Insurance Insight: Avoid message backfire

A large government agency that will remain nameless (its motto is “The world’s greatest science protecting America”) recently sponsored a safety campaign encouraging employees to hold handrails when using the stairs. Two human resources employees stood at the top of the stairs and handed out candy bars to employees who used the banister as they traversed the stairwells. Although this may be a great idea in some circumstances, this is probably not such a hot idea when you’re dealing with scientists such as those in this agency, with IQs probably higher than their body weight.

Perception is reality, in most people’s minds. If employees perceive a risk management idea as absurd, it sets your risk management program back a big step. They may take up the chant to deride your efforts. Unless you effectively deliver a message in a way that employees don’t perceive as demeaning, employees will stop listening. Then when there’s a critically important issue — not that falling on the stairs isn’t important — they will have already tuned you out.

Remember the duct tape advice after the anthrax scare in 2003? How many people felt safer or were more likely to listen to the Department of Homeland Security’s advice after that official recommendation? Words have power and it’s sometimes better to use no words than to pick the wrong words or the wrong issue and send a message that backfires.

When I was the first risk manager for a city of 30,000 people, some longtime managers perceived me as a green-eyed devil that came to wreck their game. In the beginning, they baited me continuously. In an early management meeting when I was presenting a new policy on reporting all injuries, one of the most irascible managers asked me, “What if an employee gets a paper cut? Should I report that, too?” It was around the time a lawyer had lost his leg after he acquired a horrific infection from a paper cut, but I didn’t mention that. What I did do was lose my cool and bark out an answer.

When he asked that question, which I knew was a set up, I snapped, “Yes. Make a note in your Daytimer!” The message these hecklers took away from the meeting was that I was an idiot who said to report a paper cut. That’s not what I said, but it took me months to overcome that remark and get some of the tougher managers to take me seriously.

I learned after a painful first year in that position that I needed to carefully consider what I said, how I introduced changes and how I promoted safety. I began to use the rifle approach to risk management, not the shotgun approach. I looked at where our losses were occurring, where communication was breaking down, what I could reasonably do to educate employees about these concerns, and focused my efforts there. I also found that the majority of the managers were willing to work with me, so until there was more organizational buy-in to risk management, I focused my efforts on those who wanted to work with me. Most of the others eventually came along, perhaps because I stopped pushing.

Because we’re so enthused about safety, we assume that others are as well. Generally, they aren’t. Campaigns like the great candy-bar giveaway may win a temporary battle because risk professionals feel they did something, but they lose the war because employees tune out the safety message. When setting our sites on safety, we have to aim carefully.

After the candy bar campaign, one of the organization’s employees wrote this comment, which made its way into the blogosphere: “This seems like a misguided joke. I demand a focus group. I want experts with $100,000 taxpayer-financed salaries to come up with a thousand new rules to protect me from myself. What’s next? Will we have to get ‘stair safety certification training’ before we can work? Actually, in trying to control all the little risks, we fall to the biggest risks: losing perspective and losing our edge.”

I couldn’t have said it better myself. v

Nancy Germond, ARC, AIC, is a risk management consultant in Jefferson City. Visit her Web site at www.insurancewriter.com or reach her by phone at 573-638-3738