The Art of Building Rapport in the Workplace

We spend a lot of time training people to become better clinicians. We teach anatomy, biomechanics, evaluation, treatment, ergonomics, injury first aid, job demands, work modification, and all of the other technical skills someone might need to work with employees at a company.

But there is another skill that I think is just as important, and it is much harder to teach.

Can you get people to trust you?

I have always thought there is an art to building rapport in the workplace. When you go into a company to provide early intervention or injury prevention services, you are entering someone else's environment. You are going to encounter different personalities, different communication styles, different levels of trust, and very different opinions about why you are there.

Some employees will talk to you immediately. Others will be skeptical. Some will tell you everything that is bothering them, while others will give you three-word answers. You may have a supervisor who immediately sees the value of what you are doing and another who is primarily concerned that you are going to interfere with production. Safety, operations, human resources, and leadership may all look at your role differently.

You have to be able to work with all of them.

That is especially important when you are the person representing your organization at that company. There may not be another clinician coming next week who happens to have a personality that connects better with a particular employee or supervisor. You are the person they have, which means you have to learn how to adapt.

That does not mean becoming a different person depending on who walks into the room. It means understanding that people communicate differently and learning how to meet them where they are. One worker may want to understand exactly why you are making a recommendation. Another may simply want to know what they can do today. Some people appreciate humor. Some want you to get directly to the point. Others may need to talk for ten minutes before they finally tell you what is really bothering them.

Being able to recognize those differences and communicate effectively with all of those people is a skill.

And I think it can make or break an onsite program.

One of the easiest ways for an early intervention program to fail is to put a clinician in a room and wait for employees to come to them. The clinician is available. The company sent an email or put up a flyer. Everyone technically knows the service exists.

Then the clinician sits there and waits for work to arrive.

That model might work in a traditional clinic because the person coming through the door has already decided they need your help. The workplace is different. We are often trying to reach people much earlier, sometimes when they are only beginning to notice soreness, fatigue, or difficulty with a particular task. They may not think they need a healthcare professional yet. They may not know what will happen if they tell someone. They may wonder whether their supervisor will find out, whether they will be sent somewhere, or whether talking to you will somehow make the situation bigger than they want it to be.

A poster explaining the program does not necessarily overcome that hesitation.

A relationship can.

That is why some of the most important work an onsite clinician does may happen when nobody is injured. Walk around the facility. Learn people's names. Ask them what they do. Have someone show you how a process works. Talk to the supervisor when there is no problem to solve. Understand what happens during the busy part of the shift. Be interested in the work and in the people doing it.

Those interactions may seem completely unrelated to injury prevention at the time, but they are building something important.

Three months later, that same worker notices something in their shoulder while performing a task. It is not terrible. They can still work. They could easily ignore it and hope it goes away.

But now they know you.

They have talked to you before. They know how you interact with people. They have seen you around the workplace. They have some idea of what will happen if they approach you.

So instead of waiting three weeks, maybe they walk over and say, “Hey, can I ask you about something?”

That moment is the value of rapport.

And once people trust you, you often get better information too. A worker who is comfortable talking with you may tell you that their shoulder only bothers them during one particular part of the job. They may explain that production has increased recently, that they have been working overtime, or that they changed how they perform a task because something else was bothering them. Eventually you may learn that three other people in the department have noticed the same thing.

Now you are no longer simply responding to someone's shoulder discomfort. You may have learned something important about the work.

The same thing happens with supervisors. Once they trust that you understand their operation and are there to help solve problems, the conversations change. They may tell you that a recommendation will never work on the production floor, but then offer another option that accomplishes the same goal. They may call you before a problem gets bigger. They may ask you to look at a task because several employees have mentioned it.

That relationship is just as important. You need employees to trust that you are there to help them, but you also need the organization to trust your judgment. A supervisor or safety leader needs to know that you understand they have a business to operate. That does not mean avoiding difficult recommendations or telling the company what it wants to hear. Sometimes the right answer is that a worker needs additional care or that something in the workplace needs to change.

In fact, rapport makes those conversations easier. If you have spent months demonstrating that you listen, understand the operation, and make thoughtful recommendations, you have built credibility for the moments when you need to have a harder conversation.

This is why I don't think technical expertise alone determines whether someone will succeed working onsite.

You can train someone to be an outstanding therapist. You can teach them OSHA first-aid rules, ergonomics, Job Demands Analysis, early intervention, and work modification. All of that knowledge matters.

But then you have to send that person into a company.

They need to be comfortable leaving the room. They need to talk to people who are very different from them. They need to listen more than they talk sometimes. They need to understand the workplace rather than expecting the workplace to come to them. And they need to build relationships before they need those relationships.

Not everyone is naturally good at that. Some people are much more comfortable sitting in a treatment room and waiting for the next person to arrive. There is nothing wrong with that style of practice, but it can be very difficult to succeed with that approach in an onsite injury prevention role.

Because onsite, being available and being approachable are not the same thing.

The best clinician in the building cannot intervene early if workers wait until their problem has become significant before they are willing to talk to them.

That is why rapport is not just a soft skill in worksite injury prevention. It is part of the intervention itself.

You know you have built it when workers stop seeing you as the person sitting in the injury prevention room and start seeing you as the person they should go talk to when something doesn't feel right.