Be A Part Of The Solution

I’ve always found that the safety department is divided into two extremes. The first being total avoidance,” oh no, here they come with their clipboard…quick, I’m going to look extremely busy over there and hope they go away without bothering me”. For safety professionals, it makes us feel like we are either highly contagious or persona non grata. The other extreme is being met with and often referred to as safety tattletales “did you see Bob over there changing a lightbulb using an office chair instead of a ladder”. These two approaches are often ingrained in an organization’s safety culture.

Is there is a right or wrong way to “inform,” if one must? In an ideal safety culture, tattling doesn’t shouldn’t exist. Successful teams of workers push each other to work hard and not avoid or take safety short cuts. Those co-workers have high expectations for one another. Ideally, the co-worker goes to the person directly and talks with the person instead of positioning the Safety Department to be the mediators. In a safety-rich culture, we must encourage respectful dialogue and boost morale, we support the autonomy to challenge each other to do better and demonstrate safer behaviours. We must thrive to offer a culture where safety is everyone’s responsibility.

Perhaps there are some manoeuvres we’ve long forgotten that could be best implemented in this situation? How many of us recall a similar circumstance rolling out in our childhood with an adult figure acting as the mediator responding with “don’t tattletale, come to me with a solution…”. What this brilliant and simplistic approach encourages us to do is to challenge each other to discuss the safety issue directly. Rather try redirecting the safety tattletale that they must finish telling their safety concern with the statement of “and, I intend to do the following…”. This allows for person sharing their issue to be in the driver seat of solution-based thinking. You can further support this dialogue with coaching, course corrections or advice. As safety minded professionals we need to ensure we lead by example and give this technique a try because Safety is Success by Plan.