6 Tips for Talking Safety to Someone Outside Your Team: Part I

In the minerals industry, we work with people who have a range of different attitudes toward safety and how much risk they’ll take on the jobsite.

From time to time, we find ourselves in a situation where we want to let someone know that we don’t think the way they are working is the safest way, or that we don’t think they’re following all the correct procedures for the job.

Having this type of conversation is made all the more difficult when the person we want to chat with doesn’t work for us, and may not even be from the same company or team.

But we shouldn’t avoid having a discussion about safety just because we aren’t someone’s boss. Keeping people safe is only achieved by everyone looking out for each other and having the courage to talk about the best way to do things.

Here are six tips to help make your next safety chat go a little smoother and make sure your message sticks.

1. Pick Your Moment

There are right and wrong times to have a safety discussion. If the situation you’re presented with is putting someone in immediate danger, then you need to find a way to pause the job as quickly as possible and talk about what you’ve seen.

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However, there are times when there’s not an urgent danger, and we are better to wait and have the chat later.

For example, if someone is not wearing the correct PPE, approaching him in front of the whole crew probably won’t work—we should wait until an opportune time later on when you can talk one-on-one. This will make the discussion less daunting, the person less defensive, and if it turns out that we’re wrong, we won’t look dumb in front of the whole crew.

2. Use ‘I’ Not ‘You’

The best way to avoid the person getting defensive or argumentative is to focus on your own thoughts and feelings rather than what you want them to do differently. The easiest way to do this is to make sure you start your sentences with "I" instead of "you."

We want to talk about how we feel and what we think, not directly about their actions or what we want them to change. So instead of "You should be…," "You are supposed to…," or "You know you haven’t…," we want to say things like "I’m a bit worried…," "I thought the rule was…," or "When I was on another site they…." Not only does this make our comments less direct and [confrontational] to the person (and hence make them less defensive) it also means that if we are wrong (which does happen!), then we don’t look like such a know-it-all.

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3. Ask Questions

In a similar way to using "I" instead of "you," we will try to phrase our comments as questions instead of statements as much as possible. This again makes the discussions less defensive, and gives the person a chance to explain their actions from their point of view.

So we say things like "Do we need to have locked this out first?" “Do you think we should go a get a ladder?" or “What’s the procedure for this?" Even if you know the answer for sure, using questions creates a more open and effective discussion and helps you find out more about the other person’s point of view.

Be sure to check in tomorrow for Ross’s remaining three tips.