Shared language supports psychological safety
How safe and secure do you feel in your working community?
Many of us work in international, multicultural companies and networks. Working communities communicate in multiple languages. To be able to understand and share all the important work-related issues, often a common corporate language needs to be defined. In many cases it is English, at least in Finland.
Language is an important part of culture and a tool for building a good working community spirit, improve organisational learning and safety culture. It also helps to build trust and handle conflicts. Everyone at the workplace also needs a proper orientation to safe and healthy working practises to be able to avoid incidents, accidents and stay healthy at work.
Shared language and understanding increases psychological safety within the working community meaning being able to show and employ oneself without fear of negative consequences of self-image, status or career. It also can be defined as a shared belief that the team is safe for interpersonal risk taking. In psychologically safe teams, team members feel accepted and respected.
With scale from 0-10, how safe do you feel in your working community? Is it OK to:
- speak up
- be vulnerable
- disagree
- challenge those in power
- ask questions
- try new things?
The Centre for Occupatinal Safety (Työturvallisuuskeskus) is offering Occupational Health and Safety Training in English both online and face to face. The main goal of the course is to support safety representatives, managers, supervisors and other OHS actors by giving them basic information related to OHS legislation, cooperation and recommendations. The participants:
- get basic information about OHS to understand their role and task.
- understand the meaning of OHS as part of the different functions of the organisation
- know and understand the main content and meaning related to OHS legislation
- know and understand the meaning and importance of prevention and management of OHS risks
- get know-how and competence to be able to cooperate and network with other OHS actors
- get support for continuous improvement and learning.
OHS online course feedback autumn 2024
The information received during these few days has been interesting and useful as an OHS representative. Lots of the information here should be a part of the information given to newly recruited junior or senior staff, especially during orientation. Thank you all, I hope we can form a small group here to support or consult each other when the need arises in our various organizations.
Our OHS activities have been focusing almost exclusively on physical factors, and this course was great to realize that we clearly need to also cover all the topics that were discussed over these three days. Workload and stress topics are typically addressed reactively, so I will try to push a more systematic and proactive approach from now on. I will definitely return to the training material and all the shared resources with this in mind in the near future. Thanks also to all participants for sharing their different perspectives!
I think this has been a great course to raise my awareness of the broader nature of OHS responsibilities. At my work we have focused quite heavily on the physical risks present and not at all on the psychosocial areas. I think a discussion about how to expand the understanding with the staff about what the OHS committee can help with would be a good first step.
A lot of new information has been given on this course, most importantly the knowledge gained from this training can be utilized to help my health and safety representative to full fill our employees’ needs.
The information received during those 3 days was very interesting and useful for me to improve at work as an OHS representative but also as a manager. I will look further through the website TTK.fi for planning my OHSR tasks.
I believe the material we got from the course and the courage to take actions will have a positive influence on my role as a health and safety representative. I will be able to help more people and definitely will take it to the staff meetings. Videos we had to watch previously are very good material to share to boost team spirit.
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