Hello and welcome. All right, so are you trying to decide whether or not to give a safety speech at your company, but maybe you’re not sure If it’s a good idea, not sure what to say, or if it’ll even work? We’ll stick around because I’m gonna tell you everything you need to know about safety speeches so you can decide exactly what to do.
I’ve given safety speeches in the past, and I’ve also spent many more years as a safety consultant. And I’ve seen and heard about all the different ways that company leaders have tried to use safety speeches, both good and bad, and how it can actually backfire on you if you’re not careful. So it’s important to understand that there’s a lot to consider before deciding whether or not to give a safety speech. And that’s what we’re gonna talk about today.
So I’m gonna break it down into five major areas. Number one, we’re gonna talk about, you know, what is a safety speech? What is a safety speech? Let’s start there. Number two, we’re gonna talk about what is typically included in a safety speech. What do you want to talk about? Number three, I’m gonna talk about what normally triggers a safety speech. You know, usually they just don’t happen randomly. There’s something that happens before that that triggers the need or the idea of giving a safety speech. Then number four, we’re gonna talk about what might sound like bad news at this point, but bear with me. We’re gonna talk about why they almost never work, and how, again, they can actually backfire on you if you’re not careful. So you definitely wanna stick around for that. And then we’re gonna end off talking about what really does work when you want a message about safety, what you have to do and what you should do, and what works better, uh, than a safety speech.
All right? So let’s go ahead and jump into each one of these. So, you know, number one, [00:02:00] what is a safety speech? So, a safety speech is typically a reminder about the importance of safety, a reminder message about the importance of safety at a company.
And that word reminder is important because it’s, it’s a reactive type thing. And I’m gonna talk more about that in a minute and why that’s important. Um, number two, let’s talk about what’s typically included in a safety speech. So again, a safety speech is messaging about the importance of safety. So here are the typical things that you want to talk about. You want to say things like, you know, safety is the number one priority at your company, but before you say that, you wanna make sure that that’s actually true, right? And we’re gonna talk more about how this can backfire on you if you’re not careful. Uh, number two, you want to talk about, you know, related to that first point, you want to make sure that your employees understand that you, uh, have a top priority to make sure that they go home back to their families at the end of every day in the same healthy and safe condition that they arrived in the morning. You don’t want any serious injuries. You don’t want, god forbid, any fat fatalities. You want people to go home safely to their families every night. Number three, you want to talk about things like the importance of injury and accident prevention. Prevention’s a key messaging point when you talk about safety. So these are the kinds of things that you want to talk about in a safety speech, but again, you wanna make sure your company’s actually doing something and reinforcing safety and not just talking about it.
So that leads to, uh, point number three. What typically triggers a safety speech? So, again, as I mentioned before, it’s a reminder about the importance of safety. So it’s, in other words, it’s reactive. So it’s reactive to these, these common occurrences. Number one, maybe the company, you know, had a near miss, somebody almost got hurt. Uh, number two, maybe, you know, God forbid you had a serious injury or, or even a fatality, which, you know, a lot of companies kinda live, uh, in denial that that could ever happen to them. But unfortunately, the statistics don’t lie. People get killed and get seriously injured on the job every single day across the country. So maybe that’s happened at your company, and now that triggers the need, uh, to remind about the importance of safety, or maybe somebody in management or supervision. Notice that an employee was, you know, doing some kind of a unsafe act, maybe climbing up, storage racks, maybe horseplay with a forklift, whatever it might be. That could also trigger a safety speech.
Another thing that might happen, maybe you’re rolling out a new safety program and you want to give a safety speech to talk about how the company is now committing, uh, to safety. So that leads us to point number four, and this is something that’s really important to understand something that you might want not want to hear, but it, it’s important to understand this.
I’m gonna talk about now why safety speeches almost never work. And I know this from my own experience giving them, and I know this from talking to, uh, some of our clients and business owners that I’ve known over the years who have tried to employ safety speeches. Here’s why they almost never work, and I’ve alluded to this already in this video. And that’s the fact that they’re almost always reactive, right? So I talked about the different triggers, uh, that can come up where somebody comes up and tries to remind their team about the importance of safety, their reactive, and just like like anything else in life and in business, anything that’s reactive and not proactive typically isn’t gonna work very well. And here, let me talk now about how it can actually backfire on you. So if the company leader or manager of stands in front of the, the staff and starts talking on and on about the importance of safety in a safety speech, but the employees know that the company isn’t really committed to safety because there’s no safety program, you know, there’s no employee safety training that’s going on.
