What part do conversations play in your safety improvement process?
I bet most, if not all, of your attempts to improve workplace safety include interpersonal communication. Indeed, conversation is a key component of behavior-based observation and feedback, peer-to-peer coaching, employee recognition, incident analysis, and corrective action development and implementation. Engineering benefits from learning human dynamics, too, and this requires an interpersonal exchange of ideas and perceptions.
The success of any intervention involving people depends on communication. In this article, I define five types of safety-related communication, each playing a particular and essential role in safety-related intervention. I heard these conversation labels during a Progressive Business audio conference in 2003 featuring Bob Aquadro and Bob Allbright. These categories overlap significantly with information included in earlier ISHN articles I’ve written on communication, but I find it useful to consider how interpersonal conversation varies in these five ways.