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Real leaders leave a legacy. They capture the hearts and minds of their teams. Their origin story puts the safety and well-being of their people first. Great companies ubiquitously have safe, yet productive operations. For those companies, safety is an investment, not a cost for the C-suite. It’s a real topic of daily focus. This is the Safety Guru with your host, Eric Michrowski, a globally recognized ops and safety guru, public speaker and author. Are you ready to leave a safety legacy? Your legacy success story begins now.

Hi, and welcome to the Safety Guru. Today, I’m very excited to have back with us Dr. Archana Tedone. She’s Assistant Professor of Management at the Fairfield University, Dolan School of Business. Archana, it’s such a pleasure to have you back. I know we’ve had another conversation a few years back in a prior episode, and you’ve got some new research I’m really excited to talk about.

Oh, great. Thank you so much, Eric. It’s always a pleasure to be back. I love catching up with you and talking about safety. So, thanks for having me back.

Absolutely. So maybe if you could do a brief recap of your journey in safety, because you had a pretty amazing experiences around safety now in teaching management. And today we’re going to talk about predominantly safety voice, which is a really interesting topic to talk about. So maybe if you can start out with a bit of an intro to who you are and how you got here.

Yeah, I would love to do that. So yes. Thanks for having me. My name is Archna Tedone, as I mentioned, and I’m an assistant professor of management at Fairfield University. And I primarily currently teach courses around leadership at the undergrad level, the graduate level. But I wasn’t always here. Prior to becoming a professor, I was a consultant. I worked in people analytics for a bit. Prior to that, I worked with you all at I’m formerly census, and we did a lot of work in the safety space and training and development. And that’s really where my passion for safety, I would say, grew. I was in graduate school before that. I did a lot of safety-related research and looked at populations like nursing and health care and really thinking about how we promote safety communication, especially in high-risk and high-safety critical populations such as these. Sure. And I think Being able to work on projects related to safety training, safety development, safety culture assessments, it really made me start thinking about a lot of practical ways to apply the research that I was doing. Since then, I think I would say I’ve been primarily focused on workplace safety and the voice element of it and how we can better communicate safety issues in the workplace, even when things are stressful, times are tough, how do we still prioritize safety?

One of the topics that you touch on is this concept of safety voice. The last time we talked about upwards, downward, and peer-to-peer lateral communication. Tell me a little bit about what safety voice is and why it’s so critical.

Yeah. Safety voice, by definition, is this upward communication, or it could even be lateral, of safety issues that are occurring at work. Safety issues can mean not only reporting hazards or something along those lines, but it could also be communication around potential issues that you identify or potential violations that are happening. Any communication, preventative and change-oriented communication around safety in the workplace could be considered safety voice. It is absolutely critical to promote a workplace in which safety is not just an afterthought, but truly a priority. We are gathering information daily on how to make the workplace safer.

And ultimately, frontline team members know the work the best. They know the hazards the best. And so, we want to make sure they’re communicating, they’re being heard, and We’re creating an environment where we’re fostering this dialog, this information that’s coming up in the organization as well.

Yeah, absolutely. Leaders cannot be everywhere at once. And it is just impossible to expect a leader to have eyes everywhere all the time. So, think about it. If you are not on the floor as a leader and you don’t see something, if that is your only way of ensuring safe practices at work, then that’s a huge miss. You need to be able to build a team in which they feel responsible to promote their own safety and speak up about safety issues that are happening so you as a leader, can take those actions and ensure that things that need to be prevented can be before they result in some really bad outcomes.

I know you introduced this link back to social exchange theory, and you talked about the transactional elements, which was really powerful because it made me reflect a lot about when we say a psychologically safe environment where somebody speaks up, what does it really mean? Why is it that sometimes people won’t do it?

I think that when we think about any of these exchanges in the workplace, forget about safety, but just thinking about us as human beings, we are always weighing the pros and cons or the costs and benefits of all of our actions in all of the decisions that we make, what time we wake up in the morning. Is it more beneficial for me to hit the snooze button and get nine more minutes of sleep? Or is it more beneficial for me to wake up at this time? I’m weighing those maybe in a sleepy state, and it’s not as clear, but we are always thinking about the costs and the benefits, right? This also applies to safety-related situations. In our latest research on Safety Voice, which was a meta-analysis, we looked at voice through this framework of social exchange theory, and we identified, or we viewed voice through this transactional approach, thinking about how individuals weigh the costs and the benefits of voicing a safety concern. We might perceive costs like embarrassment. What if I speak up and my supervisor thinks I’m just this tattletale or My peers think I’m a snitch. What if I get it wrong?

