Australian manufacturers have an opportunity to strengthen both safety and performance by making psychological safety a practical part of day-to-day operations, according to Dr Rod Gutierrez, Senior Director at global operations and safety consultancy dss+.
In an exclusive interview with Australian Manufacturing, Dr Gutierrez said psychological safety is becoming increasingly important as manufacturers face complex operational environments while adopting new technologies such as artificial intelligence (AI).
He said organisations that encourage workers to speak openly about concerns, mistakes and ideas are better positioned to identify risks before they escalate.
“Psychological safety in a plant looks like information moving,” Dr Gutierrez said.
“The operator who stops the line because something feels wrong. The maintainer who reports the near miss nobody else saw. The apprentice who says out loud that the instruction did not make sense.”
“When people will tell you the truth about the work while there is still time to act on it, you have psychological safety. When they will not, you are running the operation on filtered information, and every other system you own is degraded by it.”
Beyond physical safety
While manufacturers have made significant progress in managing physical hazards, Dr Gutierrez said psychosocial risks require a different approach because they are interconnected and cumulative rather than isolated.
He said organisations often assume traditional physical risk management methods can be applied directly to psychosocial hazards, despite issues such as workload, rostering and leadership combining over time to affect workers.
Another common challenge, he said, is focusing on measuring psychosocial risks without implementing meaningful controls.
“I see more effort go into measuring psychosocial risk than into controlling it,” Dr Gutierrez said.
“Measurement without effective controls becomes ornamental.”
Dr Gutierrez also pointed to trust as a critical factor, arguing that workplaces most in need of honest feedback are often those least likely to receive it because employees are reluctant to speak up.
Building a speak-up culture
According to Dr Gutierrez, manufacturing leaders can foster psychological safety by maintaining a visible presence on the shop floor, responding constructively when concerns are raised and involving workers in designing solutions.
He said employees pay close attention to how organisations respond to the first person who reports an issue.
“If the response is defensiveness, interrogation or quiet consequence, the channel closes for years,” he said.
“If the response is thanks, transparency and visible action, the channel opens.”
Dr Gutierrez added that organisations should also communicate what changes result from employee feedback, as demonstrating action encourages continued reporting.
AI and workplace trust
As AI becomes more widely used in production planning, workforce management and operational decision-making, Dr Gutierrez said manufacturers should carefully consider its impact on trust between employers and employees.
He said trust depends on workers believing that decisions affecting them can be explained by someone who is accountable for them. AI systems, however, can create situations where decisions appear to have no clear owner.
“A rostering decision, a performance flag or a shift allocation now arrives with no author,” Dr Gutierrez said.
“The worker asks why, and the supervisor consults the system and confirms the decision was correctly applied.”
He added that AI-powered monitoring can also increase perceptions of workplace surveillance if employees cannot understand or question how decisions are made.
To strengthen trust, Dr Gutierrez said organisations should ensure a person remains accountable for every significant decision affecting employees, involve frontline workers before deploying AI systems and regularly review AI performance after implementation.
He also argued manufacturers should prioritise using AI to improve working conditions rather than evaluating individual workers.
“AI that senses overload building in a schedule, smooths demand or predicts fatigue strengthens both performance and safety,” he said. “AI aimed at scoring individuals mostly builds a more sophisticated substitute for listening to them.”
Leadership remains central
Dr Gutierrez said frontline supervisors play a critical role during periods of technological change because they represent the organisation in workers’ day-to-day experience.
He said supervisors should communicate openly about what is changing, acknowledge uncertainty where necessary and avoid making promises they cannot keep.
Looking ahead, Dr Gutierrez believes Australian manufacturers have an opportunity to view safety and performance as complementary rather than competing priorities.
“The opportunity is to see safety and performance as one capability rather than two rival goals,” he said.
“Psychological safety and high performance are the same thing: truth moving through the organisation fast enough to act on.”
However, he warned that organisations must ensure governance keeps pace with technological adoption.
“The technology clock runs faster than the governance clock,” Dr Gutierrez said. “Trust erodes quietly, one unexplained decision at a time, and rebuilding it costs more than governing well from the start ever would.”
