Safety Wars
Know What to Say Ahead of time
May 3, 2021
Like the title says. Know What to Say Ahead of Time. Plan it out.
This is, this show is brought to you by safety FM. The following program is rated for mature audiences and may contain adult language, adult situations and frank safety discussions. Names in certain details. Haven't changed to protect the safe and unsafe. But believe me, every item in here is true. You know what you're going to say ahead of time today on safety wars. One of the drawbacks of being inexperienced and untrained as safety professionals is that we are often given a lot of responsibility without the experience, authority and resources to get the job done. We often do not know what we have to deal with and all the different situations from compliance training and discipline, all compounded by lack of experience. A common situation that I often had. I see others having is the I should have said this where I should have done this syndrome. It's called hindsight bias and it's usually destructive. We all do it to ourselves, but more often it is directed to us as constructive criticism by others that have never been in this situation. Another part of this is the safety stump speech. One facility that I worked at even strongly suggested that we have a safety stump speech and already it's not such a bad approach and the guy making the suggestion is known for being an excellent presenter, so it's not surprising that he would make that suggestion. I think a better approach to all of this is to just threw a fatal flaw analysis, simply put what could go wrong and how do I respond? We already do this as part of our safety programs. Why not do it for ourselves? I have my people personally develop a plan informally, of course, well ahead of time, say no what to do. When situations arise, we discuss it and then when a situation arises, we at least have a starting point or framework to work from one of the tricks that the more experienced safety people have is to have everything thought out ahead of time, along with the responses, the questions, the snide remarks and everything else that we have and get directed towards us. I noticed after several years in the business, I kept hearing the same stuff. Same response is the same complaints, the same, everything from the workforce, the same reasons for not working safe to anything else that you can imagine. I ended up befriending a recent retiree in a social situation. He told me the workforce actually has a system in place to manage their managers and they have a system on how to apply pressure for practically every situation. I thought about it and it makes sense. Successful companies have succession protocols for new leadership. Why not the workforce? We're talking union or non union workforce? is it really doesn't matter. So what am I saying? They have the responses? I don't know if it's a diary form or just part of the oral history of the workplace, but they have it. If everyone else is doing it, why aren't we doing it as safety people? If you don't have something prepared ahead of time, especially in an adversarial situation, you're more likely to get blindsided and you get undermined. Just be careful that you don't become too argumentative. A couple of episodes back. I did a two part episode on the pushback faced by safety professionals. You might want to go back and review it. Everything on there has happened to me personally and professionally, recently I was on a job and someone had an issue that I was trying to correct in this situation. I'm acting on behalf of the controlling contractor. The worker says you shouldn't be focusing on me, you should be focusing on someone else over there. It's a classic misdirection technique. I told him that the other situation will be addressed in a minute, but we'll address your situation now. At the beginning of my career, I used to fall for this tactic all the time. Instead, I develop phrases and other things way ahead of time. The situation I started telling you about escalated jimmy yesterday. They were doing X, y and Z over there. I said, okay. That was yesterday when I was on another part of the job. Did you report it? No, I didn't record it yesterday. Well, did you stop the job since you were being impacted? Did you report it to one of your supervisors? And this went on? No. To everything. We have a pretty good system of managing reports, their address almost immediately to a good resolution for almost everyone. My management for this project is 100 behind me. We worked so hard to make the project psychologically safe and open for discussion. Yes. Even in the construction industry it is possible we have a non punitive system in place, so we don't have stuff covered up lives and other stuff that goes along with it. We're not perfect, but we're striving to be better. So what do you think happens next? We moved to a great resolution on the safety issues, not every one on board. The complaint he lodges against me is how dare a safety person even talk to me or correct me. Then wait for this. The guy on the last job just hung out in the trailer and did nothing servile safety person struck again. I actually believe this guy because I know the safety professional he was talking about. Later on I got a call from his manager and the manager was laughing that I was the only safety person. I caught him in his place and he congratulated me. He said, I hope you're on the next job I'm on. We are not here to be the safety dictator, yelling, screaming and carrying on. That's usually the wrong approach. Although I'll admit it initially feels very good. We are being paid to have responses in the regular actually constructive work towards a resolution and be non confrontational. We're not always successful but we need to be working on it. The military has plans and strategies to fight their type of war. We need to develop strategies on how to manage situations and people. This is how we will win the safety war and when you win the safety war, you save lives for safety Wars. This is jim proposal. The views and opinions expressed on this podcast are those of the host and its guests, and do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the company. Examples of analysis discussed within this podcast are only examples. It should not be utilized in the real world as the only solution available as they are based only on very limited and dated. Open source information, assumptions made within this analysis are not reflective of the position of the company. No part of this podcast may be reproduced stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means mechanical, electronic recording or otherwise without the prior written permission of the creator of the podcast, jay Allen for Yeah.