Workplace safety is of utmost importance when you’re dealing with dangerous chemicals in labs or raw materials likely to hurt people on construction sites. There’s federal and state regulations to comply with along with additional safety protocols set by management. But safety isn’t just about adhering to laws and making sure that your employees are paying attention when operating heavy machinery. It’s about creating a culture of workplace safety and ensuring that people don’t feel like they’re at risk for harassment and micro aggressions.
It’s also about keeping workplace hazards at a minimum that aren’t as highly visible as machinery and chemicals: for instance, how are you mitigating employee stress?
Poor communication skills training is one of those hazards that frequently gets overlooked just because it doesn’t wear a hard hat. People need to be able to communicate with each other more effectively in and out of the workplace, but especially in the digital age workplace communication skills often need improvement. It’s very easy to misread the tone of an email or memo and while it’s convenient that we can now do everything from buy property and broker mergers via text message, it also means a lot gets lost in the process. Conversations and intents can get misread when people interact in “meatspace”: what someone thinks is gentle ribbing is actually seriously violating someone’s personal boundaries and making them feel unsafe at work.
A safety speaker can get your team on the right track by deep-diving into the communications skills necessary for fostering a safety culture. People need to be able to understand and communicate the safety message no matter what size and type of workplace that they are sharing. What may seem like an antagonistic manager or a problem employee may simply be people who just have trouble communicating. To keep your workplace safe, fixing then preventing the damage caused by miscommunication is a must.
