Podcast: A psychologist’s reflections on workplace safety

In this episode of Great Question: A Manufacturing Podcast, Nicole Stempak of EHS Today speaks with Virginia Tech's E. Scott Geller about the evolution of workplace safety culture and the human factors shaping modern manufacturing environments. Their conversation explores behavior-based safety, psychological safety, worker engagement, and the growing challenge of maintaining trust and communication in increasingly technology-driven workplaces. Together, they examine how organizations can create more connected and committed teams across the industrial sector.

Below is an excerpt from the podcast:

Nicole Stempak: Congratulations, firstly, on what I'll call your official retirement, since I know you still keep quite busy. And you taught for 56 years as a professor and researcher at the Department of Psychology at Virginia Tech. That's just incredible. So I just wanted to know what are you up to these days?

Scott Geller: Well, I still volunteer my time. We have a Center for Applied Behavior Systems where we involve undergraduate students in doing research, which is very rare, by the way, at universities. Undergraduates don't get the opportunity to actually do research. And then they present this research at professional conferences. And I should say that all of our research focuses on improving human welfare by changing behavior. And it includes the field of positive psychology, which of course talks about how do we influence behavior in positive ways. 

One of the concepts we're working on right now, which I think is incredibly important, is the simple word, gratitude. Giving gratitude and feeling gratitude is good for everyone. And again, my observations are, there's not so much gratitude around. In fact, we measured how many pedestrians thank a driver who has stopped for them at a crosswalk. And on our university campus, we watched hundreds of pedestrians. And by the way, less than 10% of the pedestrians wave their hand and say thank you to the driver.

So we talk about our culture and what's happening in our culture. I do think we can talk more about this, but I do think we have a relatively self-serving, independent culture rather than interdependent, rather than collectivistic, we are now seemingly individualistic.

NS: In addition to teaching, you've authored books, you've consulted companies, you've written articles, and I'm sure the list can go on. But what contributions to workplace safety are you most proud of?

SG: Oh, I'm most proud of, behavior-based safety, which I had to change to people-based safety. In fact, I wrote a book about that because the consultants who were teaching and selling behavior-based safety were not doing it correctly. And so I say we have to focus more on behavior, but also on attitudes and feelings. The concept I use in all of our current research is humanistic behaviorism, combining humanistic psychology with behavioral psychology.

NS: For our listeners who may not be well-versed in psychology and may not be, you know, our listeners are in the broader manufacturing and operations ecosystem. So if they haven't heard of behavior-based safety, could you share a little bit about how your ideas initially coalesced for that and what role that theory has in workplace safety for today and possibly for tomorrow?

SG: Wow, that's a great question. Well, we started in 1979 and we called it behavior-based safety. And the concept was basically this: coworkers know more than anybody else what's safe and what's not safe in the workplace. So what if we developed a behavioral checklist with the workers? What if they came up with a list of what is safe and what is at risk on our job? And then we have a checklist. That's the first challenge: Come up with a checklist of behaviors that are safe and not safe. And of course, along with that, what are the conditions that influence safe or unsafe? Now we have a checklist, and now we use that checklist to observe each other.

Simply this: you take the checklist and with the other person's permission, you ask, can I observe you? And of course, then when you're being observed, you're on your best behavior, but the observer is simply checking safe and at risk. Notice I don't say, we didn't say unsafe. That sounds too, you know, negative. Just at risk. And we list those things. And then we come up with a percent safe. What was the percent safe for this?

But here's the bottom line. The next point is to communicate to that worker what you found. We call that feedback. Supportive feedback means telling people what they did well, what they did right. Corrective feedback, that's a difficult one for many people.

Tell them what was not the best it could be. And then, by the way, we can summarize the whole thing by the letters of COACH. It's amazing how the letters of coach say it all. And I'm claiming this because we all should be willing and able to coach each other. Parents to child, child to child, child to parents. Students to teachers, and vice versa.

What's the C? The first C in coach is care. Know that I care and you'll care what I know. So I am making these observations because I care about your safety. And I care so much, I'm willing to -- the next letter: O, observe your behavior. And by the way, if you do behavior-based safety, we've developed a checklist of what we've found, what we determined as a group, what is safe and what is risky.

Now I I'm observing you. And while I'm observing you, the next letter of coach is Analyze. I'm analyzing the conditions that might be influencing at risk or safe behavior.

The next letter of coach is what? C. This is the one that people miss when they really implement behavior-based safety. C is communicate. You communicate what you determine, what you found, what you saw to the other person. 

And if you do that correctly, the last letter of coach, and I love it, is H for help. I will have helped you perform more safely in your situation. 

I think whether it's athletic coaching or parenting or what, those letters are wonderful. But here's what we found. So that's what we did in 1979 and started a company, by the way, called Safety Performance Solutions, traveled around the world teaching this and it became a worldwide thing. Everybody knew behavior-based safety. 