Retaliation. What if I made a mistake and I speak up about it and somehow, I’m implicated in all of this? We might view those as costs. The benefits, of course, maybe I do prevent a safety issue from happening, and it could save us from potential harm. Maybe there is a positive change that comes out of me speaking up about this. Maybe my supervisor praises me and says, Hey, really great. Thank you for bringing that information to me. If I weigh those against one another, and I determine that, hey, the costs are outweighing the benefits of speaking up about the safety issue, then because I’m human, I might choose not to voice that issue.

I think for me, this was really powerful as a conversation starter, because we often say, well, you should speak up. I usually use an example of a plane that crashed in Portland, I think it was 50, 60 years ago. The scenarios, they were trying to check if they had their landing gear down. They were running out of fuel as they kept circling. I think it was the first officer and the flight engineer at the time, realized they were out of fuel, but neither dare to say anything to the captain. The captain kept circling until they crashed. You would think in a scenario like this, the cost-benefit would be cost is, if I don’t say something, really bad outcome, we’re going to crash, and the benefit would seem to be very high. But then you start understanding why is it it’s not happening? It’s not just that one plane event. There’s been lots of others flying to mountains, others running out of fuel where one of the two realizes but doesn’t feel comfortable speaking up. This forces you to think it’s actually about that person. That person is making decisions not about you, but also what do I need to do during increase the benefits, which I think comes into psychological safety and so forth.

Yes, absolutely. I think there’s one thing for certain that we all have very personal ways of thinking about costs and benefits. Eric, you and I could be looking at the same safety hazard in the workplace, right? Yeah. But to me, the cost of speaking up is not worth the benefit. To you, it might be. Absolutely. This is a very personal thing, and it’s hard to say, even in the example that you just brought up. For us, it might be easy to say, Yeah, of course. The benefit of speaking up about that is clear. But when you’re in that situation and when you’re looking at it from the eyes of a frontline employee, there could be so many other factors that they are considering in their cost-benefit ratio that we just aren’t thinking about or seeing.

Yeah. This gets us to thinking about what leaders can do to help tip this balance. How do we reinforce so there are more benefits in that decision-making? Because clearly, there’s value in speaking up, and there’s a significant risk when people don’t see the value in that cost-benefit equation.

Unfortunately, it’s not an overnight fix to be able to build this team, this climate, this culture in which speaking up about safety issues isn’t an abnormal experience. Ideally, we want to create this this team, this culture, this climate in which this type of communication is just normalized. It’s normal to speak up about hazards and communicate if you see anything that needs to be attended to and that your leader needs to know about. But getting there is not an overnight fix. I think a lot of it does start at this leadership level. I think one of the strongest drivers of employee behavior is truly leader behavior. So, role modeling behaviors you want to see as a leader, modeling transparency, modeling vulnerability, showing that, hey, I made a mistake, and this is the mistake I made, and this is how we are going to fix it. Saying that, hey, I’m not bulletproof, and I’m also making mistakes, and we’re all working together. Humanizing yourself as a leader and your team can be a great start. And I also think that in some other research that we did, we really understood the power of a leader in terms of role modeling behaviors.

Sure. Some of the strongest predictors of email behaviors after work hours in another line of work, we found, were the behaviors of one supervisor. Even in organizations with really strict policies around email use after hours, if your supervisor is emailing after hours, then you’re emailing after hours. Sure. The power in a leader should not be understated here, even when it comes to safety.

I think this is a really key point because the leaders can drive the equation. I think when you presented this to me the first time, we talked about cost-benefit. It really resonated because psychological safety looks at it from a broader sense. You have it versus here, it’s saying each person is making that decision individually. I need to think of it this way because some of those individuals create climate and culture. But it made me reflect that in some organizations, people weren’t speaking up because they shared an example of 35 years ago, the CEO responded some way differently. That CEO is long retired, long gone, but in their present memory, that’s their experience, or they work somewhere else where this wasn’t valued versus the next person. They clearly understand this is the expectation here. And that’s what we’re dealing with day in and day out.

