Content area
Full Text
The Safety Professional's Road Map to
Defining the role of safety professionals in promoting workplace trust and psychological safety is of paramount importance in fostering a robust safety culture within an organization.
Sharleigh Zavaglia
Sharleigh Zavaglia is a senior loss control consultant based in Los Angeles, CA, and has been in the safety industry for 5 years. Her specialty is helping workplaces improve safety culture by providing solutions for complex adaptive systems and assisting in the implementation of change to bring in new solutions for a stronger safety management system. She also produces safety-related videos and publications to bring new solutions to safety professionals.
Bringing about workplace change can be a formidable undertaking, but with the right tools, integrating a culture of trust can be an uncomplicated process and will bolster an atmosphere that stimulates worker participation, and diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI).
Psychological Safety & Workplace Trust
Safety professionals strive to establish a healthy and secure workplace for employees, and they continually seek new ways to improve the safety of tasks and processes. Employees are provided with interactive safety training and resources catered to diverse learning styles and languages. Trust, however, is a crucial element that when absent results in a disconnect between leadership and employees.
To cultivate trust in the workplace and foster a culture of DEI, worker involvement must be embraced, and the psychological well-being of workers must be duly considered. Leaders must evaluate workers' aptitude, integrity and benevolence, which are all interconnected with creating an environment that allows workers to feel comfortable sharing their ideas on workplace safety, with the assurance that their suggestions will be incorporated for the improvement of the safety management system.
When workers experience a sense of psychological safety, they are more inclined to share their perspectives without fear of rebuke or disregard from their superiors. As Conklin (2019) points out, the higher the hierarchical level within the organization, the more distant one is from hazards present on the production floor. Given that leaders tend to spend less time on the production floor, while employees spend most of their workday on the front line, it is advantageous for leaders to gain insights from employees regarding the hazards they face and leverage those insights to make improvements based...