The Safety of Work

Drawing on Edmondson's extensive psychological safety research, the episode provides practical guidance for safety leaders seeking to improve workplace conversations. The framework reveals that effective safety communication requires more than encouraging people to speak up—it demands deliberate leadership to create environments where contributions are productive, silence is reflective rather than fearful, and meeting goals are clearly articulated. The findings offer significant implications for safety professionals working to enhance organizational communication and change management capabilities.

Discussion Points:

(00:00) Background on psychological safety and employee voice

(04:05) Introducing Amy Edmondson's reflections paper

(08:00) Why workplace meetings are often unproductive

(11:13) The four-quadrant model of workplace conversations

(16:44) Withholding when productive silence becomes problematic

(19:49) Disrupting and the challenge of unproductive voice

(26:33) Contributing through productive voice and disagreement

(30:05) Processing the importance of reflective silence

(35:53) Practical takeaways for leading better meetings

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Quotes:

"The employee voice and silence literature is a lot more precise because it's looking at a specific question: what do people speak up about, when do they speak up, who do they speak up to, what do they say?" - Drew Rae

"A good meeting is when all participants are either contributing or processing with minimal withholding or disrupting." - Drew Rae

"It's not just that disruptive people take up time and space, they raise the threshold for others to speak up." - Drew Rae

"Where there's diversity in the room, race or gender, it can make this a little bit more difficult because people might feel personally vulnerable." - David Provan

"We want an environment that promotes productive conversations, and that environment is more about when and how we speak up ourselves." - Drew Rae

 

Resources:

Resource Link: https://www.hbs.edu/faculty/Pages/profile.aspx?facId=6451

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The conversation explores how humor serves psychological purposes beyond entertainment, often functioning to establish power hierarchies and devalue professional contributions. Through survey data and qualitative interviews, the research demonstrates that passive coping strategies prevent organizations from understanding the true extent of harm. David and Drew argue that the "just joking" defense creates ambiguity that makes harassment difficult to report, particularly when supervisors are the perpetrators, emphasizing that effective psychosocial safety policies must explicitly address humor-based discrimination.
 
Discussion Points:
(00:00) Defining psychosocial safety versus psychological safety
(03:07) Introduction to workplace humor research in construction
(06:44) Research aims and the construction industry gender gap
(11:31) Research methodology using surveys and interviews
(15:07) Theoretical framework on humor as communication
(20:10) Survey findings on sexual harassment experiences
(26:24) How humor is weaponized as cover for harassment
(35:36) Conclusions on devaluing professional contributions
(40:08) Key takeaways and practical implications for organizations
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Quotes:
"The harms are real. When we talk about expanding safety into the psychosocial space, however you might feel about that framing and whether safety people are the right people to be managing it, when we're talking about people getting hurt at work, gender based humour is a hazard." - Drew Rae
"I think this is the ultimate, you know, safety is not the absence of incident reports. This is clearly something that's happening to 50, 60, 70% of participants in this study and obviously representative of the broader population. If you're getting no insight into this through any of your systems, then you need to go looking." - David Provan
"The fact that something's a joke is being used almost like weaponised to mask or shield what's actually going on, we need to just like get totally away from the idea that humour is an excuse. The question isn't, is this a joke or not a joke? Question is, what was the underlying purpose of that joke?" - Drew Rae
"If no one's complaining, get worried. We know it's happening. We know that people don't complain. If you're not getting any complaints in your work site, that's not an indication that there's no problem or no harm. That's an indication that people are not feeling safe to complain." - Drew Rae
"Jokes are fine, but not these jokes. And I think this paper really helps us understand where we might be able to draw a less fuzzy boundary around what people can and can't joke about in the workplace." - David Provan

Resources:

Resource Link: https://ascelibrary.org/doi/abs/10.1061/JMENEA.MEENG-7109
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The discussion explores three critical constraint categories: structural elements like mandatory timelines, organizational factors including resource capacity, and relational dynamics affecting investigator access to information. Drawing parallels beyond healthcare, they challenge listeners to reconsider their investigation frameworks, suggesting that organizations inadvertently create systems where investigators focus on meeting procedural requirements rather than generating genuine insights. The discussion emphasizes that effective investigations require adequate capacity, flexible timelines that accommodate complexity, and environments fostering open relationships that enable thorough inquiry and organizational learning.
Discussion Points:
(00:00) Background on NHS patient safety system and 2 million annual incidents
(09:11) Research method and the seven investigation principles
(16:24) Investigation framework with three levels and timeline requirements
(24:56) Finding one structural constraints and how timelines became the focus
(32:41) Finding two organizational capacity and resource mismatches
(37:07) Finding three roles relationships and the independence dilemma
(42:37) Summary deadlines over diagnosis compliance over comprehension procedures over participation
(45:36) Practical takeaways on timelines capacity and relationships
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Quotes:
David Provan: "The more hoops and hurdles and constraints and requirements that you put into the investigation process, the more that those things become the focus of the investigator, as opposed to the learning and improvement outcome that we're trying to achieve."
Drew Rae: "If you wanted to improve investigations in your organization, one simple leadership practice you could take is when someone gives you the investigation report, basically just say, no, there's nothing here that surprises me. Go away, come back and learn something."
David Provan: "These are the outcomes we're trying to achieve and the investigation takes as long as it takes. And if it's being held up for any reason, this is the process to check in on progress. As long as it's being worked on."
Drew Rae: "Investigations are way more about relationships than I think people realise when they're planning them. And so we've got to create an environment in which investigators can build and use relationships."
David Provan: "There's no reason that if you learn something during an investigation that you need to wait till the report signed off and finished before you do something about it... as soon as we learn something that we become curious or concerned about, we should act on it."

