Train your brain to be resilient to everyday stressors and improve your jobsite safety culture.

Real job safety isn’t about helmets or harnesses. It starts with a climate where people can honestly signal when they don’t feel safe or when a condition isn’t safe. Yet when they’re overloaded or something feels off on a psychological level, without psychological safety and the personal capacity to pause rather than collapse or ignore, they often don’t speak up about safety issues.

When people are apprehensive about speaking up, little mistakes can go unaddressed. Workers who are stressed out, overloaded and over-tired don’t have the capacity to spend the energy and time to do what they know would be right to fix—or prevent—those little mistakes.

Equipment, technology and OSHA rules abound to foster safety. Yet, these tools only work if workers can engage them. To do so, requires a down-regulated nervous system and emotional safety. Humans in general are much more aware, capable and present when rested, well-trained and supported.

TRAIN THE BRAIN

Nervous system and emotional regulation is a skill that starts with internal regulation. Somatic (physiological) awareness, is identifying what your body is experiencing and learning what to do with that feeling; not control it, not deny it, not suppress it, but work with it, allowing your capacity for information, stimuli and action to remain uncompromised.

Emotional and psychological safety on site is a performance variable, not a soft quality. Typically, people on a construction site are trained to be strong and self-reliant. Unfortunately, that often gets interpreted as pushing through stress and holding back emotions rather than speaking up. Constant holding back creates chronic physiological stress (allostatic load), which only continues to decrease the body’s window of tolerance.

If workers are uncertain about a job change, a deadline or a personal issue, they’re less likely to voice concerns when they see a hazard. Even if only unconsciously, much of their resources are focused—often in solitude—on personal issues. Holding onto old stress prompts a decrease in the capacity to handle new stress, like a jobsite safety issue.

Under the pressure of background stress combined with presenting stress, a good worker collapses into the default survival or coping mechanism. Extraneous behaviors and responsibilities fall by the wayside.

The strongest safety tool people have is the ability to speak up, and they’re more likely to do that when they feel psychologically safe and physiologically resourced. Being psychologically safe means being in an environment where workers feel trusted, not judged and generally heard. Being physiologically resourced means having the capacity to handle more stimuli without being overloaded or stressed.

SURVIVE AND ADVANCE

The stress state, at least on a physiological level, is the same as a survival state. In a survival state, the body orients toward threat, real or imagined, because the brain is hardwired to survive before anything else. This means less awareness and less concern about what subjectively feels unimportant. Yet that may just be what is objectively important on a jobsite: a particularly part, for example, vulnerable to falling off and prompting a serious safety issue.

If a worker feels either physiologically or emotionally unsafe, they are less likely to speak up or take proper action. A safety culture must explicitly protect honest signals, not just outcomes. Construction culture must allow the person in question to take the risk of saying something that might not be correct or culturally accepted, such as pointing out that an activity is not safe.

To shift this part of safety culture means shifting the appreciation toward taking emotional risks to pursue safety behavior and speaking up. It means modeling and rewarding actions that would traditionally not be honored, and having the community not only verbally agree but really feel the value of these risks.

Often, that value is felt when people start to share the feelings they’ve held and show how much they really care about others: They care about their own and others’ safety, and they recognize how difficult it can be to speak up, to slow something down or to take a different course of action.

Traditional safety programs assume people will consistently signal risk. In reality, it’s the capacity of each person and the collective emotional safety of the space that determines the success of any safety program. Buying more safety equipment and establishing more rules will often not improve your safety record, whereas changing the culture and the physiological capacity will.

SEE ALSO:  FIVE WAYS TO INTEGRATE MENTAL HEALTH INTO CONSTRUCTION SAFETY PROTOCOLS