Send us a text

Today's topic/question is a provocative one. 

What is the 'Site Safety Notice Board's negative impact? Does it encourage psychological safety?

We believe that, in principle, the intention is good, but what are the negative consequences?

Are we measuring, promoting and celebrating the right information?

What are your first thoughts when you see a safety board or read safety statistics that look amazing?

Let's dive in and see where this conversation takes us.

Karin shares a personal story about the consequences of not wanting to damage the statistics of (then) recently celebrated 'no incident' milestone, amongst other ideas and situations. 

So our question to you? 

• How do you reward or punish vulnerability in reporting something that can affect the stats?
• How do you help people feel safe enough to speak up?
• What does your Safety Culture encourage you to do? And is it psychologically safe? 

Today's Emotional Gem is... EMBARRASSMENT, visit the Show Notes for the full explanation and resources on emotional literacy.

Click 👉  www.safetycollaborations.com/e009  for the full show notes, leave your thoughts, questions and comments and discover more about how we may help you.  

Connect with Us

• Email: [email protected]
• Website: safetycollaborations.com
• Leave us a comment in the show notes on our website
• LinkedIn: Karin Ovari, Nuala Gage, and Company Page

Help Us

If you enjoyed this episode, please help us spread the word and leave a review on your preferred podcast player.

Stay Safe, Stay Well
The Safety Collaborators

Send us a text

Today we discuss What is Common Sense? 

One gentler descriptor during our research was 'Common sense is a sound, practical judgment usually developed through life experience rather than any formal training. 

Here is another description 'Your common sense is your natural ability to make good judgments and to behave in a practical and sensible way'. 

Developing Common Sense can seem like a tricky thing. But you can easily practice using common sense by being more aware and reflecting on situations before you make decisions. 

 A few years ago, Nuala attended a presentation on common sense, and she had never forgotten the speaker's words when he said,

Common sense is only common when there is an agreed understanding that makes sense to everyone involved. 

We have adopted this stance. 

The question to you, our listeners and both of us is how do we have the conversation upfront to get an agreed understanding? 

And maybe it takes a bit of buy-in, a bit of debate, a bit of giving up some of my opinions and a bit of you giving up some of yours, maybe learning from you or vice versa so that we come out with an agreed understanding and move forward so that it makes sense to everyone. 

Consider when working in multicultural environments that what makes sense in one world or worldview doesn't always make any sense in another worldview. Therefore, what's common for one person and what's common for another person can be two completely different things.

And when we think of safety, we think of those complete misunderstandings, often misinterpretations and conflict unnecessarily, and the assumption that it is all just common sense. And the assumption that they would have done it the right way, the first time.

When we think of the words common sense, we can only base it on our past experience,  but we're living it in the present to change the future. 

Here are 8 tips that may help you understand Common Sense and how to spot it. 

1. Appreciate that people are different with come with a multitude of life experiences that may not match yours.
2. Make time to have the conversation upfront to get a mutual understanding, which may dramatically reduce conversational waste further down the line.
3. Check for jargon…develop agreed conversational rituals instead.
4. Is there a WIFM? (What's In it For Me) more efficient, safer, prior experience, etc.
5. Are you triggering the right response?
6. Match the message to the person.
7. Don't make assumptions.
8. Always ask the question… Based on what? Is the assumption based on what you perceive as common sense?

Remember this one thing; Common sense is not as common as we assume… it is only common to your life experience and possibly those who have had a similar life experience to you… and when we forget this, it can lead to frustration and disappointment.

Today's Emotional Gem is... DISAPPOINTMENT, visit the show notes to find out more. 

Show notes can be found here 

Connect with Us

• Email: [email protected]
• Website: safetycollaborations.com
• Leave us a comment in the show notes on our website
• LinkedIn: Karin Ovari, Nuala Gage, and Company Page

Help Us

If you enjoyed this episode, please help us spread the word and leave a review on your preferred podcast player.

Stay Safe, Stay Well
The Safety Collaborators

Send us a text

What is Conversational waste? 

It is one of the greatest hidden costs to organisations and high performance. Conversational waste is when we have conversations that do not generate the action or result we are after or are required to achieve the desired outcome.

