaches us that the most effective way to change your habits is to change your identity.

Most people look at identity as the product of actions and outcomes. Clear turns this notion on its head. By establishing an identity as a person who upholds a certain standard, you subconsciously begin to live up to that standard. When your actions align with who you believe you are, they reinforce this self-image, rather than fight against it. The more you can establish an identity as a safe organization, the more you encourage safe habits.

Here are some ideas for this:

• Don’t just tell teams to follow safety rules, help them see themselves as safety-minded professionals.

• Encourage peer accountability. Reinforce the notion of looking after each other.

• Model the identity daily. Approach the job as a safety coach, not a safety cop.

The key message I want to end with is that small, consistent habits compound into culture. The more you can establish a culture as a workplace where safe practices are the norm, the more people will begin to live up to the message.

A safe workplace isn’t built by a few people in the safety department writing procedures, it’s built in the daily habits of everyone on site. It’s built by workers wearing PPE, forklift operators driving safely, supervisors coaching safe behaviours. In a thousand little ways, your safety culture is being built by small actions and habits of employees, managers and senior leadership.

That’s it for this week’s edition of Safety Pro Weekly. Let me know in the comments what you’re doing to help promote small safety habits in your workplace. Would love to compare notes and share ideas.

Safety Pro Weekly is published every Tuesday on LinkedIn and Substack.

Cheers,

Dan.

Hey there,

Welcome to this week’s edition of Safety Pro Weekly. This week we’re looking at safety training and how we can make it so much better.

Here’s a harsh truth:

24 hours after your employees have completed their safety training, they’ve already forgotten more than half of it.

How can this be?

In this issue:

• The way most Health and Safety training is boring, passive and ineffective.

• Dale’s Cone of Learning established a continuum of least effective to most effective ways to deliver training in ways that people actually engage with and remember.

• Moving your training strategy down the cone towards more active and engaging training strategies dramatically improves retention.

• Combinations of various methods work together and help reinforce learning outcomes.

Way back in the 1800s, researcher Hermann Ebbinghaus identified what he called the ‘Forgetting Curve’, which demonstrates that humans rapidly forget information presented to them (50-70% after 24 hours, up to 90% within a week) if the message is not reinforced.

This has major implications for effectiveness of your health and safety training, or lack thereof …

The kind of boring, passive, text heavy slideshows you’re probably using now for safety training might allow you to check the box in terms of meeting compliance requirements, but studies show it’s not effective for real learning and this lack of retention puts workers, and your business, at risk.

To make your training effective, you need to deliver it in a way that people actually learn.

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Dale’s Cone of Learning

In the 1940s, education researcher Edgar Dale developed the Cone of Learning.

This model shows that people retain information more readily when they are actively involved, rather than just passively receiving information.

Dale created a hierarchy of learning experiences that moves from abstract to concrete. The more abstract the training stye, the less effective it is at getting students to retain information.

Let’s look at the model and training options from least effective to most effective:

1. Verbal Symbols: This is the most passive and least effective method. It involves listening to lectures and reading text.

2. Visual Symbols: Slightly better for retention are visual symbols such as charts, diagrams and graphs. These add clarity and are slightly more engaging, but are still mostly abstract and don’t encourage retention.

3. Recordings, Audio, Still Pictures. Next up we have audio, photos and still pictures. This increases the level of context, but are still not engaging and interactive.

4. Motion Pictures. Motion pictures make things more real. These are more engaging than still photos or audio and begin to improve student’s retention level.

5. Exhibits, Demonstrations and Field Trips. These provide more direct experiences in more realistic settings and are very helpful in getting students engaged and helping them retain information.

6. Dramatized Experiences. Role play, reenactments and simulations really get learners engaged and help them retain information. There’s a reason NASA has astronauts go through repeated as real as possible simulations here on earth before sending them up into space.

7. Direct, Purposeful Experience. Hands on practice and, in particular, teaching others is the best way to learn if you’re looking for information retention and recall. Nothing beats doing the real task or showing it to others for promoting real understanding of the material.

