Connecting Risk Management with Psychosocial Safety

In this episode, Mary Conquest speaks with Joelle Mitchell, an organizational psychologist and human factors specialist, who translates academic research findings from psychology, OHS and human factors into actionable risk management insights.

Joelle tells the story of her journey to specializing in psychosocial health, and helps simplify psychological safety for EHS practitioners.

She explores key hot topics, such as who should be responsible for psychosocial safety, and explains how organizational structures can significantly impact Workplace Safety.

Joelle proposes a well-balanced and highly practical approach to psychosocial risk management that allows HSE and HR to work together in an evolving model.

This fascinating discussion covers many elements of modern Workplace Safety, including managing inevitable trade-offs, incentivization issues, the vitality of risk management controls, moral injuries and the importance of humble inquiry.

Find out more about Joelle’s current role and work as Global Head of Psychological Health and Safety at: Flourish DX‍

Where you can also find psychosocial health and safety webinars, podcasts, training and tools.

- [Mary] Hi there. Welcome to "Safety Labs by Slice." Folks, sometimes we talk about a very specific topic on the show, and other times we have a wider-ranging conversation with our guest. Today's show is the latter. I'll be speaking with Joelle Mitchell, an organizational psychologist and human factors specialist. Joelle takes academic research findings from the fields of psychology, OHS, and human factors, and translates them into the language and tools used in the field of risk management.

Joelle has a master's degree in applied psychology and is a regular speaker at industry events. She's currently the global head of psychological health and safety at FlourishDx. As a practitioner, she applies the principles of evidence-based practice to drive improvement in psychological health and safety outcomes.

Joelle joins us from Perth. Welcome.

- [Joelle] Thank you, Mary.

- So, your safety background is in risk management, but in the past few years, you've shifted your focus to psychosocial health or to that space a little bit more. Can you tell me about that shift, and how and why your interests have evolved in that direction?

- Yeah. So, I suppose I ended up in safety a little bit just by luck rather than design in that I was working for an EPCM and just sort of out of my undergraduate degree just needed a job, so I was working in document control and kind of moved my way through the organization until I landed in the safety team.

And then decided to do my master's in organizational psychology at that time and have sort of stayed in safety from there. And so that was supporting an oil and gas producer here in Australia. So I've kind of, yeah, stayed in that sort of safety psychology type of function throughout my career.

Before I joined FlourishDx, I had been with offshore petroleum regulator in Australia, NOPSEMA. I'd been with them for nine years. So, started out in that role sort of looking at things like safety culture in the offshore petroleum industry in Australia, looking at how to improve understanding and application of human factors concepts both in the offshore operators, as well as within NOPSEMA, within the inspectorate.

So helping to sort of upskill the inspectors in understanding human factors, concepts, how that applies within the inspection framework that NOPSEMA was using, that sort of thing. And in that role, really got exposed to...had the opportunity to see the way that lots of different organizations approach dynamic risk management and sort of major accident event prevention.

So, talking about the, you know, sort of your multiple fatality-type potential events and, you know, a lot of complexity, a lot of change. And yeah, looking at things from a safety case perspective, where things are generally very well structured from a risk planning and prevention perspective, and then how that translates into operations isn't always smooth or as predicted.

And so, you know, sort of seeing how people in operations would work within or outside of the boundaries of that safety case and then sort of what the consequences of that were. During the pandemic, we started to see more complaints coming through around mental health concerns for the offshore workforce.

So, being in Western Australia, we had a relatively unique response to the pandemic. The way that Australia works is we do have a Commonwealth government, but then each state or territory also has its own sort of local government. And the premier is the head of that government.

So, the state premier in WA closed our borders. So, yeah, nobody was allowed in or out, unless you had a justified reason for coming in or out. And so if you did come through the border from somewhere else, you basically had to do a two-week quarantine period before you could be then released into the state.

And so the offshore petroleum industry in Australia relies very heavily on a workforce that flies in and out of various places, both interstate and internationally. So, generally, what people would do is they'll fly in and do a two-week swing offshore, and then they'll go home for two weeks.

That's sort of the normal roster pattern, and there's some variation to that. And so what ended up happening was that people would be sort of coming into WA, they'd have to do a two-week quarantine, and then they'd be going to do their stint offshore. And so everything kind of got thrown out of whack. There were people who were essentially just staying in Western Australia for a long period of time. So, there were people who kind of hadn't been home to see their families for six months or that sort of thing.

