Almost all Occupational Safety and Health efforts need one key ingredient to be successful… Employees participating in the safety process! Heck, OSHA and EPA have even regulated employee participation (EP) in their process safety standards. But far too many organizations have not quite understood the concept of Parent-to-Parent engagement vs. Parent-to-Child engagement and almost all of the engagement in poorly performing organizations will be the Parent-to-Child engagement. Here is an example of what I mean:
We all are aware of the “police state” model of “safety”. We all live in it driving each and every day. Imagine if you got stopped driving every day on your way to work and on your way home.
I mean, most of us respect law enforcement (LE); some may even have a kindred spirit with LE. So it is not that we do not like LE officers, but imagine how you would feel being stopped every day – EVEN if the officer did so to merely thank you for driving the speed limit and wearing your seatbelt. Keep in mind, this is the ONLY official type of engagement most of us would have with LE; what would our thoughts/opinions become of the LEO’s.
You live this for months on end; every day getting stopped by LEO’s just to check on you and often times they are offering kind words of praise and encouragement. No tickets, No warnings – 100% positive. How long before this “engagement” drives you up the wall and you “only wish they would leave me alone so I could just get to work and back home”.
I promise you, even safety professionals would not like this “engagement model”; simply because all of those stops by the LEO are in the Parent-to-Child engagement model.
Then imagine a tragedy strikes in your community and LE asks for volunteers to search for a missing person. You volunteer to help. When you arrive, you recognize many of the LEO’s who have “engaged you” for the past several months. Yet this time, you are standing side-by-side with them on a shared mission. You begin to realize that they are not assholes, power-hungry cops, etc. They actually care – all those stops were just their job. It’s how they were trained, it’s how they were instructed to perform their jobs, it’s the “improved community policing model”. It drove you nuts, even to a point of anger; simply because it was a Parent-to-Child engagement. The search mission you are on with LE is a Parent-to-Parent engagement activity and just a day or two spent with these fine men and women of our LE agencies we once again have faith in them and their mission. ONLY TO RETURN the following morning to the old model!
The moral of the story… engagement is KEY to our success. However, in workplaces, that engagement needs to be Parent-to-Parent style engagement. Those old engagement models can actually do more harm than good, so it is time to rethink how we are engaging the very people we wake up for each day!
