Safety Conversations: How to Speak So You Are Heard
If you ask the average industrial safety and HSE professional why they talk about safety with employees, the answer will be something like: "We must convey safety information so that the employee follows it and performs their work safely."
It seems like a very simple formula: safety knowledge = safe work. But is that really the case?
According to Patrick Hudson's questionnaire, there are five ways of communicating safety information to employees:
How does the company tell employees about safe behavior?
As we can see, conveying information to an employee can be very different. Today, people responsible for familiarizing and conveying HSE information to employees are often guided by laws, regulations, or stakeholder requests. The result is boring news or massive tomes full of bureaucratic jargon and convoluted phrasing that even colleagues in the field can often barely digest.
Most importantly, this information competes for our employees' attention with TikTok, YouTube, social networks, and news sites. According to Cisco, by the end of 2016, 1.1 zettabytes of data were transmitted worldwide. In 2019, traffic volume was expected to double, reaching 2 zettabytes per year. As an infographic from Cisco helpfully points out, 1 zettabyte is equivalent to 36,000 years of high-definition video. In other words, to cover the volume of video transmitted in a single second globally, it would take us 5 years of continuous viewing.
One could argue for a long time that everyone is responsible for their own safety, that the employee should show interest because it's their life. But what's the point? Do we want to be right, or do we want our colleagues to return home safe and sound?
Therefore, all we can do is accept reality and adapt to it. Patrick Hudson can also help us here.
To compete with social networks and entertainment platforms, information must:
Today, HSE information must not only comply with legislation and stakeholder desires but, above all, be interesting and easily accessible to employees. Therefore, it's time to forget about the massive manuals that now look more like instruments of torture for employees rather than tools for their safety.
What can we do? For example, look at the experience of bloggers and popular media. It is necessary to use new channels and information delivery formats. You can create short videos with life hacks on how to work safely. However, simply reading an instruction on camera might not work anymore. You need to come up with a delivery format that attracts and holds the employee's attention.
You can't do without entertainment content either. People sometimes need a break from serious information. Therefore, it is very important to maintain a balance of useful and entertaining content.
Why not involve the employees themselves in this work? Interview them, let them tell you why safety is important to them. Let the people on the ground become safety ambassadors. This will not only attract a new audience ("Oh look, they're showing Petrovich!"), but also increase trust in the information being conveyed. After all, when an HSE specialist says it, it's one thing, but when a coworker says it, it's a completely different story.
Perhaps all regulations need to be reviewed and reworked. Piles of paper no longer work. Today, there is a trend toward getting rid of unnecessary documents and transforming necessary ones into new formats: memos, checklists, interactive courses.
You can study our experience in implementing new communication formats and reworking documents here: https://t.me/sobludaytepravila
Colleagues, I would be glad if you share your experience and vision in the comments on how to effectively convey safety information to employees.