Coaching for 'safe performance'
While the image about safety management portrayed in the popular media is a jaundiced one, the complexity of hazards and of regulations to control them often does present quite a challenge to organisations. If you fail to communicate or oversimplify, you risk penalities of several kinds. If you communicate too much, you risk information overload.
That is, unless you use the single most effective way of communicating - conversation. For that is essentially what coaching consists of - conversations that direct attention clearly and squarely to barriers to high quality performance and to safe performance.
Through coaching, an employer can postively change the social environment of their workforce.
Actively Supporting safe performance
Safe Performacne Coaching works by the way in which it contributes to the fairness of an organisation's culture. Balancing accountability with organisational learning, it emphasises what people are motivated to do, what they want to do rather more than what they simply 'have ot' do to comply with the employer's legal responsibiliteis.
By including the word 'performance' in the expression 'safe performance', a coach emphasises the two sides of the realities of tasks for which managers and the workforce are accoutnable at work. One side is the number, variety and other attributes by which the standard of perforamance of individuals and groups can be evaluated; the flip side is the ways in which equipment, furniture, handtools and facilities are designed and maintained in conditions to avoid injury or illness as well as and in which instructions, trainign, reminders and warnings.
Coaching conversations can go a long way to make problem-solving part of the normal practice of coaching meetings with teams or leaders. They contribute to developing processes and practices that add up as 'the culture' an organisation uses to do business - not a 'safety culture' but a 'business culture that includes safe performance as the way leaders conduct their affairs'.
Dismantling barriers
When a problem has become embedded, it's up to the coach to behave pro-actively to negotiate a practical resolution that is accepted as fair and just, even if not a pleasant outcome.
Barriers to effective safety emerge when the habit of managing 'incidents' has not been cultivated, with the result that few, if anybody, is really clear about what safety standards actually mean in practice. The simplest and most cost-effective way to dismantle barriers to safety is to practicse coaching about recognising incidents and reporting them consistently. This is especially effective during times of change, such as moving premises, the installation of new equipment or furniture or the merger of two departments or divisions of an organistion.
Our accredited coaching psychologists offer a clear underlying structure for coaching that is sharply focused on needs of individuals they undertake to work with. During the coaching cycle, the most accurate feedback possible is a vital component of coaching for it offers the individual a sensitive guide to how his behaviour is perceived by others, including those he most wants to influence.
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