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

Transcript

Mark French: 0:01

This week on the podcast, I'm going to focus a little bit on generational differences in the workplace. How does that affect our leadership? How does that affect our safety, our mental health, all those things this week on the podcast,

Unknown: 0:22

you welcome

Announcer: 0:33

to the leading and learning through safety podcast. Your host is Dr Mark French, marks passion is helping organizations motivate their teams. This podcast is focused on bringing out the best in leadership through creating strong values, learning opportunities, teamwork and safety, nothing is more important than protecting your people. Safety creates an environment for empathy, innovation and empowerment. Together, we'll discover meaning and purpose through shaping our safety culture. Thanks for joining us this episode and now here is Dr Mark French,

Mark French: 1:30

foreign Welcome to this episode of the leading and learning through safety podcast. So happy you've joined me. So happy you put me into your podcast rotation, glad, glad to be here. This week. I have been one working on a training package that I created that I really enjoy, and it's like a two day leadership training. And when I say leadership, it's really focused on influence, and it's focused on learning about our differences in so many different ways, a lot of different tools and assessments are thrown out to help discover that we're very different in very simple ways, sometimes just as the way we collect and use data and Send it back out and communicate it. It's complex that made me step back again, as I normally do, because I get tied up in my own head frequently. Is thinking more about the word meaningful. Now that was one of the key words in my dissertation, in my research was in the world of safety, in the world of just safety training. How do we define that word? How do we define that word, that it was meaningful to someone, and how do we convey meaning and meaningfulness to someone else, or does it matter to that person? And that is the real issue with safety training in the workplace, in my opinion, is that if we can make it meaningful to someone, then it has an impact, and it probably will start to begin to change a behavior of some form or fashion. It plants the seed. Maybe it's a dramatic change, maybe it's a minor change, maybe it's any change, but it first has to be meaningful to that person, which is, again, we take another step back. That's the hard part, because we think about the diversity that is in our workplace, and not just to stand all the different types, generational, background, mental, physical, all those things. We take those into account. We go. How do we make meaning with the limited amount of time we have with each person and even some people I'm I that truly believe that maybe safety isn't something important, how do we even begin to create meaning there. And do we even focus our time there? Because we look at a bell curve or a normal standard deviation there, and we go, there's some people who are going to pick it up immediately and run with it. There's a majority of people who can go, Okay, I kind of get it. There's going to be a small percentage that just don't care. And we unfortunately spend so much time on those that we may lose track of trying to figure out the rest, and so getting 100% is practically impossible when it comes to creating meaning for that. Now that's a lot, but really what I'm trying to get back to is meaning in that purpose of that training is very personal to each individual. Now we can take a scatter shot approach and try to hit a few things and try to create it, and sometimes meaning comes from the conversations afterward, because I distinctly, distinctly remember i. A training that I went through very early in my career that was like a it was a five, why training, and it was a different style of five, why that was kind of rolling out in the automotive world. And they brought in a trainer, and they trained it. And it was to me, it was boring. It was, you know, not practical. It wasn't it really 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 room listening to this and going, oh my gosh, this doesn't help me solve anything like the traditional methods we already have worked so much better. And the next morning, the HR manager had come in, who I worked for, because I was on night shift, and I sat down. He goes, Hey, did you go through the training line? Like, yeah, I did. He goes, what you think? And I'm like, I was pointless. Hated it, hated every bit of it. Didn't like it. And gave me my little like, new person in the the workplace rant, feeling all important. And he looked at me. He said, You know, one thing to consider, though, is that now you have a similar vocabulary that you didn't have before, because that was still fairly new with the rest of the team like you are now using. You now understand some of the language that's wanting the corporate wants us to start begin to use maybe, but also they're going to have to begin to use it in operations and inventory and all those other areas you now have a chance to speak the same language, well, suddenly there was more meaning in that training than I thought. So even meaning can change the personal feeling of that had a meaningful impact in my career, in my life and my personal it changes depending on even how someone approaches it or which, again, I'm only making it more complicated, and I don't mean to, but unfortunately, it's not easy. This is one of the most complicated topics we talk about, and I think safety is that leadership. Is that why? Because we have to appeal to so many different people. We are truly influential motivators. We have to motivate through influence. We have to create meaning through influence all the time. That is the purpose behind it is to understand what we need to do to maintain our legality. And then how do we take that and turn that into something our team can do, will do, and overall wants to do. How do we make that choice, the easiest choice for them to make? And so I took it deeper, and I started thinking about, let's just take one piece of it, and generationally, that is something I look at, is that the workplace generally, generationally is so diverse right now we have a lot of different thought processes and shaping of generational differences. A lot dealing with how fast information is coming at us, with how we react with that when we look at like some of the gaps of like, Baby Boomers were like a 20 year span. Gen X people were somewhere around a 15 year span. Millennials, then we're jumping down to about 15 years again. But then we move into like 10 year and the divisions even like subdivisions of them, we're generally generationally separating a little faster. I think because of the way that information is spreading. Can very unscientific process there, but it feels, and some of the early research would indicate it's a lot about how fast information is traveling and how fast we're connecting and creating those connections and differences, and even when we look at what the generational divides are with creating meaning to each just the just by the year you were born, looking at how you perceive meaning in the things The workplace is doing is huge. There are big gaps. And of course, when we talk generations and we put those labels on, people think of the bell curve. There are there are the majority that set within the bell there are those who are outside. There are those who are declining. But it's a very generalized word. It does not apply to everyone, not in the shame same kind of scope or or intensity. It's a generalization. I have to say that, that always when I say these things, I makes me feel better. To put the caveat there, to say that, hey, it's just a job. Generalization that lets so we're able to have the conversation. There's always inside, outside of that. Let's jump into that a little bit deeper in the second half of the leading and learning through safety podcast, you are listening to

