Читать книгу Patty's Industrial Hygiene, Hazard Recognition - Группа авторов - Страница 106

Emergency response can certainly be an important component of the roles and responsibilities of EHS professionals, both as an active participant and in development of plans and programs. However, when it comes to the day‐to‐day activities and interactions with the workers who we are morally and ethically required to protect, there is far less information available to effectively assist in communicating risk and achieve the reduction of work‐related exposures to hazards. It is important for EHS disciplines to understand their own strengths and weaknesses. Most spend their entire career developing the skills, knowledge, and abilities necessary for their field practitioner specialties. Their level of success is often built upon performing their roles and responsibilities in an environment where normal communication skills are enough for addressing routine issues and problems. Although EHS staff may be comfortable in their professional duties conversing on more technical topics amongst themselves, the ability to translate this information to the workforce and their management may need development. Communicating risks can become even more complicated when anger, criticism, fear, lack of trust, and other emotionally driven issues become entangled within workplace discussions. It is important for EHS practitioners to understand their innate communication styles. Everyone has strengths and weaknesses within their natural habits for communication and understanding these is an essential component for learning how to change and improve this skillset. This process begins by understanding the pitfalls of risk communication inherent to their discipline and other EHS professions. It is also about learning how to overcome these personal and professional hurdles while remaining competent. Questions must be answered in a language of risk understood by workers, managers, and all potential stakeholders.

When it comes to effective risk communication the EHS professions are each faced with unique hurdles that are important to address individually. In doing so, a better and more efficient method for understanding one's strengths and weaknesses is very helpful. It is necessary to understand the audience's perception of the communicator's expertise, the potential complexity of the message they are communicating, and how the audience may be affected by the message. In addition, there is the growing population of EHS Generalists that are self‐employed, working with small consulting companies, or working for multinational firms that are increasingly being found to have an amazingly small EHS staff. An increasing number of EHS professionals work for consulting firms that provide broad services to industry and government on a contractual basis. This includes those who work for insurance carriers that provide consulting services to the company's various clients. In some instances, these relationships are stable and allow the development of industry‐specific expertise. In other cases, the EHS practice is broad‐based and varied, not affording professionals the opportunity to strengthen skillsets. Consulting practice presents considerable challenges in risk communication as well, as they may be required to influence internal corporate culture and intervene with stable prevention activities externally from the company. Therefore, many companies are outsourcing EHS responsibilities that include IH, occupational safety (OS), and environmental analyst (EA) functions. Manufacturers may ask their EHS staff to monitor not only the indoor air quality but also the hazardous emissions released into the air and water of surrounding communities. Public health agencies or environmental groups may hire or otherwise call upon EHS professionals to monitor pollutants in community air and water as well. Therefore, it is also essential for EHS Generalists to also understand the risk communication expectations of the individual EHS professions as they are employed to potentially provide this information to workers, to workplace managers, to the public, and to the environmental community.