Yes, absolutely. Since that CEO had left, if behavior from leadership hasn’t changed the ideas that workers have in their heads, that is the last thought that they have. Oh, there were these issues, the CEO did nothing, and now that’s just how it is. But what it takes to change that mentality is a leader who says, hey, I am going to close the loop on this safety issue. Thank you for raising that. I did X, Y, Z to try to address this issue, or I wasn’t able to address this issue, and this is why. Here’s what we can maybe think about in the future. Closing that loop ensures that your workers are continuing to voice because, again, we as humans, we tend to not want to waste our time or our breath. And so, if we keep speaking up and speaking up and it’s going nowhere, then what are we going to Stop speaking up. Stop speaking up, right?

Correct. And a story I often share is leaders can send very powerful signals. I remember when I started in aviation, I was in my early 20s, and I remember the first day on a blackboard, they were saying, number one, value, priority is safety. They would put big capital letters and underscore it and then say on time performance, all these other things come after, but permission to play is safety. This is the only thing that matters If you could get this right, the others matter. It’s a very binary message which you don’t often hear in most businesses. My thought was, and obviously they say speak up, raise concerns. You hear that, you say, okay, I need to do the right thing. But then when I actually did this and I stopped the operation because something was perceived to be unsafe, cost a lot of money, lots of zeros. Then the next day, what I discovered is the insights that I had when I called an all-stop, where actually there was no hazard present. It was completely benign, but new information came overnight that I didn’t have at that moment. I was sure that I was going to get terminated.

There was a lot of people in the airport that wanted my job terminated. But what was interesting in this signal that happened, the COO flew down that morning and gave me a very public attaboy that it was the only right thing to do. But he made it public so that essentially everybody else would get the signal that when we say safety, is number one, and not just number one, it’s permission to play, I mean it. From that day on, I realized I have permission to do this, and a lot of others heard it. I often challenged COO, CEO, CEO, CEO, CEO, to say, do you know about these things with that proximity? I have still no idea how he knew that morning he need to jump on a plane to do something. But that was incredibly powerful to set the stage for others.

That is so powerful. A little action like that can make big waves in the climate, the culture of an organization itself. These are the threads that start weaving the fabric of what safety culture looks like in your organization. So even these tiny little actions, these behaviors from leadership, can really make waves. And that is such a cool experience.

Exactly. And so, I think this is the thought for leaders is saying, how do I create signals to me as well that reinforce the pattern change? When we’re talking about the experience from 35 years ago, unless I see a definitive change in a pattern, I assume that’s still the case, even if the organization could have moved.

Yeah. And another thing that I want to add here is that what your CEO did could have easily looked like a performative gesture. I think we are very good at picking up on genuine actions and behaviors and genuine communications and things along those lines. And so backing up your words with visible actions can really show how safety concerns are taken seriously. If your CEO sent out an email saying, Hey, great job. Eric did a great job. This was exactly what needed to happen, might not have been as powerful as him jumping on a plane to really show that he appreciated what you did, and that is what you should have done and what others should be doing.

This episode of the Safety Guru podcast is brought to you by Propulo Consulting, the leading safety and safety culture advisory firm. Whether you are looking to assess your safety culture, develop strategies to level up your safety performance, introduce human performance capabilities, re-energize your BBS program, to enhance supervisory safety capabilities or introduce unique safety leadership training and talent solutions, Propulo has you covered. Visit us at propulo.com.

Great transition in terms of we’re going to touch on essentially what should leaders do? So, one of the things is take fast action. I like what you’re talking about. It has to feel genuine because if it’s just written by Corp Coms, it’s not necessarily genuine or having the same impact. You also touched earlier in terms of you need to take action with that feedback, but you can’t always take action. So, what are some of the other things that leaders can do to make sure that they’re reinforcing this pattern?