How to fix it: Look For Ways to Move Workers Down the Cone

So, if you want to level up the effectiveness of your safety training, the key is to move your training down the pyramid towards more effective ways to deliver the information.

Here’s how it looks in practice:

• Verbal Symbols: Listening to safety reminders, or lectures.

• Visual Symbols: Posters showing proper lifting, PPE, machine guarding.

• Recordings, Audio, Still Pictures: Spot hazards in photos, diagrams, graphs.

• Motion Pictures: Safety videos.

• Exhibitions, demonstrations: Instructor-led fire extinguisher training, spill cleanup demonstrations, forklift walk-arounds.

• Dramatized Experiences: Mock emergency drills, role-playing accident response scenarios.

• Direct, Purposeful Experience: Teaching others, having workers lead toolbox talks or mentor new employees.

It’s important to keep in mind that information is best delivered in different ways. Just because the method of visual symbols is higher up the cone, for example, doesn’t mean there is no place for posters and signage. It just means that you shouldn’t rely only on those methods entirely. Spicing up your information delivery with more memorable approaches helps the information stick in employee’s minds.

For example, while you should still post signs of your evacuation routes (ie. visual symbols), running an active evacuation drill where everyone participates (ie. dramatized experience) will leave a more lasting impression to support that information.

The closer training gets to real-world practice, the more workers remember, and the more likely they are to act safely when it matters.

The best safety training isn’t about how much information you deliver—it’s about how much workers actually retain. By shifting from passive presentations to active, hands-on experiences, safety professionals can create training that sticks, changes behavior, and ultimately prevents injuries.

That’s it for this week.

Safety Pro Weekly is published every Tuesday on LinkedIn and Substack.

Let me know in the comments some of the ways you make your safety training more effective.

Cheers,

Dan.

Hello and welcome to this week’s edition of Safety Pro Weekly.

Most managers know they should keep a close eye on safety hazards in their workplace, but often it falls through the cracks because they simply don’t have time for long inspections.

Font line managers are the busiest people in any company. There are orders to be filled, paperwork is piling up and someone’s always complaining about something and they seem to think it’s the manager’s job to fix it.

While many understand the importance of workplace safety and want to make sure their workers go home at the end of the day without injuries, they simply don’t have time to give safety the attention it requires.

If you can relate to these ideas, you should know that there is a better way.

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In this article:

• Most managers don’t have time for in-depth safety inspections on a regular basis, but a quick 10 minute walk-through can spot the most glaring errors.

• Follow these 5 steps: Walk the floor, Check equipment and tools, Engage with workers, Check documentation and signage and have an eye for housekeeping.

• While this doesn’t replace the need for in depth safety inspections, regular walk-throughs with an eye for safety hazards keeps safety on the radar and builds good habits for you an your team.

While there is definitely a time and place for comprehensive, in-depth safety audits, there are simple, quick checks that you can do daily to keep things from getting too far out of hand. A simple basic safety check up doesn’t have to take all day yet it can still spot potential hazards and prevent incidents.

Here’s a checklist they can do in just 10 minutes that covers the most common risk points. If you can spare a coffee break, you can improve safety in your workplace.

Step 1: Walk the Floor

Get in the habit of walking the shop floor regularly.

This doesn’t have to be a separate task from your regular work, you can incorporate it into your normal activities. As you’re touring the shop floor, spare dome attention for the following.

• Look for obvious hazards. Blocked exits, spills, tripping hazards, emergency equipment such as fire extinguishers or first aid kits that are not readily accessible.

• Check that PPE is being worn as required. It will be quickly obvious if workers are not wearing PPE in designated areas. A quick reminder will get them back on track.

• Pay attention to ergonomic mistakes. Workers often get used to doing things a certain way because “it’s easier”. If you notice someone having to use excessive force, lifting with an awkward posture or using a knife incorrectly, pointing it out can save the worker a trip to the ER.

Step 2: Equipment and Tools

While you’re on the shop floor, take a minute to spot check one or two pieces of equipment.

