Safety Toolkit: Interviews
Make your interviewee feel safe enough to talk about workplace safety.
“Will you talk me through your day?”
“Can we talk about what you do first when you get into work?”
“So how long have you been working here?”
None of these questions are the smart way to start off a workplace interview.
I learned to interview by watching some of the best. OSHA Compliance Safety and Health Officers (CSHOs, pronounced “co-shows”) do a lot of interviews as part of workplace inspections. The best CSHOs can open up an interviewee completely, and they can do it with exceptional speed and grace.
Thank goodness that I learned interviewing as a ride-along trainee. I was not thrown into the interviewing pool and told, “swim”. I watched some of the best interviewers in action. And I don’t believe in gatekeeping.
So, today on the new recurring series Safety Toolkit, I’m sharing three interview lessons I learned from OSHA inspections and still use today.
Rule 1: Don’t dive in.
You have a bunch of information to gather. You have a ton of interviews to do. Get down to business, right? Get into the technical content that you need to understand, right?
Wrong.
“Nice to meet you, Joe. I see from your hat that you’re a Cowboys fan?”
Break the ice. Find something to connect over. In a casual workplace setting, like a manufacturing facility, the easiest connection is usually a sports logo. Ask an employee about their team. Ask them how long they’ve been a fan. Ask them if team fandom is a family affair, or if they’re part of a “house divided” by two competing sports teams. Maybe you comment on a sticker. Maybe you ask them about their amazing sneaker game.
Spend maybe three minutes on something that your interviewee cares about and feels confident discussing. Afterward, they will comfortably discuss the difficult, complicated, emotionally loaded questions that the interview needs to cover. But first you must connect over something that matters to your interviewee.
Rule 2: Let it breathe.
Ask a question…
…and wait patiently for a response. It conveys confidence, competence, and a respect for your interviewee. Competent people don’t need to fill the air with words; they hold the space for other people.
Different people require a different latency period to respond to a question. Sometimes, in our own discomfort, we make the mistake of adding clarifying information in the dead space after our question. But that can rush the interviewee.
I learned this the hard way on an OSHA inspection ten years ago. The inspection was of a ceramic goods manufacturer. I was there for industrial hygiene sampling of isocyanates. We often encounter isocyanate chemicals during a process manufacturing something big and fluffy. In this case, isocyanates offgassed from a puffy packing product that kept the ceramics from breaking during shipment. There are specific interview questions that an industrial hygienist must ask the sampled employee for legal defensibility of the sampling results.
The interviewee spoke three languages: Haitian Creole, French, and English. The pauses were significant, partly because English was his third language and partly because he was searching for the right words. I filled the air with words, adding clarifying information, not giving the employee sufficient time to answer. I’m still embarrassed about the quality of the interview and about my impatience. Now, I do better.
Rule 3: Trust, but verify.
Practice active listening. Take the time to check back with your interviewee:
“So what you’re saying is that first you press the emergency stop button and then you open the operator’s console. So two steps?”
“Yes, but there’s a step in between.”
Subtle differences in understanding are par for the course. No matter how straightforward the content of an interview, miscommunication is part of the human condition. Trust your interviewee; chances are that they are being 100% accurate with you. In my experience, people don’t usually lie, even during OSHA inspections. If anything, they usually just avoid or refuse to answer a question instead of lying.
Trust your interviewee, but verify your understanding. Periodically summarize what you've heard and ask if you've captured it correctly.at the end of the interview, recite your understanding back and ask the interviewee to please correct you if your understanding is wrong. Ask to be corrected. It’s the best opportunity for verification.
The best interviewers aren't the ones who talk the most. They're the ones who make people feel safe enough to tell the truth.