And then the offshore facilities themselves were also introducing quarantine periods because they didn't want to have an outbreak of COVID in the offshore facility because, you know, they all live really on top of each other. And this was pre-vaccines and all of that sort of thing. So, an outbreak offshore could have been, you know, potentially catastrophic for them. So, what we had were, you know, large groups of the workforce who were essentially displaced from their family, you know, really going, I guess, out of their way to essentially enable their employers to continue producing and varying degrees of approaches to managing that from, from different employers, different operators.

Yeah, some operators really were a lot more mindful of the mental health impacts on the workforce, issues of isolation, and that sort of thing. And, you know, as time progressed, they developed more sophisticated ways of managing that quarantine period so that people weren't necessarily isolated. They would sort of quarantine together in a group, that sort of thing. But yeah, I guess during that period of time, we did have a lot more concerns relating to the mental health of the offshore workforce.

And so being the only psychologist at NOPSEMA, I was really brought into to look at those things in a lot more detail, I guess. And in parallel with that, we've also had a progression to a point of having regulations about psychological health and safety, or psychosocial risk management introduced in Australia.

So, that sort of started back in 2018 when Marie Boland conducted a review of our work health and safety legislation and recommended that we needed more explicit regulation relating to psychosocial hazard management. And so that had been sort of developing along as well, and those regulations currently in force in the majority of states and territories in Australia now.

So, how did I end up at FlourishDx? Jason contacted me and asked me if I was interested.

- Okay. So, last time we spoke before, we talked about a whole bunch of different topics. And one of your interests is in looking at the relationship between organizational structures and safety outcomes. So, in other words, what you said is that you believe that the way hierarchies and reporting lines are established has a direct effect on safety outcomes.

What's the connection?

- So, essentially, the majority of us want secure work. And so the way that we behave, the actions that we take in our employment are going to be grounded in that desire to maintain secure work. So, the way that organizations are structured, and if we talk about things like reward and recognition structures, as well as reporting lines, they can have a really big impact on safety outcomes, I guess depending on the reporting line through from somebody in operations.

You know, I guess if we take like the role of a safety advisor in an operations, so in a location at a site, if they're reporting through the production manager or the asset manager or the site manager for that site, and that reports through the operations line, the goal of that operations manager is going to be primarily related to production targets.

Now, we can argue that yes, they have responsibilities for safety through the legislation and through, you know, their position description and those sorts of things, but, you know, ultimately, an organization is only going to be successful if it continues to sell what it's selling. And to be able to sell what it's selling, it needs to be able to produce what it's selling. And so fundamentally, that's sort of the core purpose of that organization is that it needs to be profitable, it needs to be able to produce whatever it is that it produces.

And so if you're an asset manager, you have a number of competing priorities and objectives. But ultimately, your primary objective is production, and hopefully, you know, it's framed in a safe production context. Now, as a safety advisor in that location, if your reporting line is through that asset manager, then the asset manager needs to sort of balance what they're hearing from their safety advisors, as well as what they're hearing from everybody else on the site, as well as things like their KPIs, as well as looking at, well, you know, what's my bonus going to be?

What's the bonus for my team and the people who are working on my site going to be? Are we going to continue operating this site if productivity is not what it used to be? So, there are a lot of competing demands at that asset manager level, and safety is just one of the things that they're thinking about when they're thinking about, "Well, how do we proceed sort of on a day-to-day basis in terms of managing operations on this site?"

And we're also really dependent on how well that asset manager understands safety, understands what the issues might be, how well the safety advisor is able to communicate those issues and challenges and risks. You know, and there's a lot of variability on both sides there in terms of receptiveness and understanding of concepts, as well as that ability to communicate and influence upwards.

A lot of the time, you know, we bring safety advisors into a site because we want them to manage safety downwards, and so we're bringing them in for those skills of sort of people management rather than yeah, sort of upwards influence. And a lot of the time they're actually not encouraged to do the upwards influencing. So, if we have that same safety advisor or group of advisors in that same operations, but they're reporting through a safety line instead, where we've got an independent safety function in that organization that sits at the same level to the operations function in terms of seniority, in terms of reporting into the executive, then what we have is a stronger voice arguing for safety protections without having those same, I don't want to say conflicting, but I guess those same challenges or trade-offs that that operations manager is sort of grappling with.