Are all machine guards in place, cords intact, machines in good repair? Are lockout/tagout procedures being observed where required? Are they being used according to specifications?

While you won’t catch everything at a glance, a quick look can spot the obvious and it beats waiting until maintenance reports come in.

Step 3: Worker Engagement

As you go about your tour, ask one or two employees if they have everything they need to do the job safely.

Sometimes even just a question about their day or a random topic can open up the conversation. People don’t always want to talk about work, take an interest in their day to day, ask how their weekend went, maybe comment on last night’s game.

The key is opening up the conversation, which allows you listen for gaps, stressors your worker may be dealing with or a concern they may have. Being available gives them a chance to bring up safety concerns while building trust and relationships with your team.

Step 4: Documentation/Signage

Take a quick moment to look for required postings and documentation.

Make sure your safety board is up to date, SDS sheets are available and emergency lights and access routes are posted, visible and in good working order.

It’s especially important to look for clear signage where risks exist, for example, forklift lanes, high voltage areas or high noise environments.

Step 5: Housekeeping / Final Sweep

Finally, as you head back to the office, pay attention to the general housekeeping and orderliness of the shop floor.

Make sure materials are stored properly, without unnecessary clutter, and chemicals and other items are stored where they should be.

A clean, organized, workplace is a safer workplace and contributes to a professional atmosphere and culture.

This isn’t a full inspection, but it’s an important way to show visible leadership and keep safety on the radar for yourself and your team.

Regular check-ins build good habits and keep the bad ones from getting out of control without requiring an unreasonable amount of time.

Ten minutes now can prevent hours lost due to injury down the road.

That’s it for this week, let me know in the comments if you have additional ideas for quick safety checks that save time and keep safety on the radar.

Safety Pro Weekly is published every Tuesday on LinkedIn and Substack.

Cheers,

Dan.

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Hello and welcome to this week’s edition of Safety Pro Weekly.

Sun Tzu wrote The Art of War more than 2,500 years ago, but his principles on strategy and leadership still apply today.

This ancient text is one of the first books written on Chinese warfare and contains timeless lessons on human nature, strategy and preparation. Though it contains only 13 chapters and can be read in one sitting, The Art of War ranks as one of the most popular books of all time.

For safety professionals, The Art of War offers some key lessons on how to think about workplace risks, culture, and leadership. Though it might seem counterintuitive to imagine we can glean safety insights from a book dedicated to war, the lessons in the book teach us about human psychology as much as the tactics of war.

In this issue:

• The Art of War by Sun Tzu is one of the most enduring and popular books ever written.

• Though the subject of the book is war, the insights provided on preparation, strategy and human psychology are relevant to many walks of life, including workplace safety.

• The following 5 lessons from the book teach strategies you can implement today to make your workplace safer.

Here are five adapted lessons to bring the ancient wisdom of The Art of War into modern safety practice.

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Lesson 1: Every battle is won before it is fought

Sun Tzu teaches us that victory in war or any other arena is determined by preparation, planning and positioning long before the actual clash of swords. Do the work beforehand by calculating risks, studying your opponent and strengthening your advantages and you can largely decide the outcome before the first move is made.

The message for safety professionals is that taking steps like conducting proactive hazard assessments, planning the work with an eye to safety and efficiency and thorough training work to prevent incidents long before they occur. A workplace that invests in prevention doesn’t need to rely on reactive fixes after the fact.

Lesson 2: Know the enemy and know yourself

One of the more famous quotes from The Art of War is, “If you know the enemy and know yourself, you need not fear the result of a hundred battles.”

For safety professionals, the 'enemy' is risk: slips, falls, ergonomic injuries, machinery hazards. In this context, knowing yourself means knowing the risks in your workplace, your team’s strengths, weaknesses, and culture. When you understand both the hazards and the workforce, you can design safety programs that fit your workplace rather than trying to implement generic rules that may not be relevant.

