Episode 190: Meaningful Safety Experience

In this episode of Leading & Learning Through Safety, Dr. Mark French explores the intersection of meaning, leadership, and generational diversity in the workplace.

Drawing from his leadership training experiences, Mark reflects on the importance of making safety training meaningful to individuals. He explains that without personal relevance, training often fails to influence behavior. A powerful story from early in his career illustrates how meaning can shift when context changes—what once felt pointless gained value when reframed as building a shared vocabulary.

Mark then connects this concept of “meaningfulness” to generational differences. Each generation—Baby Boomers, Gen X, Millennials, and Gen Z—approaches mental and physical health differently. Baby Boomers often take a “tough it out” stance and focus on treatment rather than prevention. Gen X tends to internalize their skepticism, handling health issues quietly. Meanwhile, Millennials and Gen Z are far more open, expecting robust support systems for both mental health and workplace safety.

The challenge for leaders is bridging these diverse perspectives to create programs that resonate across the workforce. Mark stresses the importance of diverse safety committees, collective dialogue, and flexible approaches—whether through collaboration, written feedback, or structured discussion.

Ultimately, leaders must be influential motivators, guiding people toward safe behaviors not through mandates but by creating meaning, fostering trust, and making the safe choice the easiest choice.

This episode reminds us that safety culture isn’t one-size-fits-all—it’s about finding meaning in diversity and using it to drive connection, influence, and safety excellence

Episode Transcript

Mark French (00:01):
This week on the podcast, I'm going to focus a
little bit on generationaldifferences in the workplace.
How does that affect ourleadership? How does that affect
our safety, our mental health,all those things this week on
the podcast,

Unknown (00:22):
you welcome

Announcer (00:33):
to the leading and learning through safety podcast.
Your host is Dr Mark French,marks passion is helping
organizations motivate theirteams. This podcast is focused
on bringing out the best inleadership through creating
strong values, learningopportunities, teamwork and

(00:54):
safety, nothing is moreimportant than protecting your
people. Safety creates anenvironment for empathy,
innovation and empowerment.
Together, we'll discover meaningand purpose through shaping our
safety culture. Thanks forjoining us this episode and now
here is Dr Mark French,

Mark French (01:30):
foreign Welcome to this episode of the leading and
learning through safety podcast.
So happy you've joined me. Sohappy you put me into your
podcast rotation, glad, glad tobe here. This week. I have been
one working on a trainingpackage that I created that I

(01:50):
really enjoy, and it's like atwo day leadership training. And
when I say leadership, it'sreally focused on influence, and
it's focused on learning aboutour differences in so many
different ways, a lot ofdifferent tools and assessments
are thrown out to help discoverthat we're very different in

(02:11):
very simple ways, sometimes justas the way we collect and use
data and Send it back out andcommunicate it. It's complex
that made me step back again, asI normally do, because I get
tied up in my own headfrequently. Is thinking more
about the word meaningful. Nowthat was one of the key words in

(02:36):
my dissertation, in my researchwas in the world of safety, in
the world of just safetytraining. How do we define that
word? How do we define thatword, that it was meaningful to
someone, and how do we conveymeaning and meaningfulness to
someone else, or does it matterto that person? And that is the

(02:59):
real issue with safety trainingin the workplace, in my opinion,
is that if we can make itmeaningful to someone, then it
has an impact, and it probablywill start to begin to change a
behavior of some form orfashion. It plants the seed.
Maybe it's a dramatic change,maybe it's a minor change, maybe

(03:20):
it's any change, but it firsthas to be meaningful to that
person, which is, again, we takeanother step back. That's the
hard part, because we thinkabout the diversity that is in
our workplace, and not just tostand all the different types,
generational, background,mental, physical, all those

(03:42):
things. We take those intoaccount. We go. How do we make
meaning with the limited amountof time we have with each person
and even some people I'm I thattruly believe that maybe safety
isn't something important, howdo we even begin to create
meaning there. And do we evenfocus our time there? Because we
look at a bell curve or a normalstandard deviation there, and we

(04:06):
go, there's some people who aregoing to pick it up immediately
and run with it. There's amajority of people who can go,
Okay, I kind of get it. There'sgoing to be a small percentage
that just don't care. And weunfortunately spend so much time
on those that we may lose trackof trying to figure out the

(04:26):
rest, and so getting 100% ispractically impossible when it
comes to creating meaning forthat. Now that's a lot, but
really what I'm trying to getback to is meaning in that
purpose of that training is verypersonal to each individual. Now
we can take a scatter shotapproach and try to hit a few

(04:48):
things and try to create it, andsometimes meaning comes from the
conversations afterward, becauseI distinctly, distinctly
remember i. A training that Iwent through very early in my
career that was like a it was afive, why training, and it was a
different style of five, whythat was kind of rolling out in
the automotive world. And theybrought in a trainer, and they

