The Science of Safety
This Science of Safety Training course will train your safety team to enhance their skills in evaluating the science of safety.
Fred has unique skills in facilitating meetings, capturing audiences, and connecting with people from all walks of life… something truly special— Luke Bowley, Field Safety Manager for Eversource Energy
A lot is made of peer-reviewed research, particularly by safety consultancies who often have something to sell as a result. Published work often underpins new initiatives and programs within safety, but not all published work is equal! There are an ever increasing number of journals requiring content, which is unfortunately diluting quality. Under such circumstances, it can also be very tempting for folks to spin things a little, enhancing conclusions or making claims that exaggerate what can be quite limited findings, to better underpin their new product or service.
It can be hard to know what’s good quality research and what isn’t. And what on earth does epistemology even mean?!
This training will give your team the skills and confidence to better evaluate consultancy offerings and peer-reviewed research. They will gain an understanding of the importance of research methodologies and methods, sample sizes, data collection and analysis and the relevance of ecological validity in safety research. Example papers will be reviewed as part of this course, which will leave your safety teams with the skills, capabilities, and confidence to evaluate academic work scientifically.
Take the Spin out of Safety! Why how you say what you say matters most of all.
Effective safety communication is not just about words, but also the wider discourses that surround it.
What are discourses? Discourses are how we talk about things rather than what we say. They shape and influence our shared understandings of different things and help us make sense of the world and everything in it. They are formed through social interactions, and are constructed and reconstructed in an ever-changing flux as we move through different spaces and social groups.
And safety is a social construct – it’s what we collectively decide to make it. It’s the culminative consequences of the different discourses that surround and shape our understandings of it.
Here’s an example: If you’ve set up your safety program around a slogan of ‘Safety is our No1 Priority!’ you might think you’re also creating a discourse of safety valorisation in all that you do. Workers can easily get it, and will also prioritize safety in all their work, right?
Wrong!
Because there’s a fundamental problem here - unless you are a safety consultancy, safety is not your No1 Priority! Construction or Civil Engineering or Utility provision actually is. So you’ve started with a lie….and your workers know this…and this feeds a discourse around safety that’s very different from the actual words used. This discourse will shape understandings of safety throughout your firm, and wherever it ends up – safety won’t be the No1 priority that’s for sure! Slogans like this just set safety up to fail.
Safety professionals therefore need to be able to recognise and work with the different discourses that surround safety in their organizations, to really understand what safety means to their workforce, and to be able to change things for the better.
In this highly interactive, engaging, and insightful workshop your team will:
- Learn about the power of discourses and how they influence and shape understandings of safety.
- Appreciate why spin and hype are not good for safety, and how they undermine safety in the field
- Learn how to unpack the discourses that surround your safety program and reshape them to deliver your goals.
Clean up your Safety Clutter
Safety just can’t help being cluttered, not least because we don’t actually know scientifically what works and what doesn’t.
And that’s due to the fact that, from research perspectives, cause and effect in safety is really, really hard to prove. So we keep adding stuff that might help, and don’t want to risk taking something away that might already be helping. So the pile of ‘stuff we do for safety’ just grows and grows and grows!
But your safety clutter is not a complete mystery. Your safety teams and fieldworkers know precisely where you clutter lurks. They know what’s super smooth to do…and what’s like wading through glue!
But clutter isn’t a noun, it’s an adjective. And it’s often how we’re doing something that creates the clutter, rather than the thing itself. And how we do things is often totally unique to your organization.
This workshop starts by drawing out and identifying how the clutter happens in your safety systems with the folks that suffer from it day-in-day-out. Expert facilitation results in an engaging, inclusive and inspiring session, that can also be part-therapy as your teams get to pick apart the things that have bugged them forever! Once the things that make folks groan have been identified, a structured facilitation process gets the participants working on a practical to-do list and bigger-picture recommendations specifically addressing how you’re doing what you do, and how to clean up your clutter.
Because once your safety systems are decluttered, your safety teams and fieldworkers can focus more on getting the job done, safely.