Lesson 3: Put yourself in a position that makes defeat impossible

Sun Tzu tells us that a wise commander creates conditions where the enemy cannot win no matter what they do.

The safest workplaces are designed so that even if a worker makes a mistake, the system prevents a catastrophe. Think guardrails, lockout/tagout, or ergonomic redesigns. This is why Elimination occupies the highest level on the Hierarchy of Controls.

Human beings are variable. Sometimes they don’t follow rules, sometimes they are uniformed, sometimes outside factors influence their behaviour. A safety program that relies only on workers doing the right things will always have human risk built in. Instead, look for ways to engineer safety into the system.

Lesson 4: Appear where you are not expected

The book also teaches us the value of surprise. Consistent tendencies are something the enemy can analyze and prepare for in advance.

Don’t be like that.

For safety professionals, unannounced audits and surprise walkthroughs will show you what’s really happening on the shop floor, not just the sanitized, staged version that you see when an inspection is expected. By showing up in unexpected places and times, safety professionals see authentic behaviors and can address risks before they escalate.

Lesson 5: Treat your people like family

Sun Tzu tells us, “Regard your soldiers as your children and they will follow you into the deepest valleys; look on them as your own beloved sons and they will stand by you unto death.”

Worker buy-in can’t be forced. It’s built through demonstrating care and respect. Workers don’t engage with safety because of policies and procedures, they engage when they believe leadership genuinely wants the best for them. For safety leaders, showing empathy, listening, and taking worker concerns into account when appropriate creates loyalty and encourages safer behaviors.

Though it was written two and a half centuries ago, The Art of War still has much wisdom to offer about success in many areas of life, including workplace safety.

These five lessons from the book remind us that safety is not only about compliance, it’s about strategy, foresight, and leadership. By preparing early, knowing risks and people, engineering safe systems, staying vigilant, and leading with care, safety professionals can build workplaces where everyone thrives.

I’d love to hear about ways you’re using lessons from The Art of War to inform your workplace safety strategies. Message me in the comments and let’s hear it!

Safety Pro Weekly is published every Tuesday on LinkedIn and Substack.

Cheers,

Dan.

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Hello and welcome to this week’s edition of Safety Pro Weekly.

Many organizations treat repetitive strain injuries as an inevitable part of the job, rather than recognizing them as a preventable workplace hazard.

Repetitive Strain Injuries or RSIs are soft tissue injuries caused by repetition, overexertion or awkward postures. They include injuries like strains, sprains, muscle pulls or even carpal tunnel syndrome.

RSIs often function like the canary in the coal mine of your safety program. They can often be a sign of a deeper cultural problem that has gone unnoticed. Unlike forklift accidents or slips, trips and falls, they aren’t immediately identifiable and can take a long time, sometimes months or years to build into something that prevents workers from doing their job.

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In this article:

• RSIs are a significant cause of workplace injuries.

• Because they build over time, they are difficult to identify and often ignored.

• Encouraging early reporting is the best way to prevent RSIs from becoming more serious.

• RSIs can be a test of workplace culture and the openness of your reporting process.

Because they build slowly, RSIs are often dismissed as general aches and pains or even a sign of aging, which delays intervention and thus extends the time to recovery. As a result, they are one of the most costly injuries for employers, with the average direct and indirect cost of a single RSI hitting approximately $40,000 per year. But the effects of RSIs extend even further than cost. RSIs are like termites in your house, you don’t notice the damage until it’s too late. And by then the repair bill is huge.

Here’s the thing that most business leaders miss: RSIs aren’t just a physical hazard, they’re a cultural test.

Early reporting of pain should be the norm. But in many workplaces, speaking up is passively or actively discouraged. This reluctance often has a spillover effect in that workers who are reluctant to report early pain from RSIs are also less likely to report unsafe conditions or near misses. Encouraging early reporting of injury allows for treatment before the injury becomes serious enough to require time off work or medical attention.

Why it Happens

There are a number of reasons why RSIs go unreported or underreported by workers.

• Slow Onset: Workers often don’t notice or take action on it until the pain becomes too persistent to ignore.