And so whether it's done deliberately or not, a lot of the time if we do have the reporting line for site safety through the operations management of that site, the safety messaging can really be significantly diluted.

And that means then from a due diligence perspective from the executive and board perspective, they actually don't have a good line of sight to risk management in operations. And so having, yeah, really that organizational structure has such a big part to play in how well senior leadership understands what are the hazards, what are our critical risks, and how well are they currently being managed, and how exposed are we as a business?

If that's coming through an independent safety line, then they're going to be more well-informed than they are if it's coming through an operational line. And, you know, recognizing that some, you know, everybody, every operational leader is different, and some of them will do a very good job at communicating that and balancing that and others not so much.

So yeah, recognizing that there is a lot of variability in there. And I guess, yeah, speaking in gross overgeneralizations.

- Well, as we have to. I mean, we can't go through everything, but I'm also curious because we talked last time about the responsibilities of psychosocial health and safety and how they related...so we did talk about operations, also HR as another potential organizational, I shouldn't say silo, but department that is often involved.

What are your views on kind of where in the mix does that work? Is that a good idea? Should it be separate? What do you think?

- I think HR is almost in a similar position a lot of the time to the safety function in that, again, depending on how the organization is structured, how those reporting lines into the executive are structured, and also the sort of competencies that an organization actually looks for when they're recruiting into those functions as well. You can have HR and safety functions that do really feed into the strategy of the organization and are able to do a really good job of informing and being collaborative and sort of building or working together to achieve different outcomes and recognizing that there's a really significant overlap between safety and industrial relations matters.

And I think, yeah, the siloing isn't helpful to addressing those overlaps. So, you know, if we're thoughtful in the competencies that we're recruiting for in those roles, they can actually be really powerful and really effective roles. I think just a lot of the time that isn't the level of competence or those types of competencies aren't what organizations are looking for when they're filling those roles.

And so what we can end up with is, you know, an HR team that's potentially, you know, being sourced through recruitment specialists, for example. They might be very good at being recruitment specialists, and then they get promoted into an HR management role, and they really don't have a good grasp of the broader HR function. But I think there doesn't seem to be a consistent understanding of actually what are the competencies that we need for somebody to actually be effective from a strategic perspective when it comes to being an HR manager or a senior HR person in an organization.

When we're talking about psychosocial risk management, I think a lot of this has traditionally sat in HRs remit because it's been framed as employee wellbeing. And, you know, a lot of that is then framed around employee benefits, which is part of your sort of recruitment and retention strategies.

And that comes from, I guess, historically our view of mental health is that it's something that sits inside people's minds. And we haven't really taken that social determinants of health perspective when we thought about mental health or when we've framed mental health.

- Sorry. Social determinants, meaning that the organization and the culture, the context that it creates as opposed to mental health being in a very individualistic thing. Is that what you're saying?

- Yeah. So, I mean, even if we looked broader than organizations, we know that mental health outcomes are linked to things like housing security and food security, job security, you know, all of those sort of really high-level factors. And a lot of that's driven by things like government policy. And then within an organization, then we can sort of take that down a level and say, well, you know, what is it within an organization...thinking about it from that social determinants of health perspective, what is it within an organization that can influence mental health outcomes, either in a positive or a negative direction for the workforce?

And so, again, you know, there's the big-ticket items like job security, getting a livable wage.

- I was going to say fair compensation.

- Yeah, absolutely. And then, you know, a workplace where you're not going to be bullied, where you're not going to be sexually harassed, where you're not going to be assaulted or verbally abused. Those kinds of things. And there are other things that sometimes are actually sort of baked into your role, like exposure to trauma. You know, if you're a first responder, if you're a counselor, you know, there's lots and lots of roles where engagement with psychosocial hazards are actually the primary function of that role.

So, there's quite a lot of nuance involved when we're talking about psychosocial hazard management. So, I guess what we've seen in Australia is a little bit of a knee-jerk reaction where because it's now explicitly outlined in the work health and safety regulations, some organizations are going, "Oh, okay, well, now it's just safety's responsibility."

