Why Relationships Matter: The Iceberg

[Image courtesy of Flickr user kaet44 via a Creative Commons license]Though most companies have sound safety procedures and competent safety officers in place, there are still many incidents and injuries. Why? It’s the Iceberg Metaphor – there is much more going on under the surface that is not addressed. And this can contribute to the danger called drift.

Drift is Like an Iceberg

The concept of drift in the workplace does not happen in a vacuum. Drift is what happens when a lot of moving parts and workplace environmental factors align in the right combination. Like an iceberg – which drifts, not coincidentally – what is above the surface, or what can be observed, is only a little piece of the entire picture. And drift can likely occur if what is below the surface is not addressed. This is called the iceberg metaphor.

The iceberg metaphor applies perfectly to many things in the workplace that still go haywire even with all due diligence. This can be a main reason why so many companies have safety officers or safety committees and yet still see incidents, accidents and injuries on the worksite despite consistent training and enforcement of safety policies.

Basically, workers are humans, darn it. And as humans, workers have emotions, thoughts and beliefs, and they desire relationships with people they are around – even in work environments. Emotions, thoughts and relationships are complicated and can be messy when a company tries to examine them, but at least having an understanding of their existence and acknowledging their influence in the workplace can be vital in the success of a safety program.

The Iceberg Metaphor in Practice

Because  messy human things like emotions and thoughts do fold into an office or worksite environment, they do play a role in how the worksite functions on a daily and weekly basis. But because these human things are messy and complicated and hard to measure, many companies often take an iceberg approach to safety – addressing the things that can be observed through the physical senses.

There is a great illustration of the Iceberg Metaphor in this original article as it applies to a worksite. What is visible to the C-suite and supervisors are things that can be observed or measured – profit, adherence to deadlines, compliance with regulations, worker behaviors, and use of technology as examples. When there are obvious  shortcomings in those areas, a company may instill such solutions as more regulations, more frequent safety audits, technical upgrades, or do more observations of behaviors with suggestions for correction.

However, as studies have consistently shown, and as many of us intuitively know, much of what happens with actions and behaviors above the surface comes from what goes on below the surface – things like our emotions, our belief systems and even our relationships with each other as colleagues, subordinates and supervisors.

Treating the Symptoms, Not the Cause

We have all heard of those neuroscience studies that discuss much about the correlations between our actions, words and behaviors being linked to our emotions, belief systems and how we relate to people. Many of us can acknowledge that when we are in a good emotional state, we tend to be more productive, more agreeable to safety protocols and we seem to be more diligent in staying safe on the worksite. However, if we are distracted, angry, depressed or we are working with people we don’t really get along with (for whatever reason), we tend to be a little more sloppy, dissatisfied with work, lash out and be quite ambivalent to safety procedures and overall productivity. The difficult part is that our companies tend to focus on the symptoms – the behaviors and actions – than the root causes for the safety risks.

It is always what is under the waterline that is the most dangerous when it comes to icebergs. And if the causes aren’t addressed and instead just the symptoms, you have situations like we have all around the world – the very best safety protocols, procedures and safety officers in the world, yet continuing recurrences of incidents, injuries and deaths. We have to better understand the emotions, belief systems and relationships of our workers, and that often means having conversations with them – which of course, goes back to the first post of this series.

This just enhances the imporance of going beyond workplace communication and moving toward workplace conversations. We are creatures who crave relationships with others. And I don’t just mean the romantic types of relationships – it’s about the fact that humans are hardwired not to be alone. We have an inherent cravinng to relate with others, whether it’s in a group setting at a party or at a worksite, or whether it’s more one-on-one with a spouse, a good friend over a drink, or a time in the park with our children or grandchildren. We are relational creatures; we desire to be treated as equals and respected as such. When we don’t have that due to communication (one-way) rather than conversation (two-way), we tend to feel emotionally distant and that often leads us away from that productive happiness that makes us model workers and human beings.

So for the sake of your workers, be aware of the iceberg and be willing to dig deep and really understand your workers, so your company’s safety protocol ship doesn’t run aground to where you are only left to bail out the ship and you have no time to actually fix the ship itself.