Trusted Leader Blog

One November evening in 1987, commuters were busily rushing home from work on the London Underground.

When it comes to getting staff to remember your important safety messages, using a safety slogan can be an effective way of getting the message through.

But not all safety slogans cut it.  A lot of them are quite bland and well, just not catchy.  Given that we're bombarded with around 3,000 messages a day, your safety slogan will become invisible and ineffective pretty quickly.

To ensure that your workplace safety communication is engaging, you need to have a stand out safety slogan.  When choosing or designing your safety slogan, there are a few things you need to consider, to make sure your safety slogan is memorable.

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.

We've all experienced the critical, negative work colleague who puts a dampener on everything.  They complain about the boss, other staff members, customers, new initiatives and always seem to see something sinister lurking behind a new initiative.  They only seem to laugh when someone hurts themselves.

Safety professionals often complain about how hard it is to get people to listen to them about safety. This is often a subtle sign that it might be time to change how they approach communicating the need for safe behaviours, rather than getting frustrated that it's not working.  After all, as Einstein said:

Researchers have found that institutional habits exist in almost every organisation.  Interestingly, one of the main differences between a company that outperforms on safety versus a poor performing company with safety are their safety habits.

We've all experienced being at a company speech and feeling our anger grow as the company leader waffled on about a whole lot of stuff we knew wasn't entirely accurate and wasn't based in any achievable reality.

Back in 1987, every Alcoa plant, worldwide, had at least one accident per week.  It was dangerous work.   Molten metals bubbled at 1,500 degrees and machines that could literally rip off a man's arm were used every day.  It was commonly accepted that some staff wouldn't make it home.

If there is one thing that safety managers despair about, the world over, is how to get their staff to be more engaged and responsible for safety.

On August 5, 1997, Korean Air airplane Flight 801, crashed killing 228 people.