- Yeah, I was going to ask about that. And actually in ISO 45003 in the guidelines, I looked this up, for managing psychosocial health in the workplace, it specifically states that the guidance "discusses managing psychosocial risk within an occupational health and safety management system."

So, it's explicit right in the wording there.

- Yeah. So, again, just because it's part of your OHS management system doesn't mean that all of the responsibility for it sits in your OHS function, right? So, I think the key there is your OHS function owns your risk management cycle, right? So, they own the processes around how do we identify hazards. How do we assess risks?

How do we introduce controls? How do we monitor the effectiveness of those controls? What are the triggers that tell us that we need to revisit our risk assessment like that? You know, those are processes that are owned by the OHS function, but we need to separate that out from who are the control owners. So, if we think about that, again, from a physical health and safety perspective, you know, if we had OHS inspectors that said, "Okay, well, yeah, we need to do this structural inspection."

They're not necessarily the ones who are going to go and do that inspection. They're going to bring in, you know, specialists who are competent in doing that. And then any issues that are identified that need to be rectified through that inspection, again, the safety team isn't going to be the ones who are actually going to fix, you know, the crack in the foundations of the bridge, that's going to go to the structural engineering team, and they're going to actually come up with the solution for that issue.

And so it's the same thing when we're talking about psychosocial hazard management is, yes, your OHS team is going to say, right, well, this is when we need to do a risk assessment. And okay, we've seen that that trigger has happened and we need to do that now, and here are the tools that we have available for you to do that or for the organization to do that. What do we find?

And then whatever we find, those controls need to go to the appropriate control owner in the organization. And a lot of the time, the control owners are actually going to be HR because, you know, we think about the touch points that we have with an organization as an employee, the majority of those are actually owned by the HR function. And that includes our leaders because...you know, a leader selection process is driven by HR. You know, identification of competencies for roles, that's managed by HR, recruitment and selection processes.

You know, all of those things actually are fundamentally owned by HR. So, yeah, there's a separation between the process ownership and the control ownership, and we need to really be clear on that and also recognize where we need HR and OHS to work together in that space.

- So, that makes perfect sense to me. Do you often see that in organizations, though? Like, to me, as you describe it, I'm like, oh, yeah, of course. That's the way it maybe not always should be done, but that it's a very sensible way to do it. But it also doesn't sound like anything I've ever heard is all that common. Like current state, do you see that in organizations, or is it more something you'd like to see more of?

- Yeah. So, I think an important caveat here is that the vast majority of organizations, if not all organizations, are very early on in their psychosocial risk management processes. And so, you know, I think what I'm really talking about is this is where we want to get to recognizing where we are now, and, you know, helping organizations to see what that future state could look like.

And using those analogies back to, well, how do you manage it from a physical health and safety perspective does really help where organizations have mature safety management systems. So, I have seen some organizations who are sort of proactively saying, yeah, we're actually managing a handover of ownership of these concepts from HR over to our health and safety function.

So, yeah, it's starting. But recognizing, yeah, where we are now, where we're going to be in five years' time, I think, you know, I'm excited to see where we are in five years' time in terms of the progress that we're able to make in this space.

- Something else that you mentioned when you and I first spoke is that reward, and this in some ways goes with talking about HR as well, reward and recognition structures are a primary driver of organizational behavior, right? We act in the way that we know will be rewarded. But sometimes incentive programs are actually at odds with either operational requirements, safety requirements.

Can you expand a little bit on the challenges that this sort of dissonance, like this cognitive dissonance happens, like what is incentivized is not necessarily what is asked for, if that makes any sense?

- Yeah. So, generally when incentives are built or introduced to drive particular behaviors, the question always comes, "Well, how do we measure whether or not those behaviors are happening?" And, you know, you're not going to have somebody out there dedicated observing, you know, sort of that making a tick every time they see somebody do that particular behavior.

And so what we require is something that's a proxy measurement. And so again, you know, traditionally, we can look at things like the take five process on a site where people need to do their sort of, you know, spend five minutes, reassess the job site for hazards, see if anything's changed since they went on break or whatever it might be, that sort of thing.

And so, okay, well, we want people to do these, so we're going to give everybody a daily KPI that they need to do two or three or however many a day. And so the goal there is we want people to be checking their work site for any changes since they went on break or, you know, since they finished their last shift.

