Rob Smith

http://www.industriouscommunicator.com/post/11871428590/avoiding-safety-rhetoric

Fri, 25 Nov 2011 00:09:42 -0500

http://www.industriouscommunicator.com/post/11871428590/avoiding-safety-rhetoric

Stifling Communication At Work

Mon, 24 Oct 2011 14:49:00 -0400

Do you have a death wish for your department at work? Do you want to see your team fail in meeting the group’s latest challenge? If so, just stifle communication. It’s really easy to do. In fact, you may already be doing it unawares.

Here are some tried and true techniques for stifling communication in the workplace. This is by no means an exhaustive list, but merely a highlighting of often unnoticed techniques you should be aware of. Take note, because the most deft of saboteurs in the workplace are. You may also find that you yourself are unknowingly undermining the effectiveness of your team. Take this opportunity to make a quick assessment. Do you, or someone at work…

Glorify Hierarchy
Avoid Direct Communication
Neglect Follow-ups
Talk over people’s heads
Forget the Human Element

Glorifying Hierarchy

Glorifying hierarchy, by necessity devalues involvement at all levels. When a person or a management team is fixated on their authority and stature, they neglect others. They close the door on important ideas and solutions that they themselves will not come up with. They ignore unique perspectives. In short, it’s an ego trip.

Whether intentional or not, when egos get in the way, teams suffer due to a lack of communication. When the opinion of one person or a few, always trumps that offered by anyone else, your team is headed down a dead-end road. People clam up and quit talking. This often happens without the offending party even realizing it.

One way to avoid this is to foster a more lateral chain of command. Within this structure you will still have key people making executive decisions, yet there is more involvement across ranks. This way, employees of different positions and seniority levels are encouraged to be involved and be heard.

Avoiding Direct Communication

For clarification purposes I’ll start by saying that a phone conversation, while less intimate than a face-to-face, qualifies as direct communication. Emails, text messages, tweets, etc. typically don’t.

I’m not for one minute implying that the above don’t have their place in the modern workplace, because they certainly do. However, the simple fact is that nothing can replace the communication value of a verbal exchange. The other forms of messaging are second rate when compared. Sure, there are many work environments which rely heavily on modern electronic communication, but you’d have a hard time convincing any expert that adding an old-fashioned conversation won’t help to convey your message.

Neglecting To Follow Up

If a challenge is something worthy of pursuing, then it is a challenge worth conquering. This is rarely possible without following up. A fantastic brainstorming session which ends with a solid plan of action, can turn out to be useless without following up to ensure that milestones are met. Just because a bunch of people have a great idea about how to accomplish something, doesn’t mean it’s going to happen automatically.

Along with dates and times for certain action steps to be taken, there should also be follow-ups scheduled to determine the outcome of each step. Without this type of effort you’re likely to have certain team members putting the proverbial “cart before the horse”. If step “A” in your action plan didn’t effect what the team expected it to, then everyone needs to know that. It could seriously affect what other members are presently working on to solve the same problem. Their role or “step” in the action plan may assume that steps taken by other members resulted in successful outcomes.

Talking Over People’s Heads

I sometimes think that this point is one that goes without saying. From personal experience, however, I know that this is a serious problem in a lot of different work environments. Some folks like to talk over people’s heads, while others do it unintentionally. Regardless, the end result is always the same.

Someone ends up feeling stupid and insignificant, or they feel like they are being talked down to by someone who considers themselves aloof. Either way, they are left feeling discouraged about being a significant contributor at work. This does nothing to encourage open communication.

Instead, we should always go out of our way to simplify things in a friendly manner when at all possible. I don’t mean talk to folks like they’re little kids. Condescension will accomplish nothing good. Just keep it simple, and talk lingo only with those who you’re sure understand the language.

Forgetting The Human Element

Whatever it is that we are presently trying to accomplish - it has to do with pleasing humans. Even if we are trying to “save the whales”, we are doing it to appease ourselves. While our efforts may benefit the whales, they are not the ones who get any intellectual satisfaction out of it.

Every challenge at our workplace is being undertaken by humans to satisfy humans. That’s the nitty gritty of it. We need to remember that people like to be treated like people. A little dignity goes a long way in accomplishing a lot of great things. Employee numbers, titles, and responsibilities are necessary, but without embracing the human element, they can be awfully humiliating.

Make sure to pause for a moment and consider the other person. All of the skill and expertise of both of you combined won’t solve a first-grade problem, if you can’t see each other as more than a means to an end. You are more than merely tools - you are human.

