Trusting Your Community: How to Unlock the Safety Potential of Your Workforce

Most people are good people who want to help. Invest in proper training, and create a culture where they can do the right thing.

— Graham Goulden

About this session

Most organisations manage health and safety through numbers, rules, and top-down mandates. Yet despite rigorous systems, fatalities and well-being issues continue to rise.

So why is the silent majority still hesitant to speak up?

To launch our UK and European monthly Safety Voices sessions, we sat down with Graham Goulden, a former Police Scotland Chief Inspector turned international leadership trainer who specialises in bystander education, to find out.

Moving beyond the traditional focus on compliance and what goes wrong, Graham introduced the workforce as the “untapped resource” hiding in plain sight. Grounded in his philosophy that “it’s all about relationships”, the conversation explored how to build a genuine circle of trust, one that empowers employees to overcome the natural hesitation to intervene, and to act with confidence.

It's a shift from a culture of policing to one of community, where speaking up it's an act of care.

Fight, flight, flock response

When stress hits, your brain gets starved of oxygen, cortisol and adrenaline take over, and, in Graham’s own words, "when you're stressed, you're less smart."

That's exactly the moment someone witnesses a "dodgy comment in the canteen”, or sees a mistake happening in the work environment, and freezes instead of stepping in. Not because they don't care. Because their brain, quite literally, isn't in a state to make a good call yet. The fight, flight, flock response freezes you, preventing you from intervening.

The solution? Just like the All Blacks, "stay out of the red, stay in the blue”. Notice the signs of stress, take a step back, breathe, and let your brain come back online before you act. That's the difference between diving in and getting it wrong, and stepping in with confidence.

Key takeaways from the session

Graham's message to safety leaders is: “the workforce is already your best safety resource. Leadership's job is to turn that potential into reality, through permission, trust, and everyday care."

The Science of Silence: Graham addressed the reasons why people stay quiet despite being in a risky situation: sometimes they are scared of recrimination or don’t want to bring concerns to senior executives. On other occasions, the company’s culture just does not encourage speaking up. There are also cases of pluralistic ignorance, which happens when someone assumes their colleagues feel differently than they actually do.

Reframing the Bystander: The conversation centers around active bystandership, a concept that encourages intervening before issues become major problems. The “supportive friend” culture helps protect colleagues, safeguard careers, and look out for one another. Inaction, on the other hand, can have physical/mental health consequences that can harm individuals or even legal impacts for organisations.

Practical Intervention Tools: including the PACT model (Probe, Alert, Challenge, Take action) and the “connect before correct” approach, giving teams the language for what to say and when to say it, leaving rank and hierarchy at the door.