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Mark French: 11:00

and welcome back to the second half of the leading and learning through safety podcast this week. I started off by talking about meaning and how we create meaning in a leadership safety style program, and now we're moving into generational differences and how big the gap is. And I work with this a lot. There's a lot there's a lot of people out there who are a lot better at understanding these generational gaps and what those mean. That mean, I've done my own very, very basic research, but enough to try to get some understanding of just the depth of what we're having to accomplish when we bridge the gaps, when we stand in front of people and say, safety is important. Why is it important to each individual? And just by looking at the generational differences, there's some big gaps there. And I looked at a combination of, how do they approach mental and physical health in the workplace, and it's very, very different, because we go back to baby boomers who are starting to exit the workplace more, but still here, still here, so very in 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 a lot in each each brings their own wonderful traits to the workplace. 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 be part of it. And with baby boomers, we talk about mental health. It's usually not talked about like, we prefer no discussion on that. We tough it out. It's invisible. It's not like an arm fell off, type mentality and let's let's just move on. And then for physical health, it's not as much about prevention. It's about if something happens, I address it, rather than the preventative piece of it. And that can easily translate into like the health and safety part. No one's gotten hurt, therefore no action needed. And that's the mentality, generally speaking. Now let's move up to Gen X. Now I'm a Gen Xer, so I do have some bias. One about Gen X, very small generation as far as population, because just coming off the baby boom, there just wasn't as much. We were latch key kids. We were given more more individual space. We were a little bit more loners, I think of that loan process of just, you know, we just stoically figure it out. And but that also leaves us, like having great ideas, but not talking about them like we understand what's going on. We see it, we're highly skeptical of it, and then we just kind of move on and go. Just take care of myself. Take care of me, move on. And so we start to see a little bit more prevention, but it's internalized, not externalized. We're not talking about it, but we can't. We see it, we look at it, and we go, that's wrong. I don'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 newer the the millennials, the Gen Z area, and they're much more open, and they're talking about it, and they begin to expect more robust resources for mental health, especially so let's just stop there and think about, Okay, we have this huge we have one half of the dinner that really wants to talk about mental health. Really wants to talk about how it feels to be here at work every day. We have those who are just being skeptical of everyone in them. And then we have those who may be uncomfortable to talk about it right there. How do you go in there and start to create some movement with those differences of being able to support. Those who need the support, not make other people feel uncomfortable about the people who need the support and those that are kind of skeptical of anything that the company is bringing forward anyway. It's very interesting. And then when we look at workplace attitudes of anywhere from the tough it out to Hey, we'll we'll create. We're looking for a culture. We're holding the company accountable to moving high forward they expect, like a full, robust system of protection and safety. There again, we have to figure out a way to create greater meaning in the processes for each one now that's a little tougher. A lot of the times, the suggestions come along of like having a cross reference safety committee, finding those who are willing to actually sit down and talk about, how can we get this to work for everyone? And I've had 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 safety committees sometimes are hit and miss. They're hard to get engaged and going, and they're Hey, it's people, right? And even I get off track there. So it happens, don't feel bad if you're having safety committee where, you know, maybe one out of a few. Actually, you're like, man, we got something good out of that. It happens. The discussions that are having where we come up with an idea, we come up with a project that we want to run, and we go, how do we make this project apply to everyone? You start going around the room and asking, and you you force the conversation a little bit sometimes, of what will work, what will not work. And you start to get to see these differences of how we can approach bringing it into view for everyone, making it meaningful to everyone. The best that we can won't be everyone, but we truly try to hit the masses when we do that. And so by bringing again, the collective thinking is better in these cases, having that diversity around the table to talk about these issues, to talk about how we make a program work and for it can be as simple as PPE, we want to get better PPE that people will wear. How do we communicate to get feedback? Well, the differences between someone in one generation to another would be very different approach. Some are going to want group collaboration. Some are going to say, hey, you need to just put it out and let people look at it and individually inspect it and talk about it and give feedback, maybe through written a lot of different ways to do it, but you're only going to learn about it when you pull a diverse group together and ask the question and kind of force a little bit of discussion among them so that we can understand how it will affect those around them, and How they feel like it'll affect those around them. I'm so happy that you join me for this episode of the leading and learning through safety podcast this week a focus on our differences and how we create meaning in those differences in the workplace, to drive influence, to drive safety. Ultimately, that's what I was trying to get at, is that we have to make a concerted, big approach to getting our data about our workplace and about our people so that we can make a great program. Again. Thanks for joining me. I hope you've enjoyed this episode and Until next time we chat, stay safe. You.

Announcer: 19:03

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