The Lab Safety Gurus
Discover the secrets to enhancing laboratory safety without the hassle of navigating complex regulations and modifying established practices.
Tune in to the enlightening discussions led by the knowledgeable Dan the Lab Safety Man and infectious disease behaviorist Sean Kaufman. Together, they explore a wide range of lab safety subjects on a weekly basis.
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The Lab Safety Gurus
Creating a Culture of Psychological Safety in the Laboratory: Strategies for Enhanced Communication and Safety Practices
Ever wondered why some lab teams seem to operate seamlessly, addressing risks and safety concerns with ease? That's the power of psychological safety, a concept that takes center stage as we, Dan Scungio and Sean Kaufman, guide you through the unspoken yet pivotal aspect of lab culture. On our latest episode, Amy Edmondson's groundbreaking idea is dissected to reveal how it can transform your workplace, encouraging open communication and creating an environment where team members dare to share without the dread of negative consequences.
As we navigate through the complexities of lab safety, this discussion isn't just theoretical—it's packed with actionable advice. From the intricacies of handling tough conversations to the delicate balance of accountability and empathy, we expose the underbelly of lab dynamics that can make or break the integrity of your safety practices. Join us on this enlightening journey as we unravel the strategies that ensure your lab isn't just a hub of scientific exploration but also a bastion of trust, transparency, and psychological security.
Welcome to the Lab Safety Guru's Podcast. I'm Dan Scungio.
Speaker 2:And I'm Sean Kaufman, and together we're providing safety insights for those working in laboratory settings, doing safety together.
Speaker 2:Well, dan, there is a new catchphrase, really entering into biosafety or laboratory safety these days. It comes from something pretty well established, actually Harvard School of Business. I think it was Amy Edmondson who really started bringing the concept of psychological safety out to the general workplace. Now, dan, you and I may have different definitions, and I know how Dr Edmondson defines this. She defines psychological safety as the ability to bring up any type of concern that you may have, anxiety that you may have, a safety issue you may have, without the fear of being punished or embarrassed or shamed when you bring this up. And this has a special application in the laboratory environment. And before we go any further, dan, what are your thoughts on that? Do you think psychological safety has a role or has a I don't know a place in laboratory safety?
Speaker 1:Oh my gosh, Sean, you scared me when you brought it up because I thought please don't tell me there's another safety topic. I have to train somebody on Psychological safety. Chemical safety, biohazards, no, no, Actually, we've been dealing with psychological safety in the labs for a long time, but we just didn't know it. We didn't have a name for it. What you're talking about there in that definition is amazing, because this is what we want. This is the safety culture we want in the laboratory. I want everybody who's working in the lab to feel comfortable about bringing forth a safety issue, an injury, an exposure, not be afraid to hide it, be able to talk about it, how to prevent it. All of that with no anxiety. That psychological safety is exactly what we want. Maybe we do have to give it its own chapter in the next safety book, because there's a lot to talk about.
Speaker 2:I agree, dan. I agree, and I have to tell you here's what I've run into, because I've been training on psychological safety quite a bit. I know you have as well. A lot of people today are concerned that when we talk about psychological safety, we're talking about the mental well-being of individuals, the emotional well-being of individuals. Dan, I don't know what your position is on this, so I want you to chime in as well, but that's not what I'm referring to when we talk about psychological safety. And so I'm going to, dan, that's my position and I'll continue to elaborate on it, but what's yours? Is it about someone's mental or emotional well-being? What are your thoughts?
Speaker 1:I don't think it's as much about the emotional and mental well-being of the employee. I don't think we have a lot of control over that. People come into work. Some people bring in the I'll call it baggage from their home life or just the mental stress of something that might be going on in their lives. Somebody might be ill, they might be taking care of a family member, family stress, whatever they might be. We can't, while people do, bring that into the laboratory. I don't think that laboratorians and the safety rule makers I'll call them can be can be taken care of that well-being. Psychological safety, to me, is a totally different pathway. I want to make you feel safe while you're at work, emotionally and mentally, about work and work safety issues Very good, not about your home issues.