But here's the issue. What they did is...watched with a checklist, recorded on a checklist, and then recorded the data on the computer. And then they gave everybody feedback, percent safe. They didn't do the coaching, the C part, the communication part. Why not? Why didn't they communicate one-on-one with the other individual? Well, we know why. They didn't know how. They didn't feel confident, comfortable in giving corrective feedback. 

And by the way, we're talking 1979. I claim that today that's even more difficult. We have a very independent, self-serving, cell phone culture, you know? And so it's tough to walk up to a person, even in the workplace, and give them feedback. By the way, I'm not just saying this, we've seen it on our campus. We've been studying coaching and giving feedback on our campus. The word we've been studying specifically recently is gratitude. As I mentioned earlier, not many pedestrians thank drivers who have stopped for them at the crosswalk. So the term gratitude is becoming seemingly less used, less significant in our culture, and that's very disappointing because, again, when somebody thanks you and you thank them, it increases our self-esteem.

NS: I was going to ask you a question, but I think you just answered it, which was if some aspect of safety has worsened in the past 50 years. And it sounds like for you, the answer is not specific to safety, but is a reflection of a change in culture. Did I hear that right?

SG: Oh, that's beautiful. The word I would use today is social support. Research shows that the perception of social support improves physical wellness and psychological wellness. And that's what we have to ask ourselves. Do we have a lower perception of social support? What do I mean by that? I mean, people around us who know us, who would look out for our safety, who would be willing to give us feedback even when it's not correct, not supportive feedback. By the way, a very important concept to teach is behavioral feedback and the difference between supportive feedback and corrective feedback. Many people use the word positive feedback, but here's my response to that. Any feedback that's given correctly is positive. Any feedback that helps the person improve is positive.

But when you're supporting good stuff, it's supportive feedback. And when you're trying to correct or improve behavior, it's corrective feedback. And again, repeating myself, giving corrective feedback is easier said than done because you have to be, here's a word again, empathic. You have to take the time to listen to the other person's perspective. Now, I ask you, in today's culture, there's very little of that, even with physicians, for example. Everybody wants to get the job done as quickly as they can, looking at their cell phone, to give you the time for empathy. And again, I'm finding that in the medical profession. You know, I've gone to several different doctors and they just want to tell you, they take the physical result and then they give you your symptoms and tell you what to do without asking you, how do you feel? How have you been? What do you think about this? That takes time, and we seemingly don't have time. Everybody's in a hurry. So we are efficient, but not effective. Because effective takes time, and I claim requires empathy.

NS: You keep touching on so many things I want to talk about. But one thing that I think I'm hearing is that culture like safety doesn't happen in a vacuum and that they co-mingle and co-influence one another. So something that you're seeing on the manufacturing floor is probably something you're going to be seeing in another personal context, maybe if it's something that you're seeing while coaching your kids' sports league or at a faith service or something like that. The idea being that these things are part and parcel of your entire existence. They're not isolated. And that they help to shape the way we see and navigate the world in many ways.

SG: That, Nicole, is excellent. What you're saying is the context changes, the situation changes, but the principles remain the same. Again, back to coaching. We need to coach in every situation. Parents to child, ministers to congregation. I mean, athletes, coaches to athlete, and vice versa. Apply that coach, care, observe, analyze, communicate, and help. But that requires a sense of, here's a big word again, interdependency. We're all in this together. We live in a system. But I must tell you, I don't know about you, but I don't trust as much as I used to. We get so much scamming happening. Who do you trust? If somebody tells me something, do you believe it? Again, it's a shame because our culture now, on the internet, I don't know about you, but I can get lost in the internet just reading my messages. And some of those messages are absolutely scam. They're fake. And so people are trying to get to us by lying to us. And in that context, how do we get people to accept the truth? How do we get people to trust another person to give us feedback? 

Again, it's tough. But we need to fight it. We need to fight this thing. And a lot of it, I think that means we need to talk about it more. We need to interact. They say, don't interact about politics. Don't discuss politics. And I want to say, why not? Why not find out the other person's opinion? You don't have to believe them, but why do they think it that way? Say that. And how does that compare with what you believe? All I'm saying is becoming more interdependent, more I would say, empathic. By the way, Stephen Covey told us that compassion is empathy in action. So you cannot really be compassionate without understanding where the other person is coming from. So that takes time. And we need to kind of slow down sometime, put down our cell phone, and have a real conversation with another person.

We hear stories where even families sitting around the table are looking at their cell phones rather than each other and having a conversation. When I was years ago with my kids, we used to have the TV on, and that was a mistake because we were watching TV instead of interacting. But today, we all have our own TV, our own personal cell phone, and that, quite frankly, is taking us away from appreciating each other and recognizing each other. And one more time, expressing gratitude and feeling gratitude.