And this is the mechanism that we're giving them to do that so that we can monitor whether or not that's happening. And typically, what we end up with is that people will just pre-write them in the morning in the crib room before they go for the day, and sort of they'll write their three and they'll pop them in the box and that's it. They've met their KPI.

So, what we're rewarding is just paperwork that's not actually achieving the outcome that we want to see. And there's lots of examples of this sort of thing.

- And I think it's important that people aren't doing that because they're trying to be difficult, they're doing it because there is disconnection between, like, at the same time as saying, fill out this paperwork, do these checks, they're also being told, but do your job faster, you know, produce quickly, right?

Like, is that where the fundamental clash happens?

- That can be a reason for it. I think another reason for it can be that they just don't see it as a value-adding process for them. Like, I can look around my work site and I can see whether things have changed. I can do that in my brain. Me making a record of that is essentially for the organization to protect itself and say that it's taken all reasonably practicable steps by putting that responsibility on me as the worker to say that I've done these things that it's asked me to do.

So, yeah, I think that there's a lot of different factors that would feed into that into why somebody would do that, but I think, yeah, it's around efficiency. You know, you're doing that same job day in, day out. You know, what things are likely to change? You know, what the hazards are and aren't.

So, yeah, there's lots of examples of that. And a really good paper that outlines or that describes this really well is a paper that was written by Kerr called "On the Folly of Rewarding A, While Hoping for B." So, yeah, I often refer people to that one. It is a classic, but it's a classic for a good reason.

- So, I want to talk a little bit about controls. You've said that working in a complex safety management system, one of the risk management challenges is to understand the vitality of your controls. So, are they vigorous, are they degraded? Can you explain that challenge a little bit more?

- Yeah. I think this sort of links in with things like the hierarchy of control, where we talk about, you know, an elimination or an engineering substitution control is more effective or reliable than something like an administration control. Part of that is to do with, you know, if we've actually built something like a guard, we can see that it's there, we can see that it's in place, we can sort of test that it's working, those sorts of things.

And so when we're talking about, I guess, individual hazard management, it can be fairly easy to see whether those higher-level sort of physical control measures are actually in place or not. We can see if somebody's wearing a harness, we can see if there's scaffolding and barricading up where it needs to be, those types of things.

When we are looking more broadly and we are looking at safety management systems that may have controls that were implemented 10, 15, 20 years ago in the design phase of a plant that now, you know, has gone through construction and has been operating for 10 years, and we've got, you know, a decision that was made in the design phase around the thickness of the stainless steel that needed to be used to fabricate a pipe, for example, to, you know, withstand a certain level of pressure or whatever that might be.

So, there's those decisions sort of in that early engineering and design phase, and then there's what happened during procurement? You know, were decisions made at procurement to change those initial design criteria, and how well were those decisions evaluated from a safety perspective? Were those decisions more around timeline management?

And, you know, did we have a milestone that we needed to meet, again, so that we could get our bonus for this stage of the project, or whatever that might be, or, you know, because we've got agreements in place with the client and with suppliers, etc? So, if we're going to delay this particular milestone, what are the ramifications of that, you know, for the rest of the project versus, you know, it seems like a small change?

Is that change actually captured in the information that we have about the design? And is that change then introduced into our management plans in terms of, you know, how often do we need to inspect and what chemical treatment do we need to use, or those types of things? So, what might seem like a really small and insignificant change at one point in this really, really complex project can actually have significant ramifications that may not come to light for 20 years.

And so, you know, I've got my bonus, and what happens in 20 years' time is going to have absolutely no impact on me whatsoever. Do I even have a good enough understanding of the broad implications of the decision that I'm making at this point in time?

Or, you know, am I somebody with a finance background who really doesn't understand safe design and doesn't understand chemical engineering, or whatever it might be? So, do I actually really understand the implications of the decision that I'm making? As an organization, do we have sufficient systems of work in place? And this is where we're talking about, you know, are they administrative controls? What are they when we're talking about systems of work, because we're largely telling people what they need to do, but we're telling people what they need to do to implement controls that would be considered elimination, or engineering, or substitution, or whatever they might be.

So, this is really where that complexity comes into it. That as we have so many, many, many layers of safety controls, you know, spanning decades, we end up with a really opaque management system in that somebody who's actually working on the tools, or even a site manager, or an asset manager, or whatever it might be, they don't have visibility of all of those controls going back for however long and whether or not they were degraded or not, and if they were degraded, were those degradations actually accommodated for moving forward?