(05:11):
trained it. And it was to me, itwas boring. It was, you know,
not practical. It wasn't itreally just to me, it. I felt
like there was no meaning in it,that I'd wasted a lot of time
sitting in this conference roomlistening to this and going, oh
my gosh, this doesn't help mesolve anything like the

(05:31):
traditional methods we alreadyhave worked so much better. And
the next morning, the HR managerhad come in, who I worked for,
because I was on night shift,and I sat down. He goes, Hey,
did you go through the trainingline? Like, yeah, I did. He
goes, what you think? And I'mlike, I was pointless. Hated it,
hated every bit of it. Didn'tlike it. And gave me my little
like, new person in the theworkplace rant, feeling all

(05:54):
important. And he looked at me.
He said, You know, one thing toconsider, though, is that now
you have a similar vocabularythat you didn't have before,
because that was still fairlynew with the rest of the team
like you are now using. You nowunderstand some of the language
that's wanting the corporatewants us to start begin to use

(06:17):
maybe, but also they're going tohave to begin to use it in
operations and inventory and allthose other areas you now have a
chance to speak the samelanguage, well, suddenly there
was more meaning in thattraining than I thought. So even
meaning can change the personalfeeling of that had a meaningful

(06:38):
impact in my career, in my lifeand my personal it changes
depending on even how someoneapproaches it or which, again,
I'm only making it morecomplicated, and I don't mean
to, but unfortunately, it's noteasy. This is one of the most
complicated topics we talkabout, and I think safety is

(07:03):
that leadership. Is that why?
Because we have to appeal to somany different people. We are
truly influential motivators. Wehave to motivate through
influence. We have to createmeaning through influence all
the time. That is the purposebehind it is to understand what

(07:26):
we need to do to maintain ourlegality. And then how do we
take that and turn that intosomething our team can do, will
do, and overall wants to do. Howdo we make that choice, the
easiest choice for them to make?

(07:48):
And so I took it deeper, and Istarted thinking about, let's
just take one piece of it, andgenerationally, that is
something I look at, is that theworkplace generally,
generationally is so diverseright now we have a lot of
different thought processes andshaping of generational

(08:12):
differences. A lot dealing withhow fast information is coming
at us, with how we react withthat when we look at like some
of the gaps of like, BabyBoomers were like a 20 year
span. Gen X people weresomewhere around a 15 year span.
Millennials, then we're jumpingdown to about 15 years again.

(08:34):
But then we move into like 10year and the divisions even like
subdivisions of them, we'regenerally generationally
separating a little faster. Ithink because of the way that
information is spreading. Canvery unscientific process there,
but it feels, and some of theearly research would indicate

(08:55):
it's a lot about how fastinformation is traveling and how
fast we're connecting andcreating those connections and
differences, and even when welook at what the generational
divides are with creatingmeaning to each just the just by
the year you were born, lookingat how you perceive meaning in

(09:17):
the things The workplace isdoing is huge. There are big
gaps. And of course, when wetalk generations and we put
those labels on, people think ofthe bell curve. There are there
are the majority that set withinthe bell there are those who are
outside. There are those who aredeclining. But it's a very

(09:38):
generalized word. It does notapply to everyone, not in the
shame same kind of scope or orintensity. It's a
generalization. I have to saythat, that always when I say
these things, I makes me feelbetter. To put the caveat there,
to say that, hey, it's just ajob. Generalization that lets so

(10:01):
we're able to have theconversation. There's always
inside, outside of that. Let'sjump into that a little bit
deeper in the second half of theleading and learning through
safety podcast, you arelistening to

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Mark French (11:00):
and welcome back to the second half of the leading
and learning through safetypodcast this week. I started off
by talking about meaning and howwe create meaning in a
leadership safety style program,and now we're moving into
generational differences and howbig the gap is. And I work with
this a lot. There's a lotthere's a lot of people out

(11:21):
there who are a lot better atunderstanding these generational
gaps and what those mean. Thatmean, I've done my own very,
very basic research, but enoughto try to get some understanding
of just the depth of what we'rehaving to accomplish when we
bridge the gaps, when we standin front of people and say,

(11:41):
safety is important. Why is itimportant to each individual?
And just by looking at thegenerational differences,
there's some big gaps there. AndI looked at a combination of,
how do they approach mental andphysical health in the
workplace, and it's very, verydifferent, because we go back to

(12:03):
baby boomers who are starting toexit the workplace more, but
still here, still here, so veryin again, when I talk about the
generations, there's no good,there's no bad, there's no more
important, least important,better, worse. We are what we
are, and we've accomplished alot in each each brings their

(12:24):
own wonderful traits to theworkplace. So I'm a very I'm a
very much on a positive thing,but we have to understand the
differences so that we can bepart of it. And with baby
boomers, we talk about mentalhealth. It's usually not talked
about like, we prefer nodiscussion on that. We tough it
out. It's invisible. It's notlike an arm fell off, type

(12:47):
mentality and let's let's justmove on. And then for physical
health, it's not as much aboutprevention. It's about if
something happens, I address it,rather than the preventative
piece of it. And that can easilytranslate into like the health
and safety part. No one's gottenhurt, therefore no action
needed. And that's thementality, generally speaking.