Resources:

Resource Link: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0925753525002243
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The findings reveal that invasiveness drives negative reactions more than the stated purpose of monitoring, with participants showing skepticism about AI's ability to accurately measure teamwork quality. The hosts emphasize that even well-intentioned monitoring systems introduce psychosocial hazards and stress, requiring organizations to carefully balance potential benefits against worker well-being impacts when implementing AI-powered team support systems.
 
Discussion Points:
(00:00) AI team monitoring invasiveness, AI workplace surveillance
(03:16) Research paper introduction and authors from Germany
(04:48) Previous research on electronic monitoring and employee reactions
(08:49) Study one methodology with invasiveness levels and video scenarios
(12:12) Study two simulation with teams designing fitness trackers
(17:46) Study one findings on invasiveness and fairness perceptions
(24:07) Study two results and participant skepticism about monitoring accuracy
(32:48) Practical takeaways on invasiveness levels and stakeholder management
(40:42) Final recommendations on balancing benefits and invasiveness
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Quotes:
Drew Rae: "The moment you divide it up and you just try to analyze the human behavior or analyze the automation, you lose the understanding of where the safety is coming from and what's necessary for it to be safe."
David Provan: "We actually don't think about that automation in the context of the overall system and all of the interfaces and everything like that. So we, we look at AI as AI and, you know, deploying. Introducing ai, but we don't do any kind of comprehensive analysis of, you know, what's gonna be all of the flow on implications and interfaces and potentially unintended consequences or the system, not necessarily just the technology or automation itself."
Drew Rae: People are going to have reactions. And those reactions are gonna have a big impact on their willingness for you to do this in the first place...You can't just force it onto them… All the things that you're trying to improve might actually get worse because of the monitoring.
David Provan: "But I think this paper makes a really good argument, which is actually our automated system should be far more flexible than that. So I might be able to adjust, you know, it's functioning. If I know, if I, if I know enough about how it's functioning and why it's functioning, and I realize that the automation can't understand context and situation, then I should be able to make adjustments."
Drew Rae: Most people don't mind if their car is giving them feedback on their driving, but most people don't like it if their car is phoning home to your boss, giving information about your driving.
 
Resources:
Intelligent automated systems to support human teamwork: perceived invasiveness impacts team members’ psychological reactions negatively

The discussion centers on two key design principles: observability, which ensures humans can understand what automated systems are doing and why, and direct ability, which allows humans to steer automation rather than simply turning it on or off. Using examples from aviation incidents like Boeing's MCAS system and emerging AI technologies, the episode demonstrates how these 25-year-old principles remain relevant for contemporary automation challenges in safety-critical systems.
 
Discussion Points:
(00:00) Background on automation and natural experiments in safety
(04:58) Hard vs soft skills debate and limitations of binary thinking
(08:12) Two common approaches to automation problems and their flaws
(12:20) The substitution myth and why simple replacement doesn't work
(17:25) Design principles for coordination, observability, and direct ability
(24:33) Observability challenges with AI and machine learning systems
(26:25) Direct ability and the problem of binary control options
(30:47) Design implications and avoiding simplistic solutions
(33:27) Practical takeaways for human automation coordination
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Quotes:
Drew Rae: "The moment you divide it up and you just try to analyze the human behavior or analyze the automation, you lose the understanding of where the safety is coming from and what's necessary for it to be safe."
David Provan: "We actually don't think about that automation in the context of the overall system and all of the interfaces and everything like that. So we, we look at AI as AI and, you know, deploying. Introducing ai, but we don't do any kind of comprehensive analysis of, you know, what's gonna be all of the flow on implications and interfaces and potentially unintended consequences or the system, not necessarily just the technology or automation itself."
Drew Rae: "It's not enough for an expert system to just like constantly tell you all of the underlying rules that it's applying, that that doesn't really give you the right level of visibility as understanding what it thinks the current state is."
David Provan: "But I think this paper makes a really good argument, which is actually our automated system should be far more flexible than that. So I might be able to adjust, you know, it's functioning. If I know, if I, if I know enough about how it's functioning and why it's functioning, and I realize that the automation can't understand context and situation, then I should be able to make adjustments."
Drew Rae: "There's, there's gotta be ways of allowing all the animation to keep working, but to be able to. Retain control, and that's a really difficult design problem."

Resources:
Link to the Paper
The Safety of Work Podcast
The Safety of Work on LinkedIn
Feedback@safetyofwork