By Thomas Barker | Senior Member
Risk communication has roots in intellectual traditions that inform the practice of communication specialists in occupational health and safety and that surface in academic conversations. Understanding risk choices for individuals, managing small group dynamics, and skill in crafting visual and text messages—these are the interdisciplinary capabilities health communication consultants, technical communication academics, and students in professional and technical writing classrooms comprise, or should comprise, as the learning outcomes of critical education in risk communication. Closer to home, technical communication scholars learn from researchers (like Jeff Grabil, Craig Waddell, and Beverly Sauer) that students should understand and critique the decisions made in risk assessment by risk professionals (mostly trained in psychology) in order to understand the writing and persuasive challenges of talking workers into “doing the safe thing.”
In this column, I will address the communication and management challenges that small businesses and nonprofits face when implementing health and safety policies, how that informs our teaching of risk communication, and some suggestions for helping students engage in health and safety topics.
The Basics of Risk Communication and Management
Workplace health and safety resembles what we already know as risk communication in that it shares the three main components of any risk assessment: hazards, risks, and controls.
Hazards: A hazard is any physical, chemical, or psychological circumstance that can cause harm to a person. In the workplace, this means machines, tools, air quality, fluids, and potentially stressful work environments and relationships with other employees and clients.
Students need to use observation and data-gathering skills to identify hazards in the workplace. The Internet can provide examples of checklists for kitchens, confined spaces, electrical appliances, walkways, and just about any areas where people work. The Occupational Safety and Health Administration also offers information for identifying harmful chemicals and other substances. Similarly, government sources offer guidelines for identifying signs of stress in the workplace, such as increases absences, conflict, and long hours.
Risks: A risk is the possibility of harmful interaction with a hazard. If a person doesn’t walk on a slippery floor it’s not a risk for that employee. Thus, risk is a calculated or analytical concept based on the probability of harm and the severity of consequence.
Students need to use interview skills to assess the degree of risks that employees face. These interview skills—adequate preparation, clear agenda, patience and consistency, and ethics—allow the student to prepare detailed reports using standard risk-depiction tools, such as heat maps and risk charts.
Controls: A control or control measure is an action that employers or employees take to minimize risk. Controls fall under the category of engineering (eliminate or fix the hazard), personal protective equipment (wear a helmet), and administrative (institute policies and safe work practices). Communication solutions fall under the administrative category.
Students need to use their document design skills to craft risk messages and informative brochures, pamphlets, signs, and posters that alert employees to risks and help them make effective and safe decisions. Training in rhetoric and persuasion that we provide for students can be helpful when they realize that avoiding risk is a decision that an employee makes and that the better the design of the risk communication document, the better the chance an employee will act safely. Understanding of usability testing, focus group techniques, and document review can help students prepare stunning posters, signs, banners, and other materials that really make an impression on employees and can turn a dangerous workplace into a workplace where safety is clearly values and “on the agenda.”
The field of workplace health and safety is highly specialized, and real-world consultants receive extensive and specialized training to handle detailed, high-risk situations. Many large companies have staffs of trained specialists in this area, and large budgets. However, I have found that governments provide many easily accessible materials for managers and small business owners to help them perform their own risk assessments. These materials, which take a commonsense approach to inspection, analysis, and control, fit the needs of student risk communicators. What’s more, the information thus provided aligns neatly with the kinds of research, analysis, and communication skills we inculcate in our technical communication students.
A great place to start is the Health and Safety Executive (see hse.gov.uk). This organization provides a “Five Steps to Risk Management” tool for employers that details how they can perform an effective yet informal risk assessment of their workplace. I have found that students and clients respond positively to the common-sense ideas in this document. It works because it creates a “same page” for people to work from. What the risk communication instructor will find, though, is that the situation gets complicated quickly once he or she realizes the kinds of challenges that small businesses and organizations provide.
Challenges in the Workplace
The nature of the workplace in both small businesses and nonprofit organizations shapes their health and safety communication issues. These organizations often have a changing workforce; their workers come and go seasonally, many are volunteers or interns, and many work with little training. Additionally, workers may have language challenges, especially in a culturally diverse city. At another level, organizations have a need to build competency in managing health and safety, having, in many cases, either ignored it or taken only token steps to ensure a safe workplace. Even beyond that, many small businesses are unaware of the need to align with city, state, and provincial health laws and codes, insurance guidelines, and accreditation partners. As a result, these organizations and businesses lack the resources that those governmental and regulatory agencies provide. What’s worse, they often lack essential skills in workplace communication to make a program successful.
