Creating a Culture of Caring: Leveraging the Power of “We”
DEKRA’s latest white paper, “Creating a Culture of Caring: Leveraging the Power of 'We',” explores the concept of Social Safety and how organizations can help develop skills to help develop it among teams and leaders.
When things don’t go the way we envision, typical culprits often play a role such as planning errors, mechanical failures, gaps in maintenance or task training, risk misalignment, and other systemic issues. These gaps within the work system that often get less attention, yet very often contribute to errors, incidents, and unplanned events, many times are found within the interactions amongst work teams and their leaders.
At DEKRA, the focus is on how a safe workday comes together. To do this we must look to the social influences within the organization and amongst the team that keep work in control and occurring as planned. We call these interactions Social Safety.
Social Safety is defined as “the agreed-upon or implied conveyance of risk perceptions, risk acceptance, and risk tolerance levels through words, actions, and non-verbals where agreement/disharmony triggers social group implications (that influence safe decision making and actions).”
In this paper, DEKRA Human Performance Reliability experts show how we build our culture of care when we point out acts in which we take action to keep exposure low, we show respect and care for others, and should highlight times when others do the same.
The white paper explores:
- How to offer opportunities to help workers develop skills and practice in safety.
- What organizations need to do have leaders and teams focus on Social safety interactions.
- The concepts of Social Contagion and Mirroring and how they may create harm at work if Social safety is not addressed.
- The role of our social brain in the workplace and how it is motivated to make us conform.
- How understanding, training, and creating an environment of psychological safety is critical to take control of Social Safety.
- How you can strengthen Social Safety within your own organization.