Comment: You’ll let your eyes wander when you think your spouse isn’t looking. Do you let your safety standards slip when you think the boss is away?
I was listening to Absolute radio last Saturday while washing my car and I’m sure I heard Frank Skinner say that in pretty much every movie Will Smith does, he ends up falling in love with one of women working on it. He then goes home and tells his wife and they have good laugh about it.
I don’t know about you, but my wife would have a serious sense of humour failure if I told her I was in love with another woman — although she took the news about my crush on Alex Jones (from the One Show) far better than I expected.
I wouldn’t dream of even looking at another woman when I’m out with my wife – the consequences of getting caught don’t bear thinking about. But when people are out without their spouse, they might let their eyes wander.
And, before you start protesting below the line, everyone does it a little bit. I know because I love watching people (not in creepy way — I am a student of people’s behaviour and body language). Everyone does it, even if most of us won’t admit it. The point is: people act differently when they think they won’t get caught.
This is definitely true when it comes to working safely. Most people will follow the rules when the gaffer is there, else the chances are at some point they’ll get in trouble. But the challenge is to stop their eyes wandering, or worse, when the boss isn’t there.
This is one of the biggest challenges we face in getting people to work safely. It’s hard to ensure that people are always adhering to safe working practices when you aren’t omnipresent.
I’ve used a few things over the years to overcome this and there are two that really stick in my mind.
The first was a short film showing the safe way to do something after which we interviewed a lad who was the first on the scene when his mate was seriously injured in an accident relating to the film’s subject. After a minute of this chap talking about what he’d seen, he welled up and I’m sure he started to cry (although he wasn’t the kind of guy you could ask, if you get my drift). In crew rooms all around the company you could hear his peers going “that could be me”.
The second was on a driver training course. At the end of the workshop the guy delivering it simply stood up and said “Do you know what? What’s really sad is the people making these things are doing a roaring trade,” as he held up an adult and a child-sized body bag.
I know that hit the mark because for months after, people at that workshop said that still haunted them and they change how they drive when they think about it.
No preaching needed, just raw emotion.
Have your say: What are the best ways you’ve come across to crack this particular nut?
I liked this Richard, it made me think about how much we actually practice what we preach! I’m not sure if i’d go quite as far as using shock tactics either (I believe we did all that in the 90’s with pictures of grusome eye and hand injuries etc). However, that said, the message I got from this article is clear – we’re not quite as ‘squeeky clean’ as we think we are! Also, I am very concious about how easy it is to believe ones own bull Sh*t and think that my way is the best or only way… Read more »
Good points
Very interesting, and a good point made, however a lot of people are very uneasy with shock tactics. Would you still use them today? What was the feedback from the participants like? I have in the past sent out hazard alerts and run awareness courses where the graphic content was deemed to be unsuitable or potentially offensive. So i guess the question is where is the line in what is considered the realms of decency when conveying the message to the intended audience. Is it acceptable to cause psychological torment to the audience to drive home the core message (Pardon… Read more »
It makes a good point. I do add photos to internal training sessions where there have been accidents/incidents to show what can happen – graphic enough but not the worst out there. They have to be relevant to what we do at the company but I always stress its not just for use at work but also at home. Adding personal notes and getting staff to join in the training helps as often they will bring up personal examples which re-inforces it. Personalising has the best effect and also we run training courses for smaller groups which helps (more times… Read more »
Hey Matthew, fair point. What I should say is that both were part of a wider behavioural safety programme. In the first, for example, all safety comms for the quarter were based on the issue in the film as too were the safety tours. Neither were that gruesome I don’t think, they just stirred an emotional response. I’m not sure I agree with shock tactics personally but others might …?