Along with factoids about lab safety, EHS professionals should present researchers and senior leadership with the lessons that the health and safety community has learned from each incident. Use the hierarchy of controls when discussing these lessons to help researchers better understand how they should identify and control each hazard before an incident occurs. Researchers working with EHS professionals in risk assessment must become the norm in order to reduce potential injuries or exposures. Such a setup would also provide opportunity for frequent, open communication between both groups. Frequent and transparent communication builds trust and reinforces a positive safety culture, with open reporting of safety concerns.

Creating trust between safety professionals and researchers is a long and arduous process, but worth it in the end. Trust in this type of relationship means that researchers know that EHS will not hinder their research in any way, but only help them to be safe at work. Trust requires communication. Reach out by presenting at research group meetings, taking friendly walks through their labs (without a clipboard or checklist—it sends the wrong message), or by starting a quarterly lab safety newsletter. Communicating your goal of ensuring researchers’ safety and success in their work also goes a long way to establish a positive safety culture. Positive safety culture will be more easily maintained when employees feel comfortable reporting safety concerns to the EHS department and have positive feelings toward the reporting process. Trust also demands consistency from safety professionals. If safety professionals have said they would investigate an issue or complaint, they must follow through with that promise. Honesty, humility, and respect are other requirements—it’s okay for a safety professional to say to a researcher, “I don’t know, but I will find out.” Once again, however, there must be follow-through or the researchers will lose trust, and researchers should be involved in applying whatever answer they receive.  Working with each lab to “personalize” its safety procedures is another method of building trust between safety professionals and lab researchers. EHS must know who the researchers are and what their research is about in order to implement safety policies and standards that fit each lab or project. How a safety policy is implemented in Lab A may not look the same as its implementation in Lab B due to different researchers’ personalities or to different project requirements.  For example, Corteva, an agricultural research company, implemented a new cut prevention policy last year. One of the company’s lab groups used scalpels on plant tissue, requiring fine motor skills, and performed this task for hours each day. The lab group found that wearing the required cut-preventive gloves decreased lab researchers’ productivity and introduced an ergonomic hazard. Taking the realities of this lab group’s research into account, the company decided that wearing protective gloves was not required for this task, but was for others involving the use of sharp tools such as scalpels. This scenario demonstrates how EHS shouldn’t hinder research progress or introduce new hazards, but truly create a safer environment for all researchers to work in. This in addition to the items previously mentioned—thorough education and engagement of senior staff—is necessary to establish a positive and effective safety culture at your organization. While lab personnel may know their research, they are not always familiar with the hazards present in their workplace, how to mitigate them, or how to assess risk. The EHS professional’s role is to guide them through this territory, demonstrating leadership and mutual respect in addition to their health and safety expertise.