How OHS professionals can enhance stakeholder communication

OHS professionals must prioritise clear communication by adopting language that is easily understood by all stakeholders, even if it means stepping outside their usual domain-specific jargon, according to QUT.

There is generally little knowledge and few empirical studies on the subject of OHS communication with different stakeholders, said Nektarios Karanikas, associate professor in the HSE discipline of the school of public health & social work at QUT.

Karanikas said academic literature and industry reports refer generally to the need for customising professional communications to the targeted audience, regardless of discipline.

“Nonetheless, my interactions with different stakeholders with no formal safety roles (e.g., workers, supervisors, senior managers), personal communications with OHS professionals, and some published opinions suggest there is room for improvement,” said Karanikas, who was speaking ahead of the AIHS Queensland Regional Visions Conference, which will be held at the Novotel Sunshine Coast Resort on Thursday 5 September 2024.

“Whether or not someone fares well on that front heavily relies on how prepared we are to ‘sacrifice’ our comfort in speaking the language we developed over time through our studies, qualifications, etc,” he said. 

“The language we use as OHS professionals may be unfamiliar to others, so it’s important to communicate in a way that everyone can comprehend. We want to believe that everyone understands terms like safety, hazards, risks and controls similarly, but his might not be the case. If it is not the case, then we think we are discussing the same concept, but in reality, focusing on different ones.”

For instance, OHS professionals with a social sciences background could fail to attract the engineers’ attention when using poorly specified concepts (e.g., immature culture, poor awareness). 

Karanikas explained that engineers (and several other job roles and professions) can understand better when a safety expert uses unambiguously defined variables, and suggests rigorous metrics beyond perception scales ranging between “1- strongly disagree to 5 - strongly agree”. 

“On the flip side, we have colleagues who are well-versed in engineering and can handle analytical simplifications. This can create false impressions about our ability to gain full control of today’s complex sociotechnical systems. The ‘can-do’ language may hide the fact that modern systems always have flaws. As we handle one, several others may arise.”

In addition, Karanikas said professionals with business and management backgrounds can be very successful when talking to other managers. However, presenting safety merely as a business function and talking about the allocation of resources, budgets and contribution to performance, for example, might create perceptions that health and safety is not a positive duty, responsibility and public health imperative. 

“When the ‘managerial language’ of safety escapes the ‘management land’, it can lead to downgrading safety as just another objective of the organisation,” he said.

Furthermore, Karanikas explained that The OHS Body of Knowledge chapter on Ethics and Professional Practice, states: “In practice, OHS professionals will recognise that the actual language used will depend on the context and purpose of the communication (e.g. investigation reports for regulators, reports for boards of management, internal hazard alert, toolbox talks)”. 

“This means that safety specialists must attract the attention of everyone when no accidents happen. After bad events, most people will attend safety matters, for some time at least,” said Karanikas.

According to literature, Karanikas explained that safety is the term that is understood in the most different ways compared to health and risk. 

“A colleague with a humanities background would be fine with different interpretations of safety in an organisation. However, welcoming differing perceptions about the definition of safety simultaneously welcomes variations in the application of safety,” he said.

“So, one of the biggest challenges for the OHS professionals is to ensure that when different staff look at the same (un)safe situation, they could agree on whether something should be done.”

However, sharing conflicting messages could be another issue. For instance, he said OHS professionals could talk about legislative compliance and hefty penalties for the offenders. At the same time, these colleagues can conduct detailed investigations into serious injuries and accidents to identify and address organisational weaknesses. 

“While this approach promotes a fair culture, the trend of criminalising safety sends a different message that can be confusing for everyone involved. How can we encourage a ‘just culture’ when safety regulators and prosecutors uphold a ‘blame culture’ that endangers managers, workers, and other duty holders with the threat of prison?” Karanikas asked.

Also, in multicultural and multilingual settings, workers of minority cultural and language backgrounds can be disproportionately at risk “when we use language and terms they cannot understand, and when we ask them to follow sophisticated policies and procedures” which can come across as complex. “Efforts, time, and money invested in safety programs could go wasted if they do not use inclusive language for all individuals regardless of experience, literacy, and job role,” he said.

“Those who have been in a foreign country without knowing the language know the frustration of communication barriers. Likewise, OHS professionals might speak a language that does not resonate with their audience. People might put honest efforts to engage, but fail because they try to decipher messages instead of conceptualising how they can use and apply them,” said Karanikas, who explained that this could result in poorly managed hazards and risks and undesirable events for all stakeholders.

Safety requires a unified view and communication from everyone, and Karanikas said OHS professionals should make an effort to use straightforward language when communicating with non-experts. 

“The language of safety should include a mix of social aspects to create relevance and meanings, engineering elements to create sustainable solutions and business aspects to achieve acceptance and integration,” he said.

For example, there are justifiable voices pushing OHS professionals and organisations against using the term ‘error’, because Karanikas said it carries notions of guilt. Still, in specific contexts and cultures, it can prove extremely difficult to find an alternative term that everyone understands and accepts. 

“In that case, maybe it is better not to abolish the term ‘error’ but to cultivate a better understanding of what affects human performance. Yes, safety science has drastically changed and evolved, and OHS experts should keep up,” said Karanikas.

“This, however, does not mean everyone outside the OHS profession is ready, mature, interested, etc. to accept this evolution. It takes time and effort to make a shift in using language.”

As such, Karanikas said the priority should not be to look and sound safety-smart. Rather, every organisation needs a simple, standard way to agree on and communicate safety and related terms like risks and hazards. 

“Maybe you do not even need to persuade workers and laypersons that risk and hazards are not the same concept. You can confuse them more than help them focus on what it matters,” said Karanikas. 

“Leave behind the terms we use at safety conferences and reports and adopt the ‘local language’ as your medium for conveying safety messages. This will help the audience understand the content easier and develop an interest in OHS.”

Karanikas will be speaking at the AIHS Queensland Regional Visions Conference, which will be held at the Novotel Sunshine Coast Resort on Thursday 5 September 2024 from 8:30am to 5:00pm. For more information, email [email protected], call (03) 8336 1995, or visit the event website.