Strengthen Your Employee Relationships and Make Your Company a Safer Place
Janitorial Safety Training Doesn’t Have to be Boring!
Today Mike discusses the best ways to implement a janitorial safety training program with April Williams, owner of A and A Cleaning. A & A cleaning has been experiencing great growth, with that comes the need of implementation of new things for the employees and company. Safety is important to April. She wants to make sure her employees get the most benefit out of the new program.

First and foremost it all starts with culture. Safety is such an integral thing. It would be very challenging to take a culture that doesn’t have safety as a part of it’s core beliefs and then try to add that on.

For the last 20 years, Mike’s core values have been Have Fun, Make Money, Be Real, and Help out. If you ask anyone that has worked for him, hopefully even today they would be able to rattle those off without problem. He also just put together an A-Z guide on starting and growing a cleaning business you guys should check out.

RESOURCE ALERT: Learn more about discovering your core values on this episode
For April, family, employees and great work relationships are the basis for her core values. Based on those concepts, safety is going to flow right out of those. The safety of her employees is paramount to their family and loved ones.

Mike encourages her to share “We are here not to make me rich, but to bring value to the community, our company and you, our employees. In that, we have to make sure we don’t hurt you and you are safe. If you’re getting hurt or dying on the job, then we haven’t made you as important as we say you are in our core values. Your family has entrusted us to make sure you come home safe every night and we are going to do that.”

So if your family is as important to you as you say it is by sharing our core values, your safety and continuation on safety training should be just as important to you.

KEY POINT: Start with the “safety lifestyle” and with the core values.
It’s very difficult to get people who don’t believe in something to believe in something. If your employees aren’t there because they believe in family, community and having good relationships with other employees and their employers and are only there for a paycheck, it’s going to be an uphill battle to get them to buy into safety as a priority.

But, if they already share your core beliefs, taking care of themselves and their co-workers will dovetail nicely with that foundational belief. If you already have a culture of “we care about each other’s families and they have entrusted you with us”, it’s easy to put fuel onto that fire.

RESOURCE ALERT: Check out this episode on finding and keeping amazing employees with your core values
Next, is lifestyle, lifestyle, lifestyle! If you want your employees to be excited about a janitorial safety training program you shouldn’t just announce, “this is a new safety program and we’re all going to follow it and you’re all going to fall in line.”

KEY POINT: Make it fun and interactive!
If you want your employees to really benefit from a janitorial safety training program, it has to be fun and engaging. Start cultivating safety stories, good and bad. Give examples of someone who did did something right that avoided a potential accident/wrong. Tell those stories on a daily if not weekly basis.

Currently, April has weekly meetings on Monday’s with her employees, Mike encourages her to not add an additional meeting just about safety but to infuse it into the current meetings. Encourage your employees to share a story of when someone in the company exemplified one of their core values. This is a great opportunity for your team to lift other members up and recognize them for their good work.

FUN IDEA: Videos are a fun and easy tool to use to engage your employees.
These days they’re cheap, easy and fun to do. We all have cameras in our phones, editing software is virtually free and very user friendly. You can make safety a quarterly theme and encourage your employees to have a competition on who can make the best safety video. They could make a fun video breaking all the rules, doing things wrong and having fun.

Make a competition for the best video and the winners get a gift certificate or something to recognize their work.

The last part of the janitorial safety training equation is pay. Any time you want to modify a behavior it’s typically done with culture and pay.

BONUS VS RAISES

Mike is huge fan of Bonus’ over raises. Raises are permanent and cultivate a behavior of entitlement and they just get more money for showing up. But bonuses will encourage them to continue doing above and beyond work to earn that extra money. Raises aren’t inherently a bad thing but they’re a very sharp sword. They can do both good and bad, but you have to be very careful on how you use them.

Now that you’re armed with the foundation for implementing a successful janitorial safety training program in your business, get started! Let us know how you do!

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