Speaker 2:Now I do want to bring up something. I was trying to jump in, but it's so hard sometimes to stop myself from jumping in because you're saying great things. You mentioned luggage. I'm sorry, not luggage, baggage. One of the things that I've learned is that there are several employees that come from a different lab into your lab, even though you're promoting psychological safety. They have been shamed, they have been blamed, they've been embarrassed, they may have even been fired. They're bringing that baggage into your new lab and you're trying to tell them, with all that baggage, hey, we want you to report, we need you to report. It's a psychologically safe environment for you to report. They have that baggage from their previous experiences and it's difficult for them. Do you see the same thing, dan?
Speaker 1:Oh, definitely. I think if you're a lab leader and you don't think that's going on in your laboratory, you need to open your eyes a little bit more. That doesn't just apply to safety, but anybody who came from another job with a I'll call them a bad manager, maybe a bad leader, who treated them in those ways that you just described, sean, there may be workarounds or practices going on in your laboratory that you will never know anything about because they're not going to tell you. There are so many possibilities. Think about every process, every procedure that a laboratory can have in its four walls. There are so many different. Oh, I got in trouble at my last job for letting this reagent run down too low, so I'm now going to throw it away when it's half empty. That's just one example of the different kinds of things that people will do to keep themselves I'm going to use their quotes here psychologically safe in their new position Absolutely In teaching this and sometimes, dan, I have to be honest with you as you're teaching these ideas, they pop into your mind.
Speaker 2:You know I'm very spiritual. I believe God fills my brain. That's why we offer all of these things up for free to people out there because I'm inspired, I think. But one of the things that I've learned in order for you to have psychological safety, you have to have the ability to have a difficult conversation. This is my perspective on this. A difficult conversation is like tossing a grenade no matter what, even if it's done tactfully, it's going to hurt. It's just going to hurt. It's not going to be an easy conversation to tell somebody we've had an incident, or hey, this is another thing, dan. What you're doing is making me feel uncomfortable.
Speaker 1:That's part of the problem with transparency in safety is there's embarrassment that goes along with it. There's potential punishment. Could somebody be written up if they got splashed in the eyes with serum and they weren't wearing face protection? There's a lot of possible consequences besides the consequence of the incident that people would be worried about.
Speaker 2:It's strange when you look at the science of difficult conversations, when we look at that and believe it or not, and when it comes to behavioral science, then there's a lot of things to say out there. But when we look at the science of difficult conversations, there are three conversations that are happening in somebody's brain simultaneously. The first is the what happened conversation. I'm listening to this right now and I'm trying to not only understand what happened, but who's at fault. That naturally occurs. The second conversation is well, how is this conversation making me feel? And a lot of people out there may be saying I don't have feelings, I'm not a feeler, I don't feel. Well, that's a feeling, just so you know.
Speaker 2:You're judging whether or not this conversation is worthwhile. Is there any benefit? At the same time that you're trying to figure out what happened and who's the blame, you're also assessing how this conversation is making you feel. Are you frustrated? Are you concerned? Are you know? Is this a waste of time? But the third one is how does this conversation position you? Does it make you look incompetent? Is it asking you to be a leader? Is it asking you to take a position? Is it challenging your credibility? And so there are things, dan, that we can do when we're trying to promote psychological safety and environment to ensure that those difficult conversations are easier to have. I don't know what are your thoughts on that.
Speaker 1:It's so I train on this a lot. I don't I've never trained on it in the in the vein of calling it psychological safety, but I guess I should. One of my, one of my favorite books on this topic is crucial accountability.
Speaker 2:I love that book. I absolutely love that book, yep.
Speaker 1:So I I've used it in lab safety for years because it's a great book to teach people how to coach others for safety in the laboratory. But it has so many other things that, as the speaker, as the person who's about to maybe talk to somebody about something difficult, have that difficult conversation. It teaches you all the things you have to do and the first part of it is getting it right in your head Get the conversation correct, why you're bringing it up, why you have to bring it up and and take away the the, the negativity in it in your head first. It's a lot of pre-thought that goes into a conversation that you're about to have. That may be difficult and that's not just true in lab safety, this is true everywhere.