So let's run through some examples of conversational waste. 

• Repeating ourselves
• Making assumptions that people understood our request or our instruction
• Jumping into the task or exercise without clarifying expectations or roles 
• Having to redo, repeat, rework, modify 
• People say yes when they don't understand because they fear asking questions.

One or all of these can lead to conversational waste, and we are sure you can come up with many more examples from your own experience. 

People don't realise that when we take the time to have good conversations, we save time, reduce risk, and increase efficiency. 

People often ask us why did you waste our time taking those two hours to have a conversation when nothing went wrong. Our response… that's why nothing went wrong. And that's why everything went well because by taking the two hours, you probably saved five, if not more, and ensured that people were doing it safely and efficiently.

Thinking about our work environments, what are they? They are created by humans and operated by humans. And therefore, millions of conversations happen all day long, so let’s have conversations that count and reduce conversational waste. 

Throughout this episode, we discuss what it takes to reduce conversational waste.  

Today's Emotional Gem is... IMPATIENCE, visit the show notes to find out more. 

Show notes can be found here  www.safetycollaborations.com/e007 for the full show notes, leave your thoughts, questions and comments and discover more about how we may help you. 

Connect with Us

• Email: [email protected]
• Website: safetycollaborations.com
• Leave us a comment in the show notes on our website
• LinkedIn: Karin Ovari, Nuala Gage, and Company Page

Help Us

If you enjoyed this episode, please help us spread the word and leave a review on your preferred podcast player.

Stay Safe, Stay Well
The Safety Collaborators

Send us a text

Today's episode is a solo episode as  Nuala is busy as the lead coach on our project in Turkey, with rubbish internet connectivity. However, they [the project]  recently reached a milestone of moving from the ‘new rig' mobilisation phase into drilling operations with many celebratory moments along the way for both the national oil company and our client.

In this episode, I [Karin] will share a little more about psychological safety.  We talk about it a lot which you will have picked up in the previous episodes. During the last two or three years, I have run several sessions, either webinars, workshops, or short conversations around psychological safety and why it's so important.

Here is a LinkedIn article written by our client on a  series of Psychological Webinars we have run and the new Psychological Safety for Leaders programme, which is about to kickoff. 

Let us know if you would like to have a similar conversation. 

The conversation around psychological safety has been around for quite a long time; it goes way back to the early 60s. But it really came to the forefront through the work of Amy Edmondson and the Google Aristotle project, giving the subject life, the words, and the flavour we are experiencing today. 

So what is psychological safety? And we discuss what it is not. 

We describe it as an environment of rewarded vulnerability.

Consider this very human question. Will my vulnerability be rewarded or punished? Meaning, what will happen if I engage in the act of vulnerability? 

What are acts of vulnerability? 

How many of the following 12 questions apply 

• Have you ever felt excluded in a social setting?
• Have you ever been afraid to ask a question? 
• Have you ever remained silent when you know the answer to a problem?
• Have you ever had someone steal credit for something you did?
• Have you ever been ignored in a discussion? 
• Have you ever been rudely interrupted in a meeting?
• Have you ever felt that you were the target of a negative stereotype?
• Have you ever faced retaliation for challenging the status quo?
• Have you ever had a boss who asked for feedback but didn't really want it?
• Have you ever been publicly shamed or made fun of?
• Have you ever been punished for making an honest mistake?
• Have you ever been made to feel inferior? 

Visit the show notes for a downloadable of the 12 Questions and an image of the Ladder of Vulnerability, which you can use with your teams and beyond. 

These tools can be used to kick off conversations with your own team. Of course, you can set them as anonymous polls to start with. However, open and candid discussions will kick-start the change process. 

The work we reference is the 4 Stages of Psychological Safety, derived from the work of Dr Timothy R. Clarke.

We review the four stages, which are…

1. Inclusion Safety
2. Learner Safety
3. Contributor Safety
4. Challenger Safety

Connect with Us

• Email: [email protected]
• Website: safetycollaborations.com
• Leave us a comment in the show notes on our website
• LinkedIn: Karin Ovari, Nuala Gage, and Company Page

Help Us

If you enjoyed this episode, please help us spread the word and leave a review on your preferred podcast player.

