10 Ways to make your Safety Culture Suck

Are your safety efforts are stuck in the past?  Unfortunately, some companies think of safety as an afterthought ensuring that it is never fully integrated into the organisation.  Thereby, ensuring that safety is never properly embedded into the company.

While I generally use our blog to give safety professional's advice, helpful tips and how-to's, sometimes it's also beneficial to understand what a "bad safety culture" looks like, so you know exactly what to avoid - that way you can create a thriving environment for safety.

So if you're curious about what you should be doing to totally suck at managing safety, read on.

Here are 10 ways to ensure your safety culture performs poorly:

1. Employ grumpy supervisors - Make sure when you hire supervisors that they don't like people - in particular senior management and frontline staff.  Ensure they prefer to hide information because they've got some weird power issues and intensely dislike open communication.  It's even better if they like to avoid or ignore people with any safety issues or concerns.  Better still, make sure they are really bad at safety and do all of the processes wrongly in front of staff, yet pull other people up for their bad behaviour in a heavily critical way.  Make sure they are allergic to giving positive feedback, prefering to criticise.
2. Written training manuals - Supply staff with 150 page training manuals with no pictures, video content or photos.  Use lots of long sentences and big words, that make you look smart.  Make sure the sentences are not in the right order of how the task is done. 
3. Use managers who don't like to train - Have all new starters trained by managers who are overworked, unfriendly and who dislike spending time training.  Ideally, they flick through the training manual and say things like "You don't need to do that, we never do" and "We've changed that process.  Head office doesn't know what they're talking about" and "Just read this and I'll be back" (taking about 2 hours to return).
4. Have senior managers who dislike safety - Make sure senior management intensely dislike safety and see it as boring and a waste of money.  Ideally, they dislike talking to safety professionals and always say "no" to being involved with leading any safety initiatives.  
5. Every department operates individually - Encourage turf wars where every department competes with one another for budget or CEO approval.  Ideally, departments do not collaborate and see safety as a separate cost and not part of any project.
6. Let equipment break down - Ensure all of your equipment is barely working and staff have to learn innovative ways to get them to work.  Ideally, maintenance is done when equipment is totally broken down.  Supply PPE with holes in it and make people wait weeks to receive safety gloves that are on "back-order".
7. Blame people for poor safety - When there is an accident or incident, blame the person and let them know it's because they're stupid.  Let everyone know that safety is bad because well, essentially they are.    Ensure people are aware that safety can't be improved because they can't be.
8. Distrust experts - Avoid any internal or external help, in particular any that have any marketing or sales expertise because that has nothing to do with safety.  After all, marketing is all about tricking people.  Ensure all your safety communication is written by real safety professionals (preferably self-righteous and who don't like to learn new things) and who have never had any training in communication and like to talk to people (in a monotone voice) until they fall asleep in meetings.
9. Have really boring tool box talks - Ensure your supervisors make the toolbox talks go on and on with no actions or decisions made.  Have staff turn up who don't want to raise any issues.  Make sure there is one or two people who just like to complain without offering a solution and who rally the rest of the employees to be on their side. 
10. Let staff play - Encourage staff to play around dangerous equipment and play jokes on each other.  Of course, this can mean staff tease other people about little things like their hair colour, skin colour, religion, IQ level and gender. Ignore it when people come to work drunk or high and start covertly drinking.  (My favourite is a boss I had who would hide his wine glass behind a picture of his family on his desk from around 11am in the morning.  Let's just say he got very angry, if you said anything).

What else can you do to totally suck at safety?  Write your comments below.