Interest in safety soft skills took off like a rocket this year.
From podcasts about enhancing safety leadership to presentations at upcoming conferences like the SafeStart Forum, soft skills are increasingly becoming recognized as key leverage points for health and safety managers to improve safety outcomes without having to make dramatic changes to their safety management system.
In the past several months, we’ve published several blog posts that outline some of the most impactful soft skills when it comes to safety. In the interest of time, we’ve gathered them below with a brief explanation of how each one can be a valuable contributor to safety results.
In How Safety Professionals Can Maximize the Value of Empathy, we discuss how frontline leaders can demonstrate a sense of caring to employees in order to improve both morale and safety outcomes. It’s not something that can be faked, but it’s well worth the time to get it right given the tangible benefits it can have in the workplace.
In Why Positivity Is the Key to Strengthening Safety Culture, the correlation between positive interactions and success in the workplace is shown to matter in safety too. Notably, supervisors are ideally positioned to ensure positive interactions are being used to balance out challenging safety interactions.
Meanwhile, Why Delegation and Empowerment Matter in Safety explains how safety managers can improve safety outcomes by delegating and empowering others. As safety consultant Tim Page-Bottorff explains in an article originally published in Safety Decisions, there are two major benefits to this approach:
“The first benefit is that you will have more eyes looking out for safety issues, and with more observations being made there will be more safety improvement opportunities. The second is that your deputies are much less likely to break the safety laws that they’re helping to protect.”
As for The Safety Case for Taking the Temperature and Reading the Room, it’s clear that there’s tremendous value in being able to recognize the mood of individual workers as well as your team as a whole. As Pandora Bryce and Pete Batrowny explain in an episode of the ASSP podcast, worker attitudes help form a safety climate that can have a surprisingly large influence on risk and injury. Being able to recognize where the safety climate is at can help safety folks make the right interventions at the right time.
In How to Maximize Two Underrated Safety Skills: Relatability and Storytelling, we note that “relatability and storytelling go hand in hand with positive safety outcomes” and explain why the ability to tell effective stories can improve knowledge retention rates and employee engagement.
And then How to Take the First Steps to Human Factors Management offered an overview of why human factors management is such a vital part of workplace safety, and how soft skills are an integral part of mitigating the dangers posed by workers’ mental and physical states. It points out that safety professionals have many reasons to spend more time learning about human factors management when you consider its value “in terms of saving time and effort… not to mention the lives saved and the ability to maximize your own investment in your soft skills.”
Lastly, in 4 Ways to Use Consistency to Boost Safety Outcomes, we show that consistency in safety can be a real difference-maker. In particular, a “predictable environment leads to predictable actions” and supervisors and safety managers need to learn “to project a certain level of consistency, on both good days and bad days,” because it can influence workers’ attitudes and behaviors toward safety.
These seven blog posts provide a great overview of seven crucial soft skills that can play a key role in safety success. But to get a comprehensive picture of how these skills work together to form a web of soft skills and why soft skills are such an overlooked yet valuable part of a safety professional’s toolbox, you should read 7 Essential Soft Skills For Hard Workplace Safety Problems, a free guide on soft skills in safety.
It provides plenty of material on each of the seven soft skills outlined above, as well as plenty of background and contextual information to help EHS managers recognize how these skills fit into the workplace safety puzzle. And, perhaps most importantly, it discusses practical ways that these skills can be improved.