Stay Safe, Stay Well
The Safety Collaborators

Send us a text

How do we make others feel included?

Today, we explore some tactical aspects of safety coaching and how we help people feel included in multinational environments. In other words, how do we increase Inclusion Safety?

First and foremost, inclusion is a basic human need and right, regardless of race, colour or creed. We should not have to ask for permission to be included, yet we often do.

As humans, we long to belong, and in that connecting process, we exchange emotional, social, intellectual, and spiritual values. Inclusion isn't something we earn; it's something we're owed. We are hyper-social creatures who need each other.

Much of what we do is bridging cultures for safety. Not only helping people understand that we are not being difficult, just different, and creating a sense of wonder in wanting to learn more about each other.

So how do you meet the needs of all to feel inclusion safety on an oil rig? With a dozen or so more different cultures and hundreds of individuals needing to work together to produce a safe and efficient outcome.

Most often, it starts with a conversation and the consideration of others.

The toilet conversation...

During our conversation, we discussed a situation where a toilet is modified to cater for different cultural norms. Helping people to feel included at a basic level. It does not always have to be difficult just requires a little engineering. See show notes for the image.

Thanks for listening in, and if you enjoyed this episode, subscribe and share.

Today's Emotional Gem is... WONDER  visit the show notes to find out more. 

Show notes can be found here  www.safetycollaborations.com/e005 for the full show notes, leave your thoughts, questions and comments and discover more about how we may help you.   

Connect with Us

• Email: [email protected]
• Website: safetycollaborations.com
• Leave us a comment in the show notes on our website
• LinkedIn: Karin Ovari, Nuala Gage, and Company Page

Help Us

If you enjoyed this episode, please help us spread the word and leave a review on your preferred podcast player.

Stay Safe, Stay Well
The Safety Collaborators

Send us a text

Today, we thought we would talk about the day in the life of an offshore safety coach.  

We very much subscribe to the concepts of the remote and digital/virtual realm and how useful that can be.  We are a remote team, doing a lot of work running programmes around the globe using digital technology.  For example, we run the global safety leadership programme for a client, which is completely facilitated via digital technology.

However, nothing takes away from the value of working person to person in situ to bring about change, which we’re delighted to say that we do that as well.  As our primary role is to help people change how they think about safety, sometimes face-to-face is the best way to start that conversation. 

Those initial conversations are essential in building the rapport and relationship we need to start the safety change journey as they’re not always sure what we’re doing in the early stages and why.  As Safety Coaches, we must be clear that we have a real purpose and are onsite for a reason.

However, before we can assert that reason, we need to have those rapport-building relationship-building conversations across the board.  We are in a unique position in that we work with everybody on a rig.  We know, for example, that not many of the drilling crew visit the engine room, but we do.

As Nuala is currently working on-site, and it has come up on a few occasions that she has been out there more than she has been at home this year, we thought we would ask her the question: 

So what’s it like out there?  

And share with you what we face in the day in the life of an offshore safety coach.

Today's Emotional Gem is... CURIOSITY visit the show notes to find out more. 

Thanks for listening in, and if you enjoyed this episode, subscribe and share.

Show notes can be found here  www.safetycollaborations.com/e004 for the full show notes, leave your thoughts, questions and comments and discover more about how we may help you.  

Connect with Us

• Email: [email protected]
• Website: safetycollaborations.com
• Leave us a comment in the show notes on our website
• LinkedIn: Karin Ovari, Nuala Gage, and Company Page

Help Us

If you enjoyed this episode, please help us spread the word and leave a review on your preferred podcast player.

Stay Safe, Stay Well
The Safety Collaborators

Send us a text

We are living and working in an interculturally complex world. Often challenges arise as we make assumptions that we all work, make decisions, communicate, share information and comply with a common set of standards and norms. That is the aim, but we are dealing with human beings, and we are like the colours of the rainbow, multifaceted and complex.

Today we continue the conversation with the final episode in our three-part series on how to improve your safety culture through intercultural intelligence. 