Yeah. So, a few things come to mind here. One is, I think it’s important for leaders to really take every concern seriously. And by seriously, I mean, even concerns that seem minor or seem like, why is this person bringing this to my attention? This is not a big deal. Forming some checklist or guidelines for yourself on how to evaluate these voices. That helps us stay away from any biases that might come to mind saying, oh, I already thought about that, or this is not a big deal, or this person always comes and speaks up, and they’re one of those people, right? So naturally, as humans, some of these biases might creep in when we’re evaluating voice, right? So, having some standard, having a checklist saying, okay, for every concern that comes up, I’m going to evaluate it around these three elements, right? So, deciding that with your leadership team and thinking about how to best evaluate, engage the action taken on voice can be really helpful.

Sure.

And two, as I mentioned earlier, the genuine piece of actively listening to the individuals that are bringing this to your attention, even if it seems minor, even if it seems like not a big deal, genuinely being able to thank them, whether it’s getting on a plane and flying down or thanking them and showing genuine appreciation for the behavior that they’re engaging in because you want them to repeat that behavior. We repeat behaviors that we feel like are positive and rewarded in some way. And so, if your supervisor is praising you for bringing this up, then you’re going to continue to do that. Right. Third, as I mentioned before, closing the loop is probably the most important. Following through either with a formal investigation, some action plan on things that you think could actually need to be changed and implemented. But most importantly, for even voice that it seems like things that you can’t take action around at the moment or things that might be non-issues, communicating that back to individuals, why you’re not taking action on this and why you’re not able to implement any changes right now. And in this way, employees will almost self-screen from there, knowing with more knowledge, okay, maybe these sorts of things are what I need to be voicing.

Those employees that are consistently voicing, the more feedback and guidance you give them around their voice, the better they’ll get at it and get you the information you need. Sure.

I think this feedback loop you talk about is incredibly important because it’s showing that I did some due diligence, and I think I see it a little bit more when you actually action something, but it’s often easy to forget when you can’t do something. But just like you Instead of closing the loop and saying why we can’t do it. As an example, if I’ve heard it was one organization, they wanted to customize trucks to add some additional bells and whistles, cost was exorbitant, and the exposure to that risk was probably 5% of the fleet needed it. But maybe you can tweak the recommendation and say, well, what if we only did it for a handful of trucks in the fleet, as an example, the ones that are exposed to that particular hazard, or just saying, we can’t do it now, but We have in the budget for next year. Even something like that that may not sound as positive is still explaining what we’re doing with that information.

Yes, absolutely. I also, to some extent, would suggest and support leaders involving their team in problem solving, right? Yeah, I love that. If there are hazards on the floor and your team is the one who is working with these hazards daily, they probably have ideas on what to do and how to best approach these situations. Closing the loop can look something like, hey, let’s chat in my office a little bit about your thoughts on how to address this problem, right? And that also helps build psychological safety and trust and helps your team feel like they’re part of the conversation and not just they are to communicate information. It involves them more in this whole process, which gets them to buy into why voice is important, too.

Absolutely. Even just problem solving on the shop floor, I’ve seen like A3s or Kaizen type events where you’re saying, okay, would you be willing to be part of the how we solve this? It can be hugely powerful because now you’re saying, okay, I’m taking your I’m engaging and involving you in solving it. Maybe even, ideally, you actually get to the building the change, implementing the change, as opposed to just the ideation part.

Absolutely. I think oftentimes, hazards and safety issues are already creatively addressed on the floor, right? If they’re not voiced up to you. There’s all of these innovative, creative ways that teams decide to work around or manage some of these safety issues. And you as a leader, if you’re working with them to craft a solution to these issues, you as a leader can be that voice of protocol of it. Because sometimes they might not know violations that they might be engaging in or why certain things can’t happen certain ways. So, if they are willing to invite you into that conversation on how to be safe and still be able to get work done, because oftentimes we see that safety is viewed as this obstacle that they have to cross to get their work done. If you’re able to gain trust and enter those conversations on, how do we make this work for everyone, that’s a really special thing. The more you involve your team, the more they might want to involve you in these conversations as well.