Conclusion

As mentioned before, this is not an exhaustive list. I’m just scratching the surface here. I’m sure you have some behaviors that you’d like to add to my list. Also, I’m sure that some of these points are painfully obvious to some reading this.

Hopefully, for those who are already mindful of these things, this has served as a useful refresher. It never hurts to revisit things you haven’t actively pondered in a while.

Avoiding Safety Rhetoric

Mon, 24 Oct 2011 14:45:15 -0400

Talk is cheap. We all know that.

It’s also no secret that the majority of industrial workers are not gullible either. Just because they don’t use the big words and flowery phrases their bosses sometimes do, doesn’t mean that they don’t have a clue. Quite the opposite is true. Often the operators are the ones who are more in tune to what’s safe and what’s not in the workplace. The reason is because they’re the ones “in the trenches”, and know the territory much more intimately than their Safety Director does.

So you talk about safety. What else do you do? Are you doing enough to get a buy in from your employees? It’s nice that you order posters and make sure that the first-aid kit is restocked, but there’s a lot more to the job than that. Sure, you do a lot more than that, but can people see what else you’re doing? You have to get people believing that you take safety seriously. And that’s going to take a lot more than just words. The saying, “actions speak louder than words”, applies here as much as anywhere else. Your actions communicate much more about your safety mindedness than your words do.

The first and most important thing is this: You have to come out of your office. It’s not enough to sit around and arbitrarily write policies and adopt safety slogans. Your employees need their Safety Manager out in the plant looking for danger, asking questions, and getting people involved with initiatives which will make your facility a safer and more productive place to work. In short, you need to communicate with them.

If you think you’re going to delegate everything, and still have operators on the floor take you seriously - you’re in for a big surprise. It’s just not going to happen. This isn’t to say you can’t delegate at all. It just means that anytime you delegate, you’re going to have to spend some quality time following up appropriately. Remember, people need to see you before they’ll believe you.

When you receive a safety complaint, how seriously do you treat it? Are you truly interested in assessing the situation and then taking the appropriate action? Do your employees automatically assume that this will be your attitude? They certainly should. If they don’t feel this way about you, it’s time to start asking yourself why.

In addition to assigning regularly scheduled departmental safety audits - do your own as well. You should also sit down with each department once in a while to discuss any safety concerns they might have. Keep in mind that this practice will only be seen as safety rhetoric if your safety challenges stem from a substandard plant or equipment which is beyond the point of safe use. Such issues must be promptly addressed in order to gain any sort of buy in from your employees.

What you communicate about safety is of great importance to the well-being of your employees. Seeing is believing. When they actuallysee you being serious about safety - that’s when they’ll start believing you.

Communicating In Context

Mon, 24 Oct 2011 14:42:07 -0400

To be a really successful communicator, you need to have a contextual framework for your communications. What does that mean? Well, it’s a lot simpler than it probably sounds.

It’s all about setting boundaries.

It is rare, when broaching a new subject with someone, to find that a well established context already exists. It is more than common or shared experiences between you and the person you are communicating with. While a common ground will be helpful in establishing these boundaries, the two are not the same thing.

The “context” refers to the “area” or subject being discussed. The “framework” is constructed of all of the additional elements such as valid questions, answers, etc. and defines the limits of the discourse.

Here’s an example.

Two people are talking about “Safety on the Job”, and they are limiting the conversation to “safe practices”. One might say to the other, “Job Hazard Analyses are fair game here, but Safety Awareness is not, because that does not pertain to a practice, but rather a state of mind.”

This example may seem a bit trivial at first glance. However, it is valid because a Job Hazard Analysis actually defines and provides instruction for performing specific tasks safely on the job. Therefore it pertains to “safe practices”.

Safety Awareness, on the other hand, while necessary to accomplish the writing of a JHA, is not automatically necessary for the end user (or operator) to execute the safe practices described therein. An operator can be someone who is not “Safety Aware”, and yet safely perform a task by simply following the procedural steps laid out in the JHA.

Clear as mud, eh? Read it a second time to be sure it makes sense. I did!

What often happens is that these boundaries are verbally established on the fly during the course of a debate or discussion. In workplace communications, however, it can be useful for you to mentally establish these boundaries ahead of time in your own mind.

If you know you are going to be facilitating or attending a brainstorming session on a particular topic, take the time to build a contextual framework for communicating within. In so doing, you can streamline problem solving and reduce inefficiency in your workplace communications.