• Fear of Speaking up: Employees fear being seen as weak or as being a complainer, so they stay silent.

• Workplace Culture: Businesses that discourage reporting or shame employees for speaking up create a culture of fear that leads to hazards of all kinds going unreported until the situation becomes dire.

• Productivity pressure: Supervisors sometimes prioritize production at the expense of worker comfort. Unfortunately this can lead to bigger productivity losses due to injury in the longer term.

How to Fix It

Fortunately there are a number of things you can do to reduce the impact of RSIs in your business, maintain productivity and minimize injury costs.

• Encourage early reporting: Encourage workers to speak up about pain and train supervisors to take even minor discomfort seriously. Early treatment can prevent a more seriously, costly injury down the road.

• Task Rotation: Train workers on multiple tasks and schedule job rotation where appropriate. This has the added benefit of having workers trained to cover absences or vacation time without loss of efficiency.

• Look for opportunities to make small, practical adjustments. Can you make small tweaks to a task to make it more ergonomically efficient? Are there ways to allow for mechanical assistance? Does the task have to be done in the first place or are there ways to substitute or eliminate it?

• Measure more than just incidents: Look for leading indicators in the work you do. Number of safety observations, perhaps, or equipment inspections, training completed, safety discussions and the like. Incidents are lagging indicators which means they measure incidents that have occurred in the past. Look instead for process items that contribute to a safer overall workplace.

• Promote psychological safety: Workplaces where employees feel safe to speak up and present dissenting opinions without fear of censure give workers the peace of mind to report injuries sooner so they can be addressed before they become serious.

Ignoring RSIs does not make them go away. It allows them to fester into a bigger, more serious and more costly problem that takes much longer than necessary to resolve. Soreness is not a normal part of work or of age. Encourage employees to report even minor soreness so that the issue can be dealt with before it becomes more serious.

That’s it for this week. Are you struggling with RSIs in your workplace? What have you done about it? Does management encourage early reporting or does it tacitly encourage employees to hide the pain. Let me know in the comments.

Safety Pro Weekly is published every Tuesday on LinkedIn and Substack.

Until next week,

Cheers,

Dan.

If more rules guaranteed safer workplaces, we’d have eliminated accidents long ago.

Unfortunately, despite ever increasing regulations and policies, incidents still happen.

It’s not that policies and procedures are a bad thing to have, quite the opposite, actually.

The problem is when you start drowning your team in safety rules and regulations, it tends to dilute their focus, confuses people, and leads to compliance fatigue.

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Why This Happens

Workplaces tend to become procedure heavy after they’ve had a few significant incidents. Once this happens, management typically decides to lean into prevention to help protect themselves against liability and the costs associated with multiple incidents.

Again, this is a good thing of course, but unfortunately it can lead to businesses overcompensating by drowning their workers in rules and procedures. The mindset becomes one of control rather than cooperation.

Every time there’s an incident, there’s another rule created to prevent it. Eventually there are so many rules no one could possibly remember, much less implement them.

And this is the problem.

The Problem with Rule Overload

Rule overload can be a significant problem in workplaces. Here are some of the problems it creates:

• Dilution of focus. When there are too many rules, workers can’t prioritize what’s critical. In today’s world we all deal with a substantial amount of mental clutter. This distraction can make workers prone to incidents.

• Compliance fatigue. When faced with too many policies and procedures to remember, employees stop paying attention. Rules simply become background noise that everyone kind of knows but no one follows.

• Box-checking culture. This type of environment leads to a culture where the focus shifts to ticking off requirements, rather than careful assessment and prevention. This is short-sighted and opportunities to identify and correct hazards can be lost if they are not part of the normal procedure.

• Workarounds. When there are too many impractical rules, employees find ways to ignore or bypass them. If safety becomes too difficult or inconvenient for workers to follow, they will find a workaround. Every time. An overabundance of rules and procedures makes getting worker buy-in a nightmare.

Instead, setting fewer, simpler rules can be safer than complex systems. Prioritize those key rules that are non-negotiable, and consider reducing others that don’t add value.