(13:10):
Now let's move up to Gen X. NowI'm a Gen Xer, so I do have some
bias. One about Gen X, verysmall generation as far as
population, because just comingoff the baby boom, there just
wasn't as much. We were latchkey kids. We were given more
more individual space. We were alittle bit more loners, I think

(13:35):
of that loan process of just,you know, we just stoically
figure it out. And but that alsoleaves us, like having great
ideas, but not talking aboutthem like we understand what's
going on. We see it, we'rehighly skeptical of it, and then
we just kind of move on and go.
Just take care of myself. Takecare of me, move on. And so we

(13:56):
start to see a little bit moreprevention, but it's
internalized, not externalized.
We're not talking about it, butwe can't. We see it, we look at
it, and we go, that's wrong. Idon't like it. You're gonna go
do something else about that,but I'm just gonna go do it.
Don't care if I share it or not.
We then move into the the newerthe the millennials, the Gen Z

(14:16):
area, and they're much moreopen, and they're talking about
it, and they begin to expectmore robust resources for mental
health, especially so let's juststop there and think about,
Okay, we have this huge we haveone half of the dinner that
really wants to talk aboutmental health. Really wants to
talk about how it feels to behere at work every day. We have

(14:39):
those who are just beingskeptical of everyone in them.
And then we have those who maybe uncomfortable to talk about
it right there. How do you go inthere and start to create some
movement with those differencesof being able to support. Those
who need the support, not makeother people feel uncomfortable

(15:01):
about the people who need thesupport and those that are kind
of skeptical of anything thatthe company is bringing forward
anyway. It's very interesting.
And then when we look atworkplace attitudes of anywhere
from the tough it out to Hey,we'll we'll create. We're
looking for a culture. We'reholding the company accountable

(15:23):
to moving high forward theyexpect, like a full, robust
system of protection and safety.
There again, we have to figureout a way to create greater
meaning in the processes foreach one now that's a little
tougher. A lot of the times, thesuggestions come along of like
having a cross reference safetycommittee, finding those who are

(15:47):
willing to actually sit down andtalk about, how can we get this
to work for everyone? And I'vehad some great discussions
there. Not to say I've had some,I'd love to say I've had a lot.
I've only had some safetycommittees sometimes are hit and
miss. They're hard to getengaged and going, and they're

(16:08):
Hey, it's people, right? Andeven I get off track there. So
it happens, don't feel bad ifyou're having safety committee
where, you know, maybe one outof a few. Actually, you're like,
man, we got something good outof that. It happens. The
discussions that are havingwhere we come up with an idea,

(16:28):
we come up with a project thatwe want to run, and we go, how
do we make this project apply toeveryone? You start going around
the room and asking, and you youforce the conversation a little
bit sometimes, of what willwork, what will not work. And
you start to get to see thesedifferences of how we can
approach bringing it into viewfor everyone, making it

(16:51):
meaningful to everyone. The bestthat we can won't be everyone,
but we truly try to hit themasses when we do that. And so
by bringing again, thecollective thinking is better in
these cases, having thatdiversity around the table to
talk about these issues, to talkabout how we make a program work

(17:12):
and for it can be as simple asPPE, we want to get better PPE
that people will wear. How do wecommunicate to get feedback?
Well, the differences betweensomeone in one generation to
another would be very differentapproach. Some are going to want
group collaboration. Some aregoing to say, hey, you need to

(17:34):
just put it out and let peoplelook at it and individually
inspect it and talk about it andgive feedback, maybe through
written a lot of different waysto do it, but you're only going
to learn about it when you pulla diverse group together and ask
the question and kind of force alittle bit of discussion among
them so that we can understandhow it will affect those around

(17:56):
them, and How they feel likeit'll affect those around them.
I'm so happy that you join mefor this episode of the leading
and learning through safetypodcast this week a focus on our
differences and how we createmeaning in those differences in
the workplace, to driveinfluence, to drive safety.

(18:20):
Ultimately, that's what I wastrying to get at, is that we
have to make a concerted, bigapproach to getting our data
about our workplace and aboutour people so that we can make a
great program. Again. Thanks forjoining me. I hope you've
enjoyed this episode and Untilnext time we chat, stay safe.

(18:41):
You.

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