To meet health and safety standards successfully, organizations need communicators. They need help building what Angelica Vecchio-Sadus, in her article, “Enhancing Safety Culture Through Effective Communication” (available on the Internet), calls “a positive safety culture” among their employees. Owners or managers may be unaware of regulations that provide for workers’ “right to know” or “right to participate” and see the process of implementing a program as a top-down initiative. However, as the Occupational Health and Safety Manual of Canada points out, “The ‘right to know’ means that everyone in a workplace has a right to receive information needed to identify and control the hazards to which they may be exposed.” Health and safety is, above all, a communication issue.
Health and Safety Committees
Technical communication students possess skills to help managers face communication issues in the workplace. Through their preparation as part of writing and publication teams students can help employers create what are known as health and safety committees in the workplace. Health and safety committees are the backbone of small business and non-profit organizations’ safety programs. A health and safety committee consists of employees and managers working together to set policy, perform on-going inspections and assessments, and manage incident reports. But more importantly, these committees provide channels of communication across hierarchies, they provide empowerment opportunities for employees, and, most of all, they represent, at its best, the constructive nature of risk communication. To paraphrase Alan G. Gross, in “The Roles of Rhetoric in the Public Understanding of Science,” unless employees can analyze and participate, they cannot understand their risks, and unless they turn that analysis into activity, they cannot control it.
Students also use their management skills in preparing tools for their clients to use to implement plans for health and safety committees and other safe workplace policies. As a capstone project for a course in risk communication, the communication and management plan provides students with a way to wrap up their research, analysis, and document preparation into a useful product for their clients. A communication and management plan consists of tools for communicating—forms, incident reports, checklists, risk messages, signs, and posters—and it also helps managers implement these communication controls, such as training materials, “tool box meeting” kits, and suggestions for safety awareness events. It provides a rationale and guidelines for increasing communication among employees and managers in the specific context of the business or organization and samples of policy documents and even schedules for meetings, repeat inspections, and evaluation criteria for successful programs.
As such, the communication and management plan can put an employer on the road to larger efforts, such as obtaining certification from state or provincial agencies responsible for workplace health and safety. For example, in Alberta, employers can work toward a Certificate of Recognition (available on the Internet at http://humanservices
.alberta.ca) by providing evidence of a successful health and safety program. Apart from providing assurance of injury reduction and improved employee participation and trust, the Certificate of Recognition also brings financial incentives to employers in the form or reduced worker compensation payment rates.
Employers respond well when students present a comprehensive plan that helps them get started with materials and strategies for improving workplace communication. Using their presentation design skills, students can “make the case” for improved workplace health and safety for their clients. But my students found yet another level of involvement with their clients: helping to measure health and safety capacities in the workplace.
The Next Level: Research
Health and safety capacities refers to the readiness of a workplace to implement a health and safety program. We found that some organizations, as one might expect, already had programs in place, some reviewed them regularly, some also had incident reporting and other characteristics of employee involvement. We found the basis of what managers call a “maturity model” of workplace health and safety. Technical communication instructors familiar with the Information Process Maturity Model (http://infomanagementcenter.com) will recognize the concept that, in organizations, capacities often fall along recognizable stages, called “levels,” that indicate how close an organization has come to achieving effective best practices.
In the case of best practices in health and safety, my students detected the outlines of more or less clear set of stages, starting from “ad hoc” or, as they put it, “clueless,” to an integrated model, where safety committees worked as partners with company policy makers. Along the way, we identified, very roughly at first, stages we called “basic,” “training,” “planned,” “developing,” and, finally, “integrated.” A similar concept can be found in a document from The Keil Centre called the “Safety Culture Maturity Model” (http://hse.gov.uk). This model identifies a similar set of five stages, starting at “emerging” and ending at “continually improving.” Such a maturity model can help managers assess their organization’s progress, and help develop it further, especially when you realize that the more mature the organization’s processes, the greater the communication component.
For students, identifying these capabilities in their client worksites provided a knowledge-making component to the course. That is, by simply comparing notes with one another, they constructed the beginnings of research questions. “What characterizes safety programs at the various levels?” “How does communication play a part in identifying a given organization’s capacity for health and safety?” “What elements should one measure in constructing a more detailed model?” These questions indicate the real payoff in teaching risk communication: students, in their roles as data collectors, analysis, and document designers, and managers, actually “make knowledge” through their group efforts. In this way, they can add to the ongoing effort to research workplace health and safety and, we hope, help more and more employees “do the safe thing.”
