Getting buy-in for safety changes
Any management job, from a warehouse supervisor to a safety professional, involves getting other people to accept your ideas. That in turn requires an understanding of human motivations. You want workers to support your ideas, not merely to accept them grudgingly.
Getting workers to make changes isn’t easy. Dozens of books and hundreds of articles have been written to explain change management. These sources often cover various aspects of how to be a more successful manager, and how to interact with others more effectively.
From all that research, a few concepts keep recurring:
- People are more likely to accept something new if they took part in developing the process, like participating in meetings that solicit their feedback.
- People are more likely to accept something new if they see the value to themselves, like saving time or effort.
- People are more likely to feel job satisfaction if they know that their efforts are appreciated, like getting positive feedback from their leaders.
The challenge for managers is putting all of that into practice. Reading a few books on management doesn’t make you a better manager, any more than reading a few books on tennis makes you a better tennis player.
Individual approaches
The second challenge is the saying, “you can’t please all of the people all of the time.” Each worker has different motivations, preferences, and priorities. A manager must either adjust the approach to each worker’s preferences, or create a delivery that appeals to several types of motivations.
In the end, change management is about getting buy-in. You must “sell” your ideas and convince others to “buy” them. This is best done by convincing the buyer that the idea has value and is worth adopting. An authoritarian approach may work sometimes (telling others what to do “because I said so”), but workers are more likely to accept and support a change if they see the value, provide input, and understand how the change positively impacts them.
