I am sure you have found a couple of my previous series of posts enlightening and at least educational, if not entertaining. Sometimes I come across interesting topics that I decide are worthy of being fully fleshed out, so I will create a series of several posts that address this main topic to bring it into more detail and clarity without having a single 3,000- to 4,000-word blog post. Consider this another one of those instances, as I came across a lengthy but important article about a concept known as drift, its hidden dangers and how it comes to be in the workplace.
The article I will be highlighting was in the January 2015 issue of ProfessionalSafety magazine and written by Rosa Antonia Carrillo and Neil Samuels under the heading “Safety Conversations.” And the key word in this article is “conversation,” because the authors spend a lot of time discussing the importance not just of communication in the workplace between employees and supervisors or managers, but how conversations are more valuable in helping prevent incidents and injuries among workers on the job. And in this article, the authors discuss these conversations, or the relative lack of them, in developing a hidden danger called “drift.”
[Image courtesy of Kool Cats Photography from Flickr via a Creative Commons license]Mark Twain was known as a great American writer and humorist, but he was also an amateur workplace safety officer in that he knew that communication has nowhere near the value to workplace safety than conversation.
But First, a Non-Conversation
The article begins with a quick case study about a group interview of employees and supervisors at a job site where an incident occurred that resulted in the death of a worker. While the interviewers were trying to determine the actual cause of the incident and the death, the group as a whole insisted that the incident would not have happened had there been a conversation with management about the potential hazards. What these employees and supervisors said was that the problems were brought up to management, but nothing was done to rectify the situation because management “just did not listen.”
Does this sound at all familiar? In my experience, it seems a little too often that communication between management on high and those on the floor or in the field is pretty much just that – communication. Memos get sent down the chain about safety rules, regulations and protocols, but there is no inbox for suggestions, concerns and questions to be moved back upstream to management from the floor or the field. This particular case study was some evidence that even with the best of intentions from management to keep workers safe, the real risk comes from those who do the work and those who are on the floor or in the field with those workers – and if there is a problem, it behooves management to have doors and ears open when something in real life does not align with the protocols and procedures on paper.
Mark Twain Was Right
Sometimes there is value in one-way communication. But to have real communication between various groups of people or individuals is to have it more than one-way where one individual or group does much of the talking and the other individual or group just has to listen. Most everyone knows that a good relationship – whether it’s a marriage , an alliance between two groups, or a worker-management relationship – is based on communication traffic that works on both sides of the street. There should be talking and listening on both sides for effective communication to happen and for positive results to be obtained.
In other words, there has to be an acknowledgment that on the one side, management does not have all the answers and is not omniscient, and that the rank-and-file are not brainless robots who only respond to management instructions and do as they’re told. Managers and administrators are human too, and they are prone to mistakes; and employees can think for themselves and are human just like management, and thus deserve the same respect when they have observations or opinions that have value to the operation.
As Mark Twain once said, “We need to stop all this communication and have a conversation.” The idea of conversation is meant to address a number of questions that have been begging for answers: With all of the safety protocols in place and buy-in by many people, why are there still incidents caused by workers not following procedures? Why do we still have employers not listening to employees, even after the tragic cases of the space shuttles Challenger (1986) and Columbia (2004)? And why, for the love of Pete, do we still see people and the environment get harmed or damaged and we still see incidents even as companies continue to pledge to eliminate these things?
In future posts, we will explore these more deeply and get into some of the various issues that results from a lack of conversation and/or communication. Future posts will look into the concept of polarity, how relationships are important in the workplace, and drift in safety protocols and how it can dramatically affect workplace safety if left unchecked.