Speaker 1:But what I love about the book is it it reminds you of things like hey, you know what, somebody did, something you didn't expect and it wasn't a very good thing to do, but there were probably at least six different sources of influence on them about why they did it. There's so much to think about. And they and the book talks about how to have these conversations and they talk about the psychological safety of the other person and how you maintain that. So there's a lot of good information out there about the importance of psychological safety and and how to maintain it. It's an art form, though you, you, if you're a passionate person and your immediate knee-jerk reaction is to yell at somebody, you've just ruined that. You know the the encounter. You've made the person feel bad. You've made the person want to hide the next time they do something, or maybe just want to leave.
Speaker 2:Absolutely, dan. I'm going to challenge you on this one. This is going to be an interesting question because I got challenged on this recently, so I want to see what your position is on this. So you ready, I'm ready. When do you fire someone?
Speaker 1:So I think that you fire somebody when you see a pattern, not a one-time incident, but when you see a pattern of bad behavior, because in this crucial accountability, this and maintaining psychological safety plays a part in this.
Speaker 1:When I talk to John this week about not wearing PPE, one of the things I'm going to do to close that conversation is to ask him a final question, and that's going to be something like can I be confident that in the future, you're going to be wearing your PPE? Because the next time you have the conversation with him, you could start to write him up and start to take him down that termination process, because not only has he violated the policy about PPE use, but he also violated the promise he made, which is a bigger issue and a bigger deal. If somebody's not going to keep their promises about how they're going to behave in the workplace, you can definitely start taking them down that process toward termination. You hate to do it. We don't have enough people in the laboratory field, that's for sure, but we also can't have people who are going to be dangerous.
Speaker 2:That's the key danger, because I am not somebody who promotes termination when people make a mistake. In fact, the only time I would promote termination is the people who make mistakes don't report them, because that just puts everybody else at risk. That is when I would promote it. But there does come a time. That's what I was challenged on, dan. It's like well, what point do you terminate somebody and how can you be psychologically safe? This is the second challenge that they gave me, dan. How can you be psychologically safe if an incident happens and it causes you to lose a license that is required for your employment? Wow, isn't that a tough challenge. For example, a boat captain who has an incident and the incident caused him to lose a license. And now guess what? They're out of a job. There was no choice there, even the organization, whether they liked him or not. What are your thoughts on that?
Speaker 1:Yeah, there's very little you could do about a situation like that. In the laboratory field it's a lot harder to lose your license.
Speaker 2:Yes, I agree.
Speaker 1:But a laboratory can lose its license to conduct testing if it's a clinical laboratory for example Correct yeah. Yeah, your employee was the reason that your laboratory got fined $60,000 because they threw out biological trash incorrectly and it made it to the regular regional landfill and your facility gets fined because of that. Do you fire that employee? What do you do in a situation like that?
Speaker 1:That employee just cost your organization $50,000. So it's definitely a situational kind of question, depends on what's going on and you afford to keep an employee if they're going to do something like that, you know. The other thing I've learned recently, sean, is a lot of people want conversations about a lot of laboratorians want education about workplace violence and how to detect it, how to de-escalate when it happens. But a big piece of that workplace violence conversation is psychological safety. People want to be psychologically safe with their coworkers. So how do you maintain that? What does that even mean?
Speaker 2:Yeah, not only coworkers but leaders, not to put a plug in for our next podcast on situational awareness. But if you don't have psychological safety in your lab, dan that whole. See something, say something. Thing that doesn't work.
Speaker 1:Yeah, it goes away.
Speaker 2:Yeah, it does. It doesn't. If you don't have psychological safety, people are not going to report incidents, accidents or concerns that they may have, because they don't feel as though they'll be protected when they do.
Speaker 1:You have to.
Speaker 2:that's got to be part of a safety culture. You've got to let people know you shouldn't be worried if you report something to me. You should be worried if you hit it and didn't. That's when you need to be worried for your job. But that's my position. That's my final say, dan. I'll give you the last word because we've got to wrap it up.
Speaker 1:Yeah, absolutely that. Psychological safety is important in all aspects of your lab safety program, because not only do you want people to report incidents and accidents when they happen, when you get to the level where they're going to report near misses now, you're golden. So if you can get psychological safety to that level in your department, you're doing the right thing.
Speaker 2:We are the Lab Safety Gurus Dan Scungio and Sean Kaufman.
Speaker 1:Thank you for letting us do lab safety together.