Helping Workers Stay Calm and Centered When Safety Matters Most
Anyone who has worked in a high-hazard environment has experienced it. A load shifts unexpectedly, an alarm goes off or a coworker gets too close to moving equipment. In an instant your heart rate climbs, your breathing changes and your muscles tighten.
This is the fight or flight response. In behavior analysis we refer to it as respondent behavior. It is elicited by the situation rather than chosen by the person. It evolved to help people survive immediate threats. However, on a job site it often works against what we need most from workers: clear thinking.
When workers are in fight or flight, the range of behaviors available to them narrows. They tend to rush and skip steps. They react to the most obvious part of the situation instead of assessing the full picture. Procedures they know well can become hard to recall in the moment.
What many leaders don’t realize is that this response isn’t limited to emergencies. A supervisor who raises their voice after a near miss can produce the same reaction. So can an incident investigation that feels like a search for someone to blame. If safety conversations are consistently paired with threat, workers will start to avoid them. They stop reporting hazards and near misses. Leaders then lose the very information they need to prevent the next incident.
To be clear, this doesn’t mean safety should be treated casually. Urgency has its place. The goal is to help workers stay calm and centered enough to think through a situation logically when it counts.
Leaders have more influence over this than they might think. The way a leader approaches a safety conversation can either escalate a worker’s stress or help bring it down.
With DCI’s Deliberate Coaching® methodology, we teach leaders to rely on open-ended and empathic coaching questions. This is especially important after a stressful event. Open-ended questions invite the worker to describe what happened in their own words. That shifts them from reacting to reflecting. Empathic questions and statements show the worker that the leader is there to help. Blame isn’t part of the conversation.
For example, after a near miss a leader might start with “Walk me through what was happening right before that” or “What were you noticing at the time?” From there, questions like “What felt most urgent to you in that moment?” and “What would help you feel more in control if this comes up again?” help the worker think through the situation logically. A question such as “What could we change to make the safe way the easier way?” turns the conversation toward solutions.
Simple acknowledgments matter too. Saying something like “That sounds like it was a stressful moment” lets the worker know their reaction is understood. It often lowers the emotional temperature enough for a productive conversation to happen.
Some leaders assume that staying calm under pressure is a personality trait. In reality it is a set of skills that can be coached, practiced and reinforced. When leaders consistently use open-ended and empathic questions, safety conversations become associated with support instead of threat. Over time, workers become more willing to slow down, think before acting and bring concerns forward.
Are your safety conversations helping workers think clearly? Contact DCI at info@deliberatecoaching.org to learn how Deliberate Coaching helps leaders build safer workplaces through the science of behavior.
Posted by Nic Weatherly, Ph.D.
Dr. Weatherly is the CEO and Managing Consultant at Deliberate Coaching International with a proven track record of maximizing operating revenues and organizational and staff performance by building holistic systems and targeted training programs, linking performance-improvement initiatives to key business metrics, and strategically aligning short- and long-range goals to the organization’s mission, vision, and values.