Safety storytelling by leaders: story and presentation attributes that make this effective

Safety communication is a crucial tool leaders have for achieving workplace safety objectives. Its effectiveness hinges on leaders crafting an appropriate safety message in a format that resonates with the target workers. To date, many types of safety communication (e.g., fact sheets and toolbox talks) have been studied for their impact on safety. Among these, recent research indicates that storytelling may be particularly effective in enhancing workers’ safety knowledge, attitudes, and behaviours. However, despite the recognised influence of safety storytelling, it remains unclear how leaders best construct and deliver effective safety stories. Therefore, this research focuses on developing an understanding of the attributes that impact the quality of safety storytelling and creating a valid and reliable measure for describing and assessing this construct.<br/>To explore the attributes that contribute to the quality of leader safety storytelling we conducted interviews (N = 41) with leaders and workers from safety-critical industries. These interviews were analysed via deductive content analysis, which indicated nine specific attributes associated with high-quality safety storytelling (i.e., relatability, factuality, descriptiveness, consequence severity, structure, explicit appeals, delivery style, questions and visual aids). Moreover, it indicated that these nine attributes could be sorted into two higher-order categories: story-related attributes and presentation-related attributes. <br/>Based on these findings a multi-step approach was conducted to develop a psychometrically sound, multidimensional measure of the perceived quality of leader safety storytelling. In Step 1, items were developed, and content-related validity was established. In Step 2, exploratory factor analyses were used to establish the dimensionality of the measure. Finally, in Step 3 confirmatory factor analyses were used to confirm the factor structure, and evidence for the criterion and construct-related validity was obtained. The results indicated a ten-factor structure (i.e., the original nine plus a new length of time attribute). Furthermore, they supported the higher-order structure of the measure, showing that the initial ten factors could be grouped into two second-order factors. Finally, the results showed strong evidence for the reliability and validity of the measure. <br/>Taken together, these findings may help safety leaders reflect on their storytelling practices and support them to be consistently effective in their safety storytelling. Moreover, organisations can use our measure to assess the current status of safety storytelling, allowing them to implement targeted training to help heighten their leaders’ capabilities in this communication tool.<br/>