What a Safety Speaker Wants You to Know: It’s About the Names, Not the Numbers
Let’s be honest: safety regulations aren’t exactly the most exciting topic. Whether your audience wears hard hats or only marginally comes into contact with dangerous substances working in an office, they don’t want to have their work interrupted just to sit through a long presentation on statutes that got updated.
A workplace safety speaker can help put your organization on the right track to adopting an organization-wide safety culture that does more than just prevent physical injuries. Safety culture is also about interpersonal relationships. So when it comes to keeping stress down and safe operating procedures up in the workplace you have to focus more on relationships than rules! How do you accomplish that? A safety speaker can teach your employees how to communicate better. Relationships often come before rules in so many aspects of life, and workplace safety is definitely one of them.
It’s a matter of putting names before numbers. Numbers are convenient for categorization and easily measurable metrics. Soft skills are unfortunately difficult to measure. So you need to change your focus to the names. Why do some employees get more stressed out than others? What situations are causing conflict among team members and what can management do to address these issues?
When it comes to solving workplace safety problems, it’s easy to take a similar approach by thinking solely about regulations and how to stay compliant with them. It’s easy enough to print some pamphlets and hand them out to employees informing them of subsequent policy changes or calling a meeting to discuss them. But a frequently-overlooked fact is that the root of the trouble staying compliant with regulations is that the culture that fosters safety and strong communication is often lacking.
Take it from a leading workplace safety speaker who’s led companies through regulatory changes hundreds of times: it’s not a time to focus solely on safety regulations, but on how management can build an enduring safety culture. Knowing your employees’ names and concerns will be more helpful than the code sections that were just changed
