Fundamentals of Safety Coaching

THE FUNDAMENTALS OF SAFETY COACHING

At its simplest, safety coaching is a one-to-one supportive relationship that focuses on developing skills, improving safety performance and resolving problems that could lead to incidents. Safety coaching is often focused on work, not emotional problems. However, work is influenced by our emotional state.  Good safety coaches therefore tap into this undercurrent and use it to lever major improvements in performance. Safety coaching is about working with individuals to help them unlock their own potential and maximise their safety performance and the performance of their inter-dependent team members – it’s about keeping people aware and keeping them safe.

Safety coaching is a personal approach to learning about safety – and this means that a coach helps each individual to become self-aware and identify how they can change their behaviours and thinking in order to improve safety performance.

The advantage of safety coaching is that the learning takes place on the job – where and when it is most impactful. It’s about catching behaviours in action and working with immediacy. It’s about having the kind of trusting relationship that enables people to work with well-conceived and thoughtful feedback. And it’s about the ability to bring about mind-shifts so that people naturally want to change and take their own personal development on board. Coaches work one-to-one - the work they do is more about development from within, rather than training or instruction. In a working environment where hazards abound and safety is high priority, the relationship of the coach to the workforce is crucial in order to cut through the everyday peer pressure that colludes and resists change. The coach can take on a roving role, carry out observational audits and use the information to feed into one-to-one sessions.

A coach is not an advisor or a consultant (see Coaching Services on home page) – a coach helps people work out for themselves what is required, they do not give advice on the work itself. They can be an informal and detached sounding board, or a formal member of the organisation’s management team.

The kinds of behaviours and thinking that safety coaching can easily address are:

·           Taking short-cuts

·           Failure to follow procedures

·           Unsafe habits

·           Poor self awareness or understanding of how the mind impacts upon personal safety

·           Lack of awareness of the environment – physical, emotional and psychological