What To Do Instead

Here are 5 steps for eliminating rule overload.

1. Prioritize: Identify the most critical rules that prevent serious harm.

2. Communicate clearly: Make sure everyone understands these rules. Use everyday language, visuals, and stories. If you have workers who speak different languages, make sure they are translated and accessible for all.

3. Engage workers: Involve them in shaping rules so they’re practical and realistic. People support what they help to create. Your workers do the job every day and have a good sense of what is important to do the job safely and what rules are consistently ignored or bypassed. They have a wealth of knowledge and feedback. Use it.

4. Enforce consistently: Once you’ve established a small list of non-negotiable rules, enforce them relentlessly. A few rules, enforced every time, build credibility. People know what to expect and act accordingly.

5. Review & prune: Finally, don’t be afraid to review the rules you have currently. Drop outdated or redundant rules regularly. Focus on the necessary and delete the rest.

A shorter rulebook can mean a safer workplace. The key is to find what’s important, implement it consistently and get your workers to do the same.

Are you struggling with rule overload in your workplace? What’s one safety rule in your workplace that everyone ignores? Can it be simplified or scrapped?

Let me know in the comments.

That’s it for this week, Safety Pro Weekly is published every Tuesday on LinkedIn and Substack.

Cheers,

Dan.

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Hey there, hope you had a great long weekend and a chance to refresh and relax!

This week I want to take a look at the psychology of safety and talk about why people don’t always follow safety protocols.

You would think that safety rules and procedures would be an easy sell. No one wants to get hurt.

Once you establish a safe work plan for a particular job, it’s a no-brainer that people would follow it to stay safe. Right?

If you’ve been in safety as long as I have, you know this is rarely the case.

The simple truth is, it’s not enough to have policies, procedures, rules and regulations in place to keep workers safe.

You have to get people to actually follow them.

In this issue:

· Why people take shortcuts.

· Overcoming “It won’t happen to me” bias.

· Using targeted communication to influence behaviour.

One thing that trips up many safety professionals is the fact that the psychological aspect of safety is just as important as rules, policies, or procedures. Your safety program is only as effective as the actions of your employees.

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All of the procedures, training and regulations in the world mean nothing if you can’t get people to follow them.

Read that again.

Let’s take a look at why this happens and what you can do about it.

Why People Take Shortcuts

In my 13-plus years of experience, 80-90% of incidents happen when people are rushing, distracted or taking some sort of shortcut. Yet no matter how many times I warn against it, people still make this mistake.

Why does this happen?

• Pressure to save time or meet production goals. Work pressure, deadlines and quotas are a fact of life. But when workers fall behind (or want to get ahead), the temptation to skip safety procedures, rush or take the easy way out can be substantial.

• Overconfidence from repetition or familiarity. Some workers, especially your most experienced workers, are prone to becoming overconfident and underestimating the risks of a particular action. Often, they’ll get away with taking risks many times and start to underestimate the risk. Until the one time that something goes wrong …

• Influence of peers. In some workplaces, taking risks and skipping steps to get the job done is encouraged. The overall culture is one of production first and everything else (often including quality, safety and customer experience) after. If this is your workplace, you’ve got your work cut out for you to change it. Start small and celebrate every win you can.

• It’s just easier. Sometimes the simple answer is that workers prefer the path of least resistance. If following safety procedures becomes difficult, time consuming, or cumbersome, some percentage of workers will skip it just to make life easier on themselves. Again, people can get away with it for a while, until one day something goes wrong, and they regret it.

Regardless of the reason, finding ways to get employees to follow the right procedures consistently is a big part of any safety professional’s responsibility.

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How to Overcome “It Won’t Happen to Me” Bias

Nobody comes to work in the morning thinking that today is the day they’re going to get hurt.

And yet, to hundreds of workers around the world each day, that’s exactly what happens.

One reason this happens is optimism bias. People frequently believe they are less likely than others to experience negative events. Psychologist Tali Sharot has done extensive research in this area and found that this bias is widespread and persistent in society.