Absolutely. I also like how you touched on the element of biases, because we all have biases. There are great articles have been written on this side. But often what I hear is that bias subtly introducing itself in the decision making. I label this person as quickly wheel because they always complain, this is dangerous, this is risky, E, et cetera. And so, by default, I start automatically tuning out what they say, which is not helpful. It’s not going to encourage safety voice as you’re introducing, but also it could be very dangerous because now I’m not listening to that person’s feedback. And maybe they were a little bit dramatic the last time, but maybe this time is actually the time you need to listen. And so, your idea of having more of a decision matrix or some a checklist to think through, tries to help you overcome the bias and maybe even getting people, I think, to recognize that I may have a bias towards this individual. How do I compensate for it?

Yes, absolutely. I think us, again, as humans, we may be tempted to discount individuals that are more frequently reporting that we view as not important or not achievable and view as more of complaints rather than anything actionable, essentially. But as leaders, it’s so important to assess the message and not just the messenger.

Sure.

Again, as we discussed already, creating some structured way to track and review this safety inputs can be absolutely important to make sure that nothing is really overlooked due to some of these biases. But we do, I think we, again, being human, understanding that we have these biases is such a great first step of knowing that, hey, am I not excited about hearing what this person has to say? Because they were just five minutes ago? Or is it for some other reason? I think also on the flip side of that, we do also… It’s completely fine to place differential weights on opinions that we hear. As human beings, we have people that we really trust, and when they say something, we place a lot of weight on that opinion. However, when it comes to reports and information about safety, it It’s a whole norther ball game. Having some standardized system in which we can evaluate, quickly evaluate and judge a decision matrix, a checklist, some guidelines, will help bring us away from that state of mind. And put us in a more objective evaluation mentality where we can really look at the issue and not the person reporting the issue.

I also think what you talked about a few seconds ago about as you get involved in the problem solving and they’re hearing the rationale and we’re starting to think about how do we turn this problem into a solution, you’re indirectly also training people to come up with more comprehensive problems with solutions, but also the type of things that are actionable.

Yes, absolutely. I would even encourage praising problem-solving behavior and thinking. If you have a team member that approaches you and says, hey, this is a big safety hazard, and this is what we figured out to fix it, and it’s completely a terrible idea, still praise them for thinking in that way, for trying to think in a way to solve the problem at hand. Sure. That’s where you’ll get so much idea generation. You’ll get so many interesting, innovative ways to solve issues that make everyone happy. I think that’s the issue with some safety policies and procedures and protocols. It’s that They struggle with making everyone happy. Maybe they make us on the leadership side happy, but not necessarily those on the floor or vice versa. Getting to a solution that makes all parties happy can happen more easily when all of these parties are involved in the crafting of the solution.

Such a powerful message. Safety voice is so critical in business because we want those that are closest to the work to highlight risk, highlight issues, highlight solutions, and be involved in improving the workplace. I really like your message around social exchange theory and this element that it’s really a cost-benefit transaction that’s happening multiple times in somebody’s head. That means we need to tip the balance more in favor of speaking up, which is really a leadership ownership responsibility that we need to foster.

Yeah. I think also as leaders, being aware that costs and benefits differ across individuals and understanding how others evaluate costs and benefits, right, can be really a powerful way to look at scenarios and situations as well.

Yeah, because it’s not like an accountant who’s got a spreadsheet that shares a spreadsheet and all the models in front of you. It’s what’s going on inside of you. Exactly. It’s prior experiences, it’s prior work environments. There’s a lot of things that you don’t have control over that are coming into that equation.

Yeah. I think building a space in which speaking up about safety issues doesn’t feel like voice. It doesn’t feel like you’re voicing anything. It just feels like you’re having a conversation. And that’s the gold standard, I think. Getting to that place can be so ideal for the exchange of ideas, information, and issues, and being able to take preventative action, which is what we all want to do, right?

Yes. Thank you so much, Archana. Thank you for coming back on the podcast, and you’re welcome to come back anytime when you’ve got some new ideas to share. I really appreciate you sharing this. Thank you.

Thank you for having me, Eric. Always great to be here.

Thank you for listening to The Safety Guru on C-suite Radio. Leave a legacy. Distinguish yourself from the past. Grow your success. Capture the hearts and minds of your teams. Elevate your safety. Like every successful athlete, top leaders continuously invest in their safety leadership with an expert coach to boost safety performance. Begin your journey at execsafetycoach.com. Come back in two weeks for the next episode with your host, Eric Michrowski. This podcast is powered by Propulo Consulting.