So, you might be making a decision, again, at that point in time, and you're making a trade-off decision between, well, we have this operational target, this is sort of what our safety rule says. We think that we can manage around that if we do it this way instead, and we can do that and still maintain safety for the team who are working here, for example. But that trade-off might actually interact with a number of other trade-offs, or changes, or degradations of those historic control measures that you are not aware of, and that interaction might actually lead to something going bang.

- Or even like some...like you said, if they don't understand the implications of the trade-off and they think, oh, wow, look at that? We saved this much money, or we delivered that much faster. Why weren't we doing this before? Let's do it from now on. You can see how this can happen.

- Yeah, absolutely. And so, yeah, when a trade-off works and you don't actually...yeah, things didn't go bang. If we don't explore that well and actually say, well, was there a potential for something to go wrong here, then yeah, what we typically will end up with is that trade-off will be repeated because it worked, and it'll be repeated and repeated until it becomes essentially the new unofficial standard for safe work in relation to this particular thing that we're doing.

And so that's also then sort of how control measures can be degraded over time at the local level as well. And so Jens Rasmussen did a really good paper on this, again, it's quite an old one, but it just outlines it so well, and that's called "Risk Management in a Dynamic Society." So, it is open access if you can find the right hyperlink. So, yeah, that that paper outlines this issue really quite nicely.

- So, then as a safety manager, perhaps new safety professionals, you know, newly hired new in the organization, but the organization goes back 20 years or longer, how do you get...like, you don't know what's degraded. You can't see it in this type of example.

How do you attack that challenge? How do you, maybe not attack it, but how do you deal with that and see if you can find the hidden trade-offs that led the controls down a merry path?

- Yeah. That's a good question. I think maybe, unfortunately, the answer is that there are some things that are just going to be hidden if they weren't captured, though they just won't be there until you...if you happen to stumble across them. I think, you know, at a site level, it is around understanding where are people making trade-off decisions and monitoring those and understanding why, why are those trade-off decisions being made?

And actually being mindful of, okay, well, let's actually explore this. Is this an innovation that we can actually introduce and incorporate as part of our safe work practices? Or are there risks that the work group weren't aware of that, you know, we were lucky this time that things didn't go wrong, but maybe that that's something that we need to address? So, I don't think that it's about cracking down and saying procedure, procedure, procedure, and nobody deviates because we know that that's just not actually possible or practicable, you know, in a dynamic work situation.

So, it's more about saying, well, yeah, trade-offs are going to happen. So we need mechanisms in place so that we can understand what those trade-offs are when they're happening and we can actually evaluate those to determine whether or not they're okay to continue or not, and whether we can sort of build those into the way that we do things or not.

- Okay. So, I want to move back a little bit into governance for psychosocial health and safety. So, I'm guessing that there's no one-size-fits-all approach to how psychosocial health and safety should be managed in terms of organizational structure, but what kind of factors do you suggest people look at to decide which...to make decisions about governance for psychosocial health and safety?

Like, what should be considered?

- Yeah. So look, I think wherever possible, if you can use your existing health and safety governance structures and expand those to encompass psychosocial health and safety as well, that's, I think, probably the best approach to use for now. And so I've sort of talked before about, you know, where we're going to be in five years, we don't know. So, I think that, you know, for now, the approach that I lean towards is wherever possible, using existing safety management frameworks, structures, models, because we really want to ensure that organizations are anchoring employee mental health within a safety framework instead of within employee benefits get them to support framework.

So, we want to move them out of that individual health management, you know, sort of accommodations perspective into a let's design the work so that it's safe and protects people perspective. So, I've used this analogy a few times, but like, you know, when automobiles were first introduced and they were sharing the road with horses, they actually would mount a fake horse head on the front of the automobiles so that it would be less startling for people and for horses who were sharing the roads, because, you know, there's this thing that's just moving around of its own accord.

- And making noise.

- Yes. Stick a horse head on the front of it, and it sort of starts to look a little bit like something that we're already familiar and comfortable with. And so I think that where we're at at the moment in terms of psychosocial risk management is we're a little bit like sticking the horse's head on the front of the automobile. We know that it's sort of serving the same purpose as physical health and safety risk management. And so we want it to look the same at the moment so that people within organizations are able to actually ground it and anchor it in those safety management principles.

