Are you safe?  Are you sure? This is no small question.

At an industrial worksite in Alberta, Bill asked to meet with people who were experienced with the worksite and the people working there. He asked them what the biggest challenge was for them when it came to safety. One older, clearly experienced worker, looked at Bill and said, ”Trying to convince the young people coming on site that people can get hurt bad here, and even die. The culture here has a lot of bravado and ego. It makes people do stupid things and it needs to change. But old habits die hard. Pardon the pun.” Bill knew this man was speaking from his lived experience and from his heart. This man was speaking about people working with an unsafe mindset that is all too pervasive in a culture focused on productivity over all else. They weren’t Seeing Through Safety Glasses and many couldn’t see the danger this veteran of the worksite spoke of.

At a job site where the walls were papered with the slogan “Safety is Job #1” Bill was shown reports which detailed a vast number of under reported “near misses”. As safety folks all know, ‘near misses’ are simply safety incidents that haven’t happened yet. Through this experience, and many more like it, Bill learned that slogans like “safety first” can be problematic. Where there are habits, biases, and unconscious workplace protocols operating unseen and unchecked they are even dangerous and the results often deadly. Safety isn’t just a slogan; it has to be a mindset, a way of seeing.

Much more than just rules and protocols, Seeing Through Safety Glasses shows ways of seeing safety as a mindset and then acting from that mindset. It is about anticipation. It is also about the individual and collective responsibility for changing our workplace to make it safer for everyone.

From mining, to oil rigs, highway driving, to government, food production, transportation, health care, volunteer organizations, to work in theatre, the principles of Seeing Through Safety Glasses remain the same. How to get into this mindset and share it are the core learnings that come from this keynote.

At its core, building a culture of safety is about building an empathic and caring community.

Safety also means being safe emotionally, socially, with mental health and cultural considerations at the forefront of a truly safe workspace. Safety from all forms of harassment and bullying are essential. Too often this area of workplace safety is overlooked. By helping people understand the neuroscience of interpersonal exchange, Bill shows how our brains can work for or against us where safety is concerned. Cognitive biases are everywhere in our society. Cognitive biases are mental shortcuts we use every day, often unaware we are even using them. One we see a lot these days is the bandwagon bias. This is where if everyone else is thinking and acting in a particular way so we might as well too. This can lead to going along with the crowd even when the crowd is wrong. Or the Anchoring Bias, where we latch on to the first bit of information we hear about a topic and are reluctant to change our minds, despite better evidence to the contrary. It’s easy to see how these biases could lead to wrong headedness. And these are just a couple of the biases Bill looks at and shows how they can be invisible dangers in a number of workplaces.

Bill maintains, “When it comes to safety - physical and emotional - all the rules in the world will not make any difference if the mindset is not right. If you aren’t Seeing Through Safety Glasses, then you and your co-workers are at risk.”

Seeing Through Safety Glasses is where people and profitability walk in lockstep. It is essential for the worker, critical for families, and profitable for companies – everybody wins!