9 Outstanding Teamwork Skills to Improve Safety

When it comes to safety - teamwork skills matter.

Both the aviation and medical industries lead the way when it come to researching the impact of teamwork on safety.  What they've both learnt (to their detriment) is that effective teamwork rarely happens spontaneously.  Instead, it requires long-term training and organisational planning.

Research has found that when planes crash, or patients die on the operating table through "human error" , the real culprit actually lies in teamwork failures. 

Essentially, inadequate communication and poor co-ordination of the work task means a loss of life in these tough environments (read Are Tyrants threatening staff safety in your Company for more information on the aviation industry).

Luckily, for most industries it's not a life or death situation every day.

What is Teamwork?

According to the Businessdictionary, teamwork is the process of working collaboratively with a group of people to achieve a goal.

When it comes to safety, teamwork is a clear contributor to whether people get injured at work.  Research has found that teamwork reduces lost time accident rates (LTA's) and that people are more likely to work safely in a team, than independently.

A study (Hechanova, Alampay & Beehr, 2002) investigated the correlation between teamworking and safety performance.   It uncovered a negative correlation between the level of self-management and both unsafe behaviours and team injuries.  In other words, where a team is able to self-manage (which means they have technical skills, knowledge and the ability to make decisions), the safer the team will work.

A review of a variety of research studies (including a literature review by Parker and Turner) found teamwork improves health and safety for the following reasons:

However, the issue is that a lot of companies find that supervisors or team leaders often know about how to manage tasks, but when it comes to nurturing and leading a team, to get the best out of them, then issues occur.

What both the medical and aviation industries have found is that you have to train on teamwork skills.  You can't expect them to spontaneously occur in the workplace.

That's why we've created supervisor or team leader training that helps supervisors understand the importance of their role, as well as how they influence the safety behaviours and productivity levels of the team.  In addition, we also go through 9 connect and collaborate skills to really help supervisors and team leaders engage, collaborate and communicate effectively on safety.

This training is available both online, on DVD and in customised workshop format.  There is also the option of onsite or telephone coaching.  Visit www.digicast.com.au/toolbox-training-DVD for more information.