Deploying the Easy Button. There's a Right way & a Wrong way.

Mon, 24 Oct 2011 14:40:18 -0400

I’d like to make a case for the Easy Button because there are times when you can and should use it to your advantage. Now pay close attention. I said use it, but I didn’t say use it for yourself.

Perhaps first we should revisit what we already know - the premise of the famous Easy Button. Who is it for? Well, it’s for anyone who has to do something that they really don’t want to. Why don’t they want to do it? They don’t want to do it beacause they think it’s going to be hard.

If you’re striving to be your best at work, then you should avoid the easy button personally. It’s beauty is in it’s ability to persuade others who are resistant to progressive and positive changes in your workplace. The ultimate power of the Easy Button is it’s ability to lure someone to take action, because it will be “easy”, as opposed to doing nothing at all because they think it will be hard. Sometimes it’s simply a case of someone thinking “This will be an easy way to get so-and-so off my back.”

The really neat thing is that once the resistant person gets involved (by taking the Easy Button), your opportunities to get them fully on board with the program increase substantially. They’ve opened the door for you to ask for more. Sometimes you need to hand them another Easy Button, sometimes you don’t. People who get involved and who are recognized and truly valued for it, seldom need another “easy-in”.

If you’re human, then you’ve probably been resistant to some type of change before. You may have been handed an Easy Button yourself at one time. Maybe you didn’t even notice. The person handing it to you may not have known it either. You probably made it through a really tough transition that would have been impossible without an easy way to get started. You can help people around you make it through tough changes too, by conciously giving them an easy way to get started. It’s a lot more convincing than telling someone they have to commit all or nothing, right now, on-the-spot.

This can be really useful when you’re dealing with a situation where incremental change would be the ideal way to go- but you simply don’t have the time. This could be your condensed version of incremental change. What you need to realize, however, is that this way is going to take a lot more personal involvement from you because some folks will have to be coddled along. There are always some that do. It’s just that now you have to coddle faster, which is an interesting feat to be sure! That’s just the truth. There’s no shame in it either. We’re all human with diverse personalities, strengths and weaknesses. That’s why we build teams - so we can pull a bunch of different types of people together. This way we get the best of everything on our teams.

Make the Easy Button a part of your arsenal for affecting positive change at work. If you learn to do it deliberately and effectively, then it will be a truly rewarding and ethical approach to helping folks through the tough times that every company or department faces. Just remember: Don’t use it yourself. Do offer it to others to be used as a stepping stone to a better place at work.

Written Safety Procedures

Mon, 24 Oct 2011 14:36:58 -0400

One area that many organizations could stand to improve in is safety communication.

The Standard Operating Procedure should be the most basic and persistent safety communication tool in the workplace, yet it is often poorly crafted and ineffective. Over the years, I’ve read a lot of them, and the most consistent theme I see is an overall vagueness about how a task can be safely performed.

The SOP is often very detailed from a technical perspective yet lacks any vantage concerning safety. Sometimes, however, I actually find procedures which are not detailed at all. They are so vague, in fact, that they leave a lot to the imagination. This is definitely a detriment to safety on the job.

It’s imperative that we be specific, otherwise we are just dressing up a generic directive to “Just go do the job”. In other words, our SOP needs to say a lot more than “This is what you need to do to perform this task”. We need to go deeper, breaking the task down into minute steps. Yet even this is not enough.

In this day and age, it’s not sufficient to merely explain the steps involved in completing a work related task. We must also take into consideration the safety risks associated with each and every step in a procedure.

One way to ensure that your Standard Operating Procedures include adequate safety guidelines is to implement the Job Hazard Analysis. The JHA is a wonderful tool for defining the potential dangers associated with each and every step of a procedure.

If your organization hasn’t yet nailed down all of it’s SOP’s, the JHA can be particularly useful in helping you keep safety in mind while you author them. If you do have written procedures in place for every conceivable task, then you can supplement them with Job Hazard Analyses. The original SOP can serve as the technical document, while the JHA serves as the supplemental safety document.

Ideally, all organizations should strive to fully integrate the JHA into the SOP. The best practice would involve all information from the JHA being included in the SOP. The JHA, however, does not necessarily have to contain all of the information from the SOP.

Writing a Job Hazard analysis does not have to be a daunting task. It’s actually pretty easy to do. In fact, the most practical way to get them written is to have someone else write them - namely, the employees who actually perform the job. They will usually be the ones in the best position to identify potential hazards. This may take a little prompting on your part to get them looking at things from the proper perspective. Nonetheless, they will ultimately be the ones best suited to the task. Your job will be to give the final stamp of approval after the JHA has gone through a revision process, during which time you can offer your suggestions.