In the workplace, this shows up as people not believing they will experience an accident despite seeing and knowing the hazards around them. Even when people are presented with accurate hazard information, they tend to only believe it if the new information is positive. The result is that workers often underestimate the level of risk they face.

Another reason is alarm fatigue. Workers become de-sensitized when exposed to frequent low critical alerts. This is essentially the “Boy who Cried Wolf” effect.

When workers are constantly warned about minor hazards, they start to pay less attention to any warning and become complacent about the actual risk.

So how do you combat these tendencies?

• Use real stories and case studies that make risks feel personal. Grounding safety information in real events rather than theory makes it seem more real and has greater impact.

• Encourage reflection and ownership of safety choices. Don’t just lecture about safety, encourage workers to reflect on safe choices and the consequences of making a wrong choice. Allowing workers to lead a team safety talk is a great way to encourage this. Give people a chance to speak up and contribute without fear of retribution.

• Reinforce that safety incidents can happen to anyone, regardless of experience. Help workers understand that incidents are not just something that happens to someone else. They can happen to anyone, without warning, and the best way to prevent them is to follow established procedures every time.

Using Targeted Communication to Build Good Habits and Influence Behaviour

Your best defense against these natural human tendencies is targeted communication.

One-size-fits-all messaging doesn’t work because people have varying motivations and communication preferences. Generic communication simply won’t resonate with most workers. If you want to get the message through, you’ll have to:

• Segment your communication by role, task, or experience level. Individualized communication is critical. Newer workers have different concerns than experienced workers, front line workers face different hazards than office workers. If you don’t want your message to go in one ear and out the other, you’ll have to tailor it to the right person at the right time.

• Repetition and reinforcement to strengthen habits. Studies show that up to 70% of information that is communicated verbally or in writing and not reinforced will be forgotten in 24 hours. If you want your message to stick, you’ll have to repeat it often. When your workers know what you’re going to say before you say, that’s a good sign you’ve gotten the message across.

• Making safety reminders specific, actionable, and relatable. Give people information that they can actually use. General reminders have their place, but you’ll get better traction with specific, direct advice that relates to the worker’s daily experience.

• Use peer leaders or champions to model safe behaviour. No matter how much people respect you as a safety leader, worker peer groups have the biggest influence on behaviour. If you can get worker leaders to model and promote good safety practices, your job as safety professional will be much easier.
  

The key point I want you to come away with today is that safety is not just about procedures and policies, but about understanding human behavior.

By addressing why shortcuts happen, overcoming biases, and using targeted communication, leaders can create a safer, more resilient workplace culture.

That’s it for this week, thanks for tuning in.

If you’re struggling with any aspect of health and safety in your workplace, let me know in the comments. I’ll make it a focus of a future article and perhaps we can chat and share perspectives.

Safety Pro Weekly is published every Tuesday on LinkedIn and Substack.

Have a great week,

Dan.

If, like me, you’re drawn to a field like Occupational Health and Safety, you’ve entered the field motivated to do something positive, to protect people and to make a difference.

Unfortunately, many professionals who enter the field motivated to make a difference, soon find themselves overwhelmed, stressed out and wondering if they should quit.

I’ve felt it myself.

Early in my career I saw a couple of serious injuries that were unfortunately life-changing for the people involved. I saw the long hours of therapy, emotional struggles, frustration with completing even simple daily tasks and thought, “If I can prevent even one more person from having to go through this, then I’ve done something positive with my life.”

And that thought has carried me through 13 years in the field.

Key Points at a Glance

· Burnout, stress and overwhelm are common among safety professionals.

· This is often a result of frequent conflict, lack of control and agency despite the high level of responsibility and the feeling of isolation in workplaces with small safety teams.

· Combatting this feeling requires a multi-factorial approach by reframing success, building allies where possible and focusing on high leverage tasks.

