Communicating Safety Jargon to the Masses

Have you ever been the safety person in one of those workplaces where there is some fancy- pants, high level, corporate safety strategy with so much associated jargon you almost need a degree to understand it?

The “grand masters” who come up with these plans seem to forget the point of the exercise is to enable Ernie the employee to look after his own safety and health and that of his colleagues.

When you tell Ernie that he needs to manage “catastrophic risks outlined in accordance with the strategic safety management system” his eyes glaze over and Ernie probably doesn’t think much of you nor the message you are delivering.

But hey, you are just the messenger. So do you tell Ernie that “if anyone asks, just repeat this phrase…”? or as a clever safety professional that you are, do you find out exactly what that jargon means and explain it to Ernie in simple terms, the way it should have been explained to start with?

It is all well and good developing strategic safety plans at a high level but the implementation of these plans needs to be considered before the flood of top level managers stream out of their ivory towers, expecting Ernie the employee to either produce the correct verbal outpouring that matches their strategic plan (with no comprehension of what it actually means to them or their work) or hope Ernie the employee managed to comprehend their jargon and can appropriately answer the question in his own terms.

Part of implementing any strategic safety plan is communicating the safety ideas to the entire workforce, without patronising them or suggesting they are stupid, so they understand what needs to be done. It’s very easy to do, use the terms they use, the terminology they know and understand but use those terms to explain the strategic plan of the business.

So instead of the company just telling Ernie to “manage the catastrophic risks outlined in accordance with the strategic safety management system” we should also be telling Ernie what that means is; “everyone needs to do a JSA before starting work”, because Ernie knows what a JSA is and how to write a good one for his job tasks. Now Ernie also knows that is how he is managing catastrophic risks in accordance with the strategic safety management system, and he is feeling just a little bit smug about this new knowledge.

If you enjoyed this post you might enjoy my other blog posts here.