Employees come to work in various moods and psychological, emotional, and physical states. Misunderstandings arise, production plans are not always met, and staff miss work due to sick leave or family circumstances. Many experience emotional burnout, some are simply tired of the current work schedule, and others feel unheard by management, with nothing changing for the better. Can these factors affect the team atmosphere and the likelihood of incidents? Yes, absolutely.
We do not only play the role of an investigator when analyzing specific incidents. We also act as psychologists, working on their prevention and prophylaxis. This is especially true when we personally witness, for example, a heated argument due to disagreements, a dislike of someone's appearance, or attempts to humiliate a colleague based on their position, competence, or, even worse, their ethnicity.
Another role we play is that of a judge — listening to both sides of a conflict, calming them down, identifying causes, finding solutions, and offering advice. Our life experience must be rich, and wisdom must be our guide. After all, sometimes the cause of a conflict can be a completely resolvable situation, such as: cleaning restrooms at a time when another employee needs to use them, or ignoring right-of-way rules when staff stubbornly refuse to yield.
Can the HSE department be everywhere at once and help everyone around the clock? No, that is impossible. But by engaging in daily preventive priority work and diving deeper into the "lives" of colleagues within work processes — knowing them, thinking ahead, forecasting, reacting, and raising sharp questions and problems — we can prevent dozens, if not hundreds, of incidents. For example, a mechanic's psychological state can be negatively affected by an unsuccessful week-long search for the cause of a malfunction in the same machine by that same employee.
In our company's HSE training, special attention is paid to the topic of conflict situations — one should not engage in them, initiate them, give in to emotions, or respond with physical aggression. In our documented list of examples of unsafe behavior, fights are recorded as gross violations with corresponding response measures, including the immediate summoning of security services.
The authority of an HSE department employee should be such that people do not run to them for every trifle or gossip, but rather seek help in the event of a real threat of an incident (including a potential police call) if the specialist is not yet aware of it.