But there have been some rough moments. Days when you feel completely overwhelmed, drowning in deadlines, carrying the weight of the responsibility, feeling like you’re on a desert island shouting into the wind and no one seems to notice or care. Even the employees you’re trying to protect.

Long hours, compliance pressure, resistance from workers and managers, and in many companies being the 'one-person safety department' create exhaustion. It’s easy to disengage, go through the motions, or just move on to another career.

But it doesn’t have to be that way.

First let’s examine why many safety professionals quickly go from ready to save the world to burnout and stress.

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Why It Happens

Burnout among safety professionals is almost always one of these 5 reasons:

· Constant Conflict: In some workplace cultures, the safety department is seen as the bad guy. The person who holds up production, scolds people to wear their safety glasses and is basically as welcome as ants at a picnic. This wears you down over time and chips away at your motivation.

· High Responsibility, Low Authority: In some companies, the safety department has very little decision making authority. This combination of being responsible for everything, without agency to enact change leads to high levels of frustration and a feeling of helplessness.

· Emotional Toll: Investigating incidents, dealing with injuries, and carrying the weight of 'what if something goes wrong?' feels like a weight you carry with you every … single … day. Just as first responders are often at risk of PTSD from the experiences they have on the job, long time safety professionals can be at risk for emotional and mental burnout.

· Workload Creep: Safety gets everything from training to compliance paperwork dumped on them. Sometimes, security and quality too. Given the fact that most safety departments are understaffed, this is a recipe for stress, poor performance and undesirable outcomes.

· Isolation: Many safety professionals are the sole safety person in their workplace. Aside from the workload issues that creates, the feeling of isolation is even worse. Often there is no one else in the company with a thorough grounding in health and safety basics and this can leave you feeling like Tom Hanks in Castaway.

How to Fix It

So what can you do to reclaim your energy and enthusiasm for the job?

As with most things in life, there’s no easy answer. My suggestion is to start with small positive moments each day. Reach out to co-workers, build relationships and allies at your workplace. Those personal connections can be a lifeline when you’re struggling with the weight of responsibility.

Here are some other things that can help:

· Shift the Role from Cop to Coach: Worry less about enforcement and focus on coaching, not policing. Taking the approach of coaching people to help them stay safe is a much more positive and palatable approach for everyone involved than trying to be the bad cop all the time. Of course, sometimes you have to enforce the rules, but a softer approach can lead to less conflict more often than not.

· Prioritize & Protect: Ditch the busywork as much as possible. Use the 80/20 rule and identify the 20% of tasks that prevent 80% of incidents. Get the most important work done, but don’t try to be everything for everyone. It’s not possible and will take a heavy toll if you try.

· Build Allies: Recruit safety champions at every level, supervisors, frontline workers, anyone who can help to spread responsibility. Safety for an entire company is too much for one person to manage. The more you can get help, or even just advocates for safety, the easier it will be.

· Protect Yourself: If you had a co-worker who was constantly stressed, had trouble reaching out and was dealing with unreasonable work demands, wouldn’t you do everything in your power to protect that person? What if that person was you?

It’s not always easy but do your best to set realistic boundaries, take breaks and vacations, maybe join a professional network for support and ongoing learning to stay engaged. You might feel like you can’t afford to take the time for a break or vacation, but can you afford a long term leave or job change if the stress becomes too much? Better to build rest into your program before it becomes a health necessity.

· Reframe Success: Celebrate small wins, not just zero-injury streaks. As a safety professional Some days you feel like the Maytag repairman, some days you feel like the Captain of the Titanic. Take the successes where you can get them. Any single positive change could be the thing that prevents someone from a serious injury.

Burnout isn’t a sign of weakness, it’s the result of caring too much in a system that doesn’t always support safety. By protecting your energy, building support, and focusing on what matters most, you can stay effective and keep your passion for safety alive.

That’s it for this week.

Are you a safety professional who is suffering or has suffered from burnout? How did you change it? Or did you?

Let me know in the comments.

Safety Pro Weekly is published every Tuesday morning on LinkedIn and Substack.

Have a great week,

Dan

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