Conversations, and not just communication, have proven to be more effective in promoting and delivering not only great safety records in companies, but also effective production. As was talked about in my last post, the first of this series about drift, when communication is just one way – from management and the C-suite down to the floor or the field – there can often be a wall and a moat that prevents valuable ideas from the field getting to management. And such a wall and moat can lead to injuries and deaths, as what was determined in the quoted case study regarding a workplace death in Georgia.
[Image courtesy of Robert Agthe of Flickr via a Creative Commons license]Polarity, or the concept of having two seemingly different goals and objectives working together for success, needs to be addressed in the workplace through conversations, not communication. Having this conversation reduces the effects of drift in the workplace.
Emotional Investment
Why are conversations not more prevalent, when a study that is more than 40 years old has suggested that workers are human, they have emotions an they behave a certain way based on those feelings and emotions? A conversation establishes a relationship between workers and management, or between colleagues, and when there is that relationship and there are some emotions involved – feeling envy, or joy, or confidence, or liking or hating the person – will generate some emotional investment one way or the other, and that emotional investment will tend to determine a person’s overall behavior and productivity in the workplace.
We see this all the time, don’t we? If a worker has truly bought into the mission of the company, loves his or her work and the people he or she works with every day and feels an emotional investment to being there, he or she will likely be a very productive and conscientious worker. On the other hand, we see that workers become less productive and often sloppy when they hate their job, hate the people they work with or they have outside distractions that prevent them from focusing their emotional energy on their work. A decent percentage of incidents could be traced back to a worker’s emotional investment (or lack of) in the company and the work.
One of the questions that can often be asked when it comes to the state of the safety profession is, where there are so many safety officers and safety protocols and consistent training, why are there still incidents, injuries and deaths in the workplace?
Polarity is Not Just for Batteries
One of the potential reasons for continued incidents despite all of our efforts as safety officers has to do with the concept of polarity, which is the thought that two seemingly conflicting forces have to work together for success, but yet a company chooses one as a priority over the other. The example in this case would be that employees either make their production quotas, or be compliant with safety procedures.
Of course, those aren’t exactly polarities, but that is sometimes how it is thought of in some C-suites. There is a belief that if you make workers stick to safety procedures, that will affect their efficiency and production as workers, which is then believed to raise labor costs. But as many of us know, labor costs do tend to rise more quickly if there are shortcuts to safety just to make a couple more widgets in a day. As shortcuts increase risk, the increased risk raises the chances of an incident and possible lost time (and thus lost productivity) for a worker.
One of the points that really should be made here is to emphasize the nonsense of polarity and instead address the possibility and probability of having strong production while following safety protocols. When entering a conversation, you can approach it from a more open-minded thinking of both/and rather than the limited thinking of either/or.
There is a warning, however. The conversation about these polarities and how to meet both expectations runs a risk of “drift” that we are ultimately discussing. A worker can find an innovative way to stay within safety protcols and be more productive, and that new way of “doiing business” can become part of the cluture and can eventually be accepted as a new way of doing things. Does it really work?
Only if there is an anchor, which will be discussed later.