Plugging Your Safety Program
He who has a thing to sell And goes and whispers
in a well, Is not so apt to get the dollars As he who climbs a tree
and hollers.
—Author unknown
You might as well face up to it — if you’re in “safety,”
you’re in sales.
Granted, unless you sell supplies to other companies,
you’re probably not asking people to give you money for a product.
Yet, as a safety and health professional you are asking people to
believe in something you’re “selling”— a safety
program.
Consider what happens when there’s a change in
a regulation which requires you to modify the way your employees
work. After presenting the change to management, you then must let
employees know about it. This means convincing them they need to
change their behavior. If you can’t convince employees that
it’s worth their time and effort to make the change, they won
t “buy” your sales pitch. That can make it difficult (if
not impossible) to implement the new standard. Simply put, you must
sell the change.
Your employees must by your safety program.
On a broader scale, the success of your entire safety
program rests on whether your employees buy it or not. You must
promote the program in a way that will convince workers to follow
it. (Interestingly, one definition for the word selling is “to
promote” and another is “to convince.”) As with any
sales campaign, if you want to sell safety successfully, you’ve
got to do some advertising.
There are loads of ways to advertise safety.
No doubt you’re using some already such as humorous
posters, large signs, and bulletin board notices. Your department
may even publish a monthly safety and health newsletter. Yet there
are still three important questions you need to continually ask
yourself: 1) Are we advertising our product often enough? 2) Has
our advertising campaign lost its punch? and 3) Do the advertisements
positively influence our audience?
Before you answer the first question, consider this:
Each year, on average, an American watches about 75
Coca-Cola commercials. Add that to the number of times he or she
sees a Coca-Cola ad in a store, on the side of a bus or on a billboard
and it’s obvious that Coke’s marketers want to bombard
you with their message: “Buy Coca-Cola.”
Is it too much? It would be if the ads never changed
or if they were boring. But Coke spends the money to make sure that
doesn’t happen. Though you may not drink Coca-Cola, it’s
still a fact that the company has persuaded millions of other people
to buy their products. Take a hint from this successful corporation
and advertise at every opportunity.
As for the second question, though your budget may
prohibit you from hiring Madison Avenue to keep the punch in your
promotion program, there are still many things you can do to keep
it lively. For example:
Rotate Your Posters
Most likely you change your safety and health posters
several times a year. Unless you have the same poster hanging throughout
the company (which is not a good idea), interchanging the different
posters is a simple way to increase their impact. Also, vary the
type of posters you buy. Not all of them should be serious nor be
in the same format.
Use Teasers
Advertise the words “More Than $4,000,000”
for a few days or weeks without explaining what they refer to and
you are using a teaser. A teaser’s purpose is to heighten interest
in the message that will later explain what the teaser is about.
This technique is effective when used sparingly. (In case you want
to use the teaser listed above here’s the follow-up message:
“Medical expenses for a serious head injury can add up to More
Than $4,000,000.” “A hard hat costs less than $50.”)
Say Something Different
The words “Safety First” may have a slight
impact on a person the first 300 times he sees or hears them, yet
eventually, they will become nothing but background noise. Get a
few co-workers together and do some brainstorming for new slogans.
It won’t take long before you’ll have a couple dozen snappy
sayings to choose from.
Use Different Mediums
Smart advertisers use several mediums (radio, television,
newspapers, direct mail, etc.) to reach their audience. You should
do the same thing. Don’t limit your campaign to posters, safety
meetings and flyers. Send letters to your employees. your company
has a voice mail system, why not use it to send out a message (such
as a reminder for employees to change the batteries in their smoke
detectors). You could even put short messages on the refrigerator
in the cafeteria.
The third question (Do the advertisements positively influence
our audience?) is the hardest to answer.
The most common advertising goal is to influence consumer
choice of a particular brand. It’s easy to determine which
brand of peas people are choosing. You may not be able to tie all
the sales to a specific commercial but you can easily tell when
sales are going up.
With safety promotions it’s
difficult to show that employees have chosen to change their behavior.
Unlike choosing a product, there is usually no record kept when
an employee chooses to work safely.
This doesn’t mean you can’t
find out if your advertising is effective. It just means it takes
more effort. Don’t rely on your accident rates, especially
if they are already low. You’ll need to survey employees, asking
them specific questions about your promotional campaigns as well
as getting data from inspections. Doing this correctly might take
extra time, but it’s not difficult to accomplish.
Is it worth the time and effort to advertise? Consider
the words of Joe L. Whitley, management consultant,
“If you think advertising doesn’t work, consider the millions
of Americans who now think yogurt tastes good.”
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