You know, the, the CEO or the owner or maybe management walks around in the manufacturing area without, safety glasses or without a hard hat, whatever the PPE that everybody else wears. If, if those kind of conditions are going on, the company doesn’t actually have a safety program, but yet the leader or a manager is standing in front of the group talking about how important safety is. You can imagine how that’s gonna be received, that people are gonna be scratching their heads and talking to each other. It’s like, Wow, this guy, you know, my manager, the owner of this company is up there talking about the importance of safety, but we don’t even do anything about safety. We had this bad accident happen, or we had this near miss happen. Now they’re trying to, you know, jam safety down our throats, but we don’t have any sort of a safety program at the company.
So that’s where it can really backfire on you if you don’t have a functioning safety program, and then you stand up there in front of your company and talk about the importance of safety, you know, it doesn’t land well because it’s hypocritical. You’re not really actually doing anything. You’re just talking and talk is cheap. You know, actions, uh, speak louder than words. We all know that. So that’s where it can really backfire on you. So if you don’t have a functioning safety program, you’re not actually proactively out there managing a safety program, it’s very dangerous to stand up and talk about the importance of safety. It really is.
All right. So having said all that, let’s go ahead and talk about what actually does work when trying to message about safety to your company. Uh, instead of using a, uh, a safety speech like we talked about, the only way to really properly message about safety, I’ve already alluded to it.You actually have to build a safety program. Um, there’s no substitute for building a safety program. In other words, no safety speech, no matter how well said, and developed and delivered to your team, will never substitute for building and managing a safety program. In other words, your employees have to see your, uh, what we call in the industry management commitment. They need to see that, uh, there’s consistency there, that there’s commitment there. So what does that look like? Building a safety program, um, you know, there’s a lots of safety programs. If you’re a small manufacturing or industrial companies, you have a company, you have to start at the baseline. And the baseline is OSHA compliance. You need to build an OSHA compliance program that meets all the federal standards for the Occupational Safety and Health Administration. So what does that look like? You gotta have a customized written program that meets all your requirements. You have to implement a customized safety training plan to train all your new employees and existing employees. You have to conduct routine inspections to identify and fix safety hazards. In some states, you have to have a safety committee. Um, those are the kind of things, those are the main components of a safety program. So that’s how you message and, uh, deal with safety at your company. You build and you manage the safety program. You show your employees that you’re committed, you show that consistency. That is the only way to do it. There are no shortcuts. So I know that’s, uh, that’s a lot different than you might have expected, uh, when you started the video wanting to learn about safety speeches. But there is no substitute for, uh, a safety program. Safety speeches typically don’t work. I talked about the how it can backfire on you. If you don’t have a functioning safety program, your employees just won’t listen. It’ll go, it might last for a day or two, but they’re gonna forget about it if they don’t see that consistency over time.
All right? So having said that, if you have any experience trying to give safety speeches, maybe you have better luck than what I’m talking about. Feel free to, uh, comment on it below. I’d love to hear from you and I promise to respond to any of your comments. And having said all that, having gone through all this, if you find yourself, uh, you know, believing and understanding that you really do need to build a safety program, I want to tell you about a great new option that we’re rolling out now. It’s actually a safety training program that trains your staff how to build and manage an OSHA compliance program, like how I described before, at a fraction of the normal cost of either hiring a full time employee, hiring a safety consultant. Not only do we train your staff on how to build and manage the safety program, but we also give you virtual support to our team of experts. So they’re there on a weekly basis to answer your questions, guide you through the maze of building a program, managing the safety program, um, and again, all at a fraction of the cost of, of the traditional methods of building and manages, managing a safety program. So if that sounds interesting to you and you wanna learn more about it, click on the link below the video to schedule a strategy call. I’ll tell you all about how the program works. You can tell me about your company and what you need help with, and, uh, we’ll see if there’s a good fit there. Thanks for reading, and I’ll see you next time.