The simplest of JHA formats can consist of headings such as “Basic Job Step”, “Potential Hazards” and “Preventative Measures”. Another column for “Additional Comments” can be helpful as well.

It’s really that easy and it can make a huge difference.

By starting a JHA program, you’ll be communicating how you really feel about safety. Your employees will know you are serious about safety, and secondary to that, so will regulatory agencies such as OSHA. So call a meeting, form some departmental teams, and get started crafting some well written safety communication documents today. You, and a lot of other people at work will be glad you did. Most importantly, everyone will be a lot safer because of it.

Clearly Communicating Details

Mon, 24 Oct 2011 02:50:10 -0400

What if I asked you to lie down and let me drive a loaded dump truck over you? Would you let me? How about for a million dollars? Better yet, would you jump out of an airplane without a parachute for $2 million?

You’re probably responding with an emphatic “No!”

Now, what if I told you that all you had to do is lie down under an overpass, while I drove the dump truck across a bridge overhead? What if the airplane was a small two-passenger type, still parked on the runway?

“Now that’s a different story!”, you might say. But is it really? It’s actually the same story, but without your personal assumptions putting a spin on it. And so it is in the workplace as well. Effective communication is often undermined by failing to clearly define the details in whatever situation you’re dealing with.

Think about the above example for a minute. Did I say the dump truck tires were actually going to touch your body? Did I say the plane was going to be flying in the air?

Nope.

Granted, I was trying to trick you with my suggestions, but that’s not necessarily the case when we misinterpret other people’s ideas at work. Many times it is simply an honest misunderstanding. Innocent as it may be however, it can lead to disastrous results. Just imagine making a million dollar mistake because you didn’t take the time to find out the details.

It’s also crucial that you stop to consider how you present your ideas to other people. You want to be sure that you don’t present them in such a way that your coworkers think they’re going to get run over by a dump truck if they buy in. That wouldn’t be a very persuasive way to win support, now would it?

Make sure you clearly communicate details when sharing new ideas. It may seem like a chore at first. If you stick with it, however, you’ll find that it pays huge dividends. Before long you’ll be known as a great communicator of ideas. Another added benefit is that when people question your ideas - they will ask for details. After all, you will have an outstanding reputation as being an open, sincere, and detail oriented communicator.

"trust is a tricky word that is often misused…"

Sun, 23 Oct 2011 18:22:00 -0400

“trust is a tricky word that is often misused…”

- read more…

People or Processes - Which Is More Important?

Sun, 23 Oct 2011 18:08:00 -0400

I recently took a personality assessment test which required me to answer the following question: “What do you feel more comfortable with, people or processes & systems?”

The question bothered me a lot. Mainly because I had to choose one or the other without the benefit of any elaboration on my part. That’s not the case with this article, however, so now I can share how I really wanted to answer that question.

In organizational terms, either one is useless without the other. So here’s my final answer: “I’m comfortable emphasizing the importance of processes and systems to people, while being careful not to make individuals feel insignificant” This is somewhat of a balancing act, and I believe that a person either has a knack for it, or they don’t.

Here is my reasoning for this answer.

From a business perspective, what good is a group of people who have a great idea, if none of them can come up with a practical way to get from point “A” to point “B”? That’s a futile situation. A bunch of dreamers - sitting around and dreaming. At most, a bunch of dreamers spinning their wheels and not getting anywhere very fast. Good intentions won’t take you very far without a vehicle. Therefore, we introduce a system comprised of processes.

On the other hand, what good is a fantastic system without empowered people who feel valued and aptly equipped to master that system?

It’s a symbiotic relationship. If you choose one over the other, you’re simply setting your organization up for failure.

Proponents of systems often neglect the nurturing of people, while the people advocates are often dreamer types who believe that wild success will come through casual ambiguity. The truth is that both are looking at a long-shot and are taking the longest possible route to true success - if they manage to arrive there at all.

Which came first, the people or the process? I know that sounds silly but think about it for a moment. Who created the process? People did. Who will make the system successful? People will.

Key into the human element by finding ways for your employees and coworkers to truly realize their intrinsic value. Connect with them. If you can do this, you will have no problem developing them into masters of your system. You’ll also find that many of them will even become innovators who will help you to continuously improve your systems.

But none of it’s ever going to happen if they feel like a bump on a log.