In the last episode, we explored how formal and informal decisions are made.  Who is more responsible for accuracy in understanding (and non-verbal communication) how status may impact how we respond in social settings and how we respond in a cultural way that makes sense; to the other person. It is not easy, but it is certainly worthwhile. Now, let's continue the conversation with the next hot potato question.

The questions that we are exploring in this episode are

• Are people willing to take risks to achieve personal goals, or do they prefer to do things the way they have always been done?
• Do the people anticipate possible problems of crises and plan for possible solutions or protection, survival? 
• Are people concerned about doing things ‘on time’, or is the schedule organised loosely around situations, circumstances or matters of convenience? 
• What are some of the felt needs of the people that their worldview does not address adequately for them.? 

Our aim is that these questions and our conversations will trigger some thoughts and ideas in you. It's about taking a step back and stepping into somebody else's shoes just for a moment and saying, what are our differences? And how can those differences make us more the same?

Over to You and some thoughts to ponder

The questions that we've been exploring over the past three episodes are taken from the realm of intercultural intelligence and our programme Bridging Cultures for Safety. 

When we are dealing with humans, we need to consider:

• How do we learn? 
• How do we get a better understanding of ourselves? and the people around us?
• How do we lead better? 
• How do we have conversations that matter? 

So the more we can learn about the above and our differences, the better our chance of having a true safety culture.

Thanks for listening in, and if you enjoyed this episode, subscribe and share. 

Today's Emotional Gem is... DOUBT, visit the show notes to find out more. 

Show notes can be found at www.safetycollaborations.com/e003 for the full show notes, leave your thoughts, questions and comments and discover more about how we may help you. 

Connect with Us

• Email: [email protected]
• Website: safetycollaborations.com
• Leave us a comment in the show notes on our website
• LinkedIn: Karin Ovari, Nuala Gage, and Company Page

Help Us

If you enjoyed this episode, please help us spread the word and leave a review on your preferred podcast player.

Stay Safe, Stay Well
The Safety Collaborators

Send us a text

Welcome to this episode, the second in a three-part series on improving your safety culture through intercultural intelligence.

We are living and working in an interculturally complex world. Often challenges arise as we make assumptions that we all work, make decisions, communicate, share information and comply with a common set of standards and norms. That is the aim, but we are dealing with human beings, and we are like the colours of the rainbow, multifaceted and complex.

In our last episode, we asked, how do you make your teams feel included so they can speak up, stop the job and trust their gut feelings without being ostracised by the more extensive group. This week's podcast jumps right back into that conversation, so let's carry on where we left off and focus more on communication and decision-making. 

Note; Conversational waste is one of the greatest costs to every organisation and to be explored in another episode. 

The questions that we are exploring in this episode are

• How are informal and formal decisions reached in the local community/team/group?
• Is the speaker or the listener more responsible for accuracy in understanding?
• At what distance do people normally stand from each other when in conversation?

Our aim is that these questions and our conversations will trigger some thoughts and ideas in you. It's about taking a step back and stepping into somebody else's shoes just for a moment and saying, what are our differences? And how can those differences make us more the same?

Over to You and some thoughts to ponder

If one can only remember one rule for communication, it should be that communication is about triggering the right response instead of sending the right message.

What are the right communications to have to trigger the right responses so that everybody, regardless of whether they're indirect communicators, direct communicators, time-oriented planners or relationship people-oriented planners, come together for a common purpose and safe, efficient operations? 

How do you create that third cultural space, allowing multiple cultures to come together to create a new working relationship, a new working culture,

Quote of the episode

If one can remember but one rule for communication, it should be that communication is about triggering the right response instead of sending the right message.

Thanks for listening in, and if you enjoyed this episode, do subscribe and share. 

Today's Emotional Gem is... ANXIETY visit the show notes to find out more.


Show notes can be found at www.safetycollaborations.com/e002 for the full show notes, leave your thoughts, questions and comments and discover more about how we may help you.  

