5 powerful safety questions you can ask during your next safety moment
By Eduardo Lan
Safety moments are quite common in organizations with an established safety program. These begin some meetings with the intent of focusing on safety, elevating its importance and ownership. Usually, a recent safety incident is reviewed, statistics are shown, or a general message around safety is presented. Unfortunately, these safety moments don´t always generate the level of engagement required to make them meaningful, wasting a precious chance to drive the desired safety culture and sometimes even diminishing its importance in the minds of those attending.
Call to Action:
To elevate the importance and ownership of safety, we must involve people in a meaningful conversation that raises awareness and gets them thinking. This cannot be achieved by the mere presentation of numbers, data, or examples, but rather depends on engaging both the minds and hearts of those present.
To engage the minds and hearts of people around safety, it is often useful to ask a powerful question and then facilitate a conversation around said question. Here are 5 powerful safety questions that will help you generate an engaging safety moment conversation.
1. What was your safety moment?
People are not born or even go through their first job thinking safety is important. For many of us, safety became important when something happened either to us or to somebody else that changed our relationship to safety. What was that moment for you?
2. What is your safety why?
To achieve significant and lasting safety performance, safety needs to be personally relevant and important such that individuals are committed to working safely both for themselves and others. Thus, it cannot just be based on the organization´s reasons for safety. What is your personal safety why?
3. Which organizational and leadership elements foster and which ones diminish psychological safety?
Much has been said lately about the importance of psychological safety to generate a work environment where people feel comfortable and safe to speak up. What fosters and what diminishes psychological safety at work?
4. What does caring for people mean and what does it look like?
“Nobody cares how much you know until they know how much you care.” This quote by Theodore Roosevelt is pertinent in an organizational safety context. What does caring for people mean and what does it look like in the workplace?
5. How can we achieve operational excellence, ensure compliance, and hold others accountable while at the same time showing that we care?
Active care is a key principle of a strong safety culture, but many organizations struggle to balance it with operational excellence, compliance with rules and procedures, and overall accountability. What is that balance and how do you achieve it?
At Propulo Consulting, we help organizations and their leaders engage people in skillful and meaningful conversations that raise safety awareness and ownership and significantly improve safety performance.
Reference
Good leadership is about asking good questions. Harvard Business Review. (2021, November 30). Retrieved January 31, 2022, from https://hbr.org/2021/01/good-leadership-is-about-asking-good-questions