And think about it from those perspectives. Once we are there, hopefully, our practices, processes, and approaches will evolve and mature. And so, you know, yeah, where we are in five years' time, hopefully, we don't need the physical health and safety horse head on the front of it, and we can just have it as it is. But where we are now, I think we really need to frame it in ways that are familiar to organizations, instead of it being this big, new scary thing so that organizations can actually be more comfortable in adopting these practices in a way that feels familiar to them so that it's not as scary for them.

It doesn't seem like such an insurmountable challenge.

- Summary, we're at the horse head stage.

- Yes.

- But yeah, no, and that's good too because, you know, longtime health and safety practitioners, it's new to them too, to some degree. And so, you're taking something that's new to you, having to implement it and understand it, and then introduce it more widely to the organization. It's a big ask as they say. I have a question about psychosocial health and safety that last time we spoke, you mentioned a term that was new to me.

I have heard it mentioned since, but I haven't dug into it. So, I'm curious, what is moral injury in this...what does it mean in this context?

- Yeah. So, moral injury, it's really tied in quite tightly with concepts of organizational justice, and I guess people's sense of whether they've been treated fairly by their employer. And it's probably tied in fairly closely with things like psychological contract as well.

You know, we come to work and have expectations about what our employer will provide for us in exchange for our time, effort, physical or mental effort, you know, all of those things. Whether those things, whether those expectations are explicit within our employment contract or sort of implicit assumptions about what should be there in terms of that relationship, when our employer behaves in a way that violates those assumptions or those agreements, depending on how significant that is, obviously, that can over time lead to what we call a moral injury, which is essentially your employer has betrayed you.

And so you get this sense of just that this work that I'm doing or this situation that I'm engaged in is fundamentally unfair. And particularly where that has caused either psychological or physical damage to an individual, yeah, it can lead then to psychological harm.

And I think we see that a lot where people are going through the workers' compensation system for a physical injury, and the way that they're treated in that workers' compensation process actually leads them in two psychological injury because of, you know, the number of barriers that are put up, the difficulty in dealing with insurers and the approach that insurers take to that, which is that they want to reduce their own liability as much as possible.

You know, but from a workers' perspective, well, I was doing my job. I was injured while I was doing my job. So, you know, I was there doing this thing for my employer and now I'm injured, and now my employer is doing whatever they can to get out of caring for me, despite it being essentially their fault largely that I've now got this injury. And so, you know, from a psychological perspective, that really is harmful.

And, you know, it manifests in lots of different ways. I think in the pandemic, we saw it a lot with healthcare workers, for example, where doctors and nurses were needing to make decisions about who could be given a respirator because they didn't have enough. And that's just almost diametrically opposed to the role of doctors and nurses in a hospital environment, or in any type of lifesaving type of an environment where they're actually having to go, "Well, who's more likely to live in this situation?"

And actually making those decisions and largely saying, "Okay, I'm deciding that these people are going to have to die because my employer hasn't given me the resources that I need to be able to do the job that I'm here to do."

- Yeah. Because initially, they didn't have those guidelines. So, you talked about where you'd like to see the health and safety profession as a whole in five years in terms of all the things that we've talked about. Is there anything else, or anything that you're excited to see in the next 5 to 10 years maybe, just with the profession as a whole, like as it moves forward?

- Yeah, look, I'd like to see less tribalism in the health and safety community, if we want to use that word. I'm not sure how we get there. Yeah, I don't know if we need more well-defined competence frameworks when we're talking about who...you know, people that are working in that safety function.

And it's almost sort of the same picture as it is for HR as well. I think where I would love to see both of those functions or people in those functions develop is in things like science literacy so that they are actually able to take evidence-informed approaches and not just have to take somebody else's word for it that this approach is evidence-informed or evidence-based.

And I think the other really key competence for both of those functions is to go back to what I was talking about before, the ability to influence upwards within the organization and, you know, to understand what is a strategy, you know, a bigger strategy in an organization, and how do I contribute to that or develop one.

Those are really, I think, two big pieces of the puzzle that are largely missing when we are looking at, you know, the range of competencies that we want in those two functions. So, I would really love to see more people being recruited into safety and HR functions who have that grounding in good science, whether that's physical science or social science.