Connect with Us

• Email: [email protected]
• Website: safetycollaborations.com
• Leave us a comment in the show notes on our website
• LinkedIn: Karin Ovari, Nuala Gage, and Company Page

Help Us

If you enjoyed this episode, please help us spread the word and leave a review on your preferred podcast player.

Stay Safe, Stay Well
The Safety Collaborators

Send us a text

Welcome to this episode, the first in a three-part series on improving your safety culture through intercultural intelligence.

We are living and working in an interculturally complex world. Often challenges arise as we make assumptions that we all work, make decisions, communicate, share information and comply with a common set of standards and norms. That is the aim, but we are dealing with human beings, and we are like the colours of the rainbow, multifaceted and complex.

Today, we will begin the series by discussing some questions from the list of Culture Acquisition Questions; there are 152 we shall only cover dozen or so during this and the subsequent two episodes. These questions help us understand our differences and consider how to work together for safer operations. The Culture Acquisition questions are from a body of work on Intercultural Intelligence which we bring into our safety culture consultancy work and help people to think differently about safety.

The questions that we are exploring in this episode are

• What is the cultural norm for the relationship between a leader,  manager,  supervisor and the people reporting to them?
• How do people generally respond to outsiders trying to integrate into the new group?
• What things or conditions provide the people with a feeling of security?
• Do people depend on themselves or the group for their directions and choices in day-to-day life? 

Underpinning much of today's conversation is Psychological Safety - listen out for it. 

Our aim is that these questions and our conversations will trigger some thoughts and ideas in you. It's about taking a step back and stepping into somebody else's shoes just for a moment and saying, what are our differences? And how can those differences make us more the same?

Over to you

How do you make your teams feel included? How do you make your people feel they can speak up and stop the job when they have their gut feeling or that inkling, or they just know something isn't right without being ostracised by the bigger group.

Today's Emotional Gem is FEAR

Show notes can be found at www.safetycollaborations.com/e001 for the full show notes, leave your thoughts, questions and comments and discover more about how we may help you.  

Connect with Us

• Email: [email protected]
• Website: safetycollaborations.com
• Leave us a comment in the show notes on our website
• LinkedIn: Karin Ovari, Nuala Gage, and Company Page

Help Us

If you enjoyed this episode, please help us spread the word and leave a review on your preferred podcast player.

Stay Safe, Stay Well
The Safety Collaborators

Send us a text

#000 Welcome to our Podcast. It has been a long time coming, and we are so excited that it is finally here. 

Our purpose in sharing this podcast is to have a chinwag (conversation) to help people change how they think about safety. 

We intend to share experiences, learnings and wisdom that we have gathered from a combined  40 years of experience working in high-hazard industries such as Oil & Gas, Mining, Nuclear, Construction and Transport etc. 

Topics we will cover include but are not limited to conversational intelligence, emotional literacy, intercultural intelligence, safety leadership, life offshore, safety culture and psychological safety, working in dynamic teams and whatever else pops up during our conversations.

We hope to challenge your perspectives, potentially solve a nagging problem, share actions that you can implement, and give you at least one aha moment.

So join us weekly as we explore the world of organisational safety culture and more. 

During this episode, we begin the conversations with intercultural intelligence and Three Colours of World View that lead nicely into our next three episodes on how to improve your Safety Culture through Intercultural Intelligence. 

We hear you ask what is the ‘ Three Colours of Worldview’? 

The Three Colors of Worldview Discovery tool was developed to assist people with a deeper understanding of their own and other people’s cultural drivers, motivators and demotivators. 

The Three Colours of Worldviews are 

• Innocent / Guilt
• Honour / Shame
• Power / Fear.

We shall be exploring these in more detail in a future episode. 

This week's Emotional Gem is Urgency. 

Show notes can be found at www.safetycollaborations.com/e000 for the full show notes, leave your thoughts, questions and comments and discover more about how we may help you.  

Connect with Us

• Email: [email protected]
• Website: safetycollaborations.com
• Leave us a comment in the show notes on our website
• LinkedIn: Karin Ovari, Nuala Gage, and Company Page

Help Us

If you enjoyed this episode, please help us spread the word and leave a review on your preferred podcast player.

Stay Safe, Stay Well
The Safety Collaborators