Safety on a Shoestring Budget: Pen-To-Paper

Dear Safety-Aware

PEN-TO-PAPER

Safety Tip #10 in the series:
SIMPLY SMART SAFETY
on a shoestring budget

  ◊  PREVENTION    ◊  PURPOSE
  ◊  PREPARATION    ◊  PEOPLE
  ◊  PROBLEMS    ◊  PAT-ON-BACK
  ◊  PLAN   ◊  PROGRESS
  ♦  PEN-TO-PAPER    ◊  PRO-ACTIVE

The purpose of this series is to give struggling-but-eager SHE professionals and practitioners, who are working for financially-constrained companies, pointers on how to get the safety awareness message across to both management and workers, on a shoestring budget.

PEN-TO-PAPER , OWNERSHIP and ACTION go hand-in-hand when it comes to implementing change and improving safety.

Changing well-entrenched habits and routines is a tricky business, requiring perseverance through the discomfort and resistance and inevitable desire to revert to the status quo. But the process of change can be oiled by sending, and making sure people get, the right message right.
To many people, walkabouts by management are seen like a royal state visit. The king & queen walking at the front and everyone else following behind, looking at what the king is looking at or finding wrong. Funny picture? For sure! So what needs to change? The plant / office / site owners should be leading the walk about, because they know their area. They know where the good, bad and ugly things are which the team should be looking at to improve and reinforce safety.
Everyone walking about must make it a HABIT to take their OWN NOTES and take OWNERSHIP and ACTION for fixing or improving things. That is *100 times better* than waiting for a report from head office in 4 weeks’ time! Often that is anyway too late - safety ACTION needs to be taken promptly, pro-actively, NOW. One most powerful reason for putting PEN-TO-PAPER is what it signals to the people on the plant / site / office. They see and take note of who is writing, because that sends a message that this must be important because the ‘boss’ is making a note. However, BEWARE, because this also creates an expectation – that something will be done.
Bottom line: do not only *WRITE, but ACT* upon what you have noted, and, most importantly, *make your intentions to act known* to those who are seeing you write.

For information about
PRESENTATIONS and TRAINING
on offer, click here.

If you would like a copy of my 'experiments' with change,
reply to this e-mail with "SHIFTTHEBED" in the SUBJECT.

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