And then, yeah, on the other side of it, yeah, being educated in how to speak to an executive or a board and be able to put forward a convincing argument about what needs to change, why it needs to change, what's going to be involved in that.

- And conversely, I would think in the wider community, having the expectation so that it wouldn't be such an odd thing for an OHS manager to be managing up, as you say, but having the expectation that this is what we want from our OHS manager. So, it's not just what people in the profession can provide, but it also becomes the expectation of their role.

- Absolutely.

- Yeah. So, that leads nicely into my next question. I have a few questions I ask every guest at the end, and one of them is...and it may be the same answer, but it may be different. If you were to choose a narrow set of interpersonal or human skills in an OHS training program, where would you focus that education?

Which kind of interpersonal skills do you think would be most likely to equip tomorrow's safety professionals for what's to come in the world of safety?

- So, I think this idea of humble inquiry that was maybe coined by Ed Schein probably a few decades ago now. I think that that's a really core soft skill or interpersonal skill that a lot of safety practitioners would benefit from understanding more and practicing more. And again, you know, recognizing that there are plenty of practitioners out there who do this very well, but I think that it really is a core part of...again, to go back to, you know, actually understanding the concept of work as done.

You need to be able to actually talk to people and understand what are they doing. Why are they doing it? Why does it make sense to them to do it that way? All of that sort of thing. And you can only do that through that process of humble inquiry. If you're going in saying, no, these are the rules and you're not following them and it's a breach or a deviation or whatever it might be, essentially you're going to be just confronted with a whole lot of fear and resistance and hiding of what's actually going on.

So, you know, to be effective in your role, it's, yeah, I think less about enforcing the rules and more about seeking to understand why things are being done the way that they are.

- Okay. And if you could go back in time to the beginning of your safety career, what is one piece of advice that you might give to yourself?

- It's okay to not know the answer to something. It's okay to ask questions. Nobody expects you to know everything all at once. And yeah, just be confident asking questions of people because most of the time people like to tell you about things that they know.

- And frequently there's someone else in the room, at least one other person who has the same question and was too scared to ask.

- Quite likely. Yes.

- How can our listeners learn more about some of the topics in our discussion today? So, you did mention a few papers, we'll see if we can find and link to those, but are there any books or websites that you would direct people towards?

- Yeah, so I've mentioned the Kerr paper and the Rasmussen paper. Hopkins wrote a book a little while ago called How Safety Creates Culture...oh, sorry, "How Structure Creates Culture." So, that really puts together a good description, I guess, of some of those structural things that I was talking about and how reward and recognition and reporting lines kind of feed together to drive organizational behavior.

And Hopkins is a sociologist, so I guess it's written from a case study or from multiple case study perspectives. So that's quite a good one if people are interested in that. We at FlourishDx, we do run webinars almost on a weekly basis, sort of talking about different aspects of psychosocial risk management, psychosocial health and safety.

We've also got a professional practice program coming up, which is targeting safety and people leaders or functions focused on upskilling around psychosocial risk management, in particular. So, people can go to flourishdx.com to find information about that. They can sign up to our community and sort of get our regular updates on whatever it is that we're doing.

They can also follow us on LinkedIn. We have our podcast, the "Psych Health and Safety Podcast." So, we have a different guest...similar to yourself, we have a different guest every episode to sort of talk about a different area of psychological health and safety. And they range from academics to practitioners, people in government, regulators, all sorts of...

So, we have a really good variety of guests on talking about lots of different topics. So, that can be a really useful resource as well if people want to learn more about the topic. And yeah, Jason and I are on LinkedIn quite a bit, certainly welcome to connect with us as well.

- Yeah, I was gonna ask where listeners can find you on the web. So, is LinkedIn kind of the best if they wanted to reach out?

- Yeah, if they wanted to reach out to me personally, LinkedIn would be the best way to go. Yep.

- Well, that is a wrap on today's show. Thanks so much for the interesting conversation, Joelle.

- It's my pleasure.

- Listeners, did you know that like your 13-year-old, Safety Labs is on TikTok? You won't see us doing meme-worthy dances, but you will see daily clips that make you go, hmm. So, to find us, get on TikTok and search for Safety Labs. I'd like to thank the "Safety Labs by Slice" team for their dedication to the safety profession and to safety professionals.

Bye for now.