Identifying hidden concerns can help reduce risk, says CIRAS confidential hotline.
Understanding rules and regulations, investing in health and safety, and being willing to listen and learn, all point to organisations with a positive safety culture, but the best-laid plans and processes can’t always prevent issues becoming incidents. Are you missing jigsaw pieces of information from your safety puzzle?
Uncovering your safety blind spots is a good place to start. Blind spots always exist, not least because any incident could involve many possible combinations of factors. A chain of smaller events can have a devastating impact. Minor issues and feedback can also provide important safety intelligence and highlight bigger problems.
Encouraging open challenge helps create a workplace where more people will raise concerns, as you’re giving the message that they’re likely to be heard. Even in an open-door environment, though, there’s no guarantee you’ll find out what’s on people’s minds. Some still won’t bring forward their concerns. Can you help close the gap between the concerns people have and what they’ll report?
Offering choice
Consider this: people are all individuals and, with the best will in the world, not everyone is comfortable raising concerns openly.
Teams and workplaces include many people and personalities. For example, there are those who don’t want to become more visible at work than they need to be, and others who will always perceive themselves as being at risk from speaking up, based on their own or others’ experiences.
Don’t underestimate self-doubt and uncertainty too. Being new to a job role, team, or industry, can make people question if what they see as a concern or risk is seen as acceptable in that culture or environment. Is speaking up ‘the way we do things around here’? They may prefer to raise a concern anonymously or confidentially, just in case.
Understanding all this means it’s important to provide options. Where some might prefer to raise a concern with a quick chat or phone call, others might use an app or a paper form. Still others prefer to report confidentially, so they can be listened to without the company knowing who they are. CIRAS confidential safety hotline can help here, passing the concerns to the right people so they can take action. Often people use CIRAS because they don’t feel listened to when they’ve tried other channels.
Teams can include contractors and others who aren’t directly employed. CIRAS is a reporting route that everyone on site can use to report safety issues that aren’t real-time and don’t pose an imminent risk of harm. This third-party insight can be especially valuable for companies as it may offer intelligence and ideas based on other organisations’ learnings.
Different people perceive different things. Listening to diverse voices, including those you don’t normally hear, can reveal safety insights you might be missing.
Safety in listening
Sometimes people aren’t listened to closely enough. If a concern doesn’t align with the listener’s world view, they may not fully hear the big picture context or detail despite best intentions. It can also be instinctive to feel defensive about something you’re responsible for. Perhaps it should work or be a certain way, but you’re hearing that it isn’t. Defensiveness can block effective listening.
The psychological safety of teams and working relationships can determine if people feel their colleagues and managers will ‘have their back’ if they raise a concern. That’s especially important if they’re worried about blame, or if it’s personal, such as fatigue and mental health.
Psychologically safe environments accept challenge. People working there feel they can contribute freely, learning from mistakes, discussing, and questioning.
A psychologically safe workplace also doesn’t lean towards groupthink. With groupthink, a group – such as an organisation or leadership team – agrees a consensus without considering alternative information and perspectives. It reduces the ability to problem-solve. It can also reduce the collective perception of risk, and the likelihood people will listen to new information contradicting the status quo.
Resolving concerns
Identifying unknown risks isn’t always possible. Even so, listening to people, however they raise concerns, can uncover blind spots or challenge established thinking. That could be the key to preventing an accident.
One way employees judge if an organisation is really listening, is looking out for actions or updates in response to their concerns. So, if you receive a close call, concern or a CIRAS report, a thoughtful response helps everyone. You might end up monitoring the situation, planning a staff briefing or longer-term actions, or clarifying existing procedures to the reporter. Whatever the direct result, it builds a culture of listening and learning, where people feel it’s worth raising concerns.
Go to: https://www.ciras.org.uk/rightcall
Lead image credit: Dimi Andreev_Shutterstock
