Become a Creator today!Start creating today - Share your story with the world!
Start for free
00:00:00
00:00:01
#1: They’re gonna give me a badge and a beige Ford Taurus?
191 Plays7 years ago
True to the show, podcast host and Chief Safety Officer Jill James retraces her career-long journey in safety. Jill tells the story of how her professional aspirations changed in college, the internship that landed her a job as an OSHA investigator, and describes her mentors along the way. And if you’ve ever wondered what it was like to be a woman in the safety field circa 1990, this is the brief, often funny, oral history you’ve been searching for. Also, cleaning up a mercury spill and what that’s like—bonus!
Recommended
Transcript
Introduction to Podcast
00:00:10
Speaker
Hello there and welcome to episode one, the accidental safety profession hosted by Jill James. This series is brought to you by Vivid and the Health and Safety Institute. My name is Barrett and to kick off our brand new safety podcast, I'm introducing and interviewing one of my all time favorite people, my friend and colleague series host Jill James, Vivid's chief safety officer. So Jill, welcome to your show. Thanks Barrett. Nice to be here today. Jill, why a safety podcast?
Origin of the Podcast Title
00:00:40
Speaker
Well, I was talking with some other safety professional contacts of mine, in fact, our focus group here at Vivid, and they were talking about how they don't often get to talk with other people in our field. Oftentimes, people who are in this field of practice are solo operators. They're the only people at their company that are doing that work, and they don't have a lot of opportunities to connect with other safety and health professionals.
00:01:07
Speaker
except maybe at a conference every once in a while where you're kind of going to a lot of conference activities, but you don't have a lot of opportunity to have meaningful conversations with other people who do the work that you do. And so our focus group suggested it would be really nice to be able to have
00:01:23
Speaker
some kind of venue where we can connect with one another or at least hear one another's stories on how we go about doing our work or what drives us to do our work or how we got into it. And so one of the people on our focus group suggested a podcast.
00:01:39
Speaker
He had mentioned that
The Gap in Safety Content
00:01:40
Speaker
he listens to podcasts often during his commute to work. And he said, wouldn't it be great if we could just connect with other safety professionals and hear their story in podcast form? And so here we are with our first episode of the accidental safety professional.
00:01:55
Speaker
Yes, here we are. I love the idea, having interacted and talked to some of the same folks. I know that there is a need out there or a vacuum, I should say, of content at a podcast level for safety professionals. There's just, what are there, two, three?
00:02:11
Speaker
Zero? Is this the first? There's a couple of safety podcasts out there based on my research, but nothing that sounds like it's just safety professionals talking with one another about their work. I love that. Between two ferns. Certified safety professionals and professional types of the like.
00:02:32
Speaker
So I wanted to ask you to explain the concept of the show, starting with the title. You want to talk to safety professionals, connect folks, and have some collegiality in a very relaxed manner. But where did you get accidental safety professional? Where does the title come from? And maybe you can explain the significance for the
Accidental Career Paths vs. Traditional Paths
00:02:52
Speaker
audience. Right. Well, whenever I meet someone in the field of workplace safety and health, one of my leading questions that I ask is,
00:03:01
Speaker
How did you come to this work? Like how did it come to you? Because I don't know that I've ever met a person in the 23 years I've been doing this work.
00:03:10
Speaker
who, you know, as a little kid knew they wanted to be a safety and health professional, wanted to study the OSHA regulations, or even when they got to college knew that that was a field that they wanted to go into, or maybe they didn't go to college for it and it came to them another way. So everybody has this story of how they came into safety and health, essentially, accidentally. It just kind of wasn't anything they had ever considered.
00:03:35
Speaker
And through some series of events, there they are and there they landed in this work. And so it's a question I love to ask people. And so that's where the name came from. People came into the field accidentally. And it's the question that we'll always be asking in this entire podcast series. I think we'll be leading with that one.
00:03:55
Speaker
Do you feel like that is a phenomenon unique to safety? So, or safety professionals in the safety field say, you know, someone is less likely to accidentally become a doctor or an attorney. Right. So, you know, you think about when you ask people in other career paths how, you know, when did you know you wanted to be a teacher? I've known since I was a little kid that I wanted to be a teacher. And I remember getting all my neighborhood friends together and I was teaching them.
00:04:22
Speaker
You know, you don't hear that about safety people. Like, I got all my friends together and I was teaching them, you know, how to avoid electrical hazards or something, you know, it just didn't happen.
00:04:32
Speaker
no one says that and i guess maybe it's the uh... low publicity level of safety professionals you know there are a lot of safety heroes for kids to look up to growing up i can only think of from my history captain planet being anything near the safety field so they just don't aspire to that it's not in popular media you know they're not watching safety professionals on a reality show from the time they're young uh...
Media Portrayal of Safety Professionals
00:05:00
Speaker
you know or
00:05:01
Speaker
visa v like a football player or you know a movie star and there are no safety professional tabloids which maybe that's something we should consider yeah avoid to fill maybe we found avoid to fill here the uh i guess when i when i think about like superhero safety types in the
00:05:20
Speaker
you know, how would we have that, right? The only time safety ever seems to make the proverbial news, whether it's locally or in your company or nationally, is when something's gone sideways. And so it's not something you aspire to, you know, you're asking questions about safety for professionals, but it's only in times of need. And there's one story that I that, you know, gives me heart that one time I can think of that like safety made headlines, right? And it's,
00:05:46
Speaker
Captain Sully when he landed the plane successfully in the Hudson and it became a movie and it became a book and he was lauded for his work in perfectly executing his safety skills and of course his flying skills. But I always think about when I, you know, you know, hold up a successful safety story and where like the whole thing is kind of built around safety.
Jill's Accidental Journey into Safety
00:06:10
Speaker
That's the one that comes to mind for me. So Sully would be my, you know, like safety hero. He's the, he's the new poster child for working safety professionals, even though he's a pilot. Right. Yeah. But that's the nearest approximation, I guess. Okay. So, you know, given the concept that you've explained, I have to ask you to tell me about your own path to safety.
00:06:33
Speaker
Sure, the way that I accidentally came into it. Well, it started when I was in undergraduate school. My undergrad degree is in community health education, and I was
00:06:45
Speaker
Getting near the end of my degree and had taken all my, you know, lots of different health classes and epidemiology classes and one of the classes I had taken was safety, but I still don't even remember what the content was and I needed to find an internship in order to complete my degree. And so I was looking through this list of internships for community health education and it was, you know, different public health facilities or American Heart or Red Cross, American Lung Association, that kind of thing. And on the very, very bottom of the list, it said safety.
00:07:14
Speaker
Department of Transportation and I thought awesome that sounds so boring Nobody else is going to want this particular internship And I will be able to get this one because it was really competitive market at that time for internships so I applied for the internship with the Department of Transportation and I Interviewed with someone who is a district supervisor for a district office for the DOT and I got that internship
00:07:43
Speaker
And once I got there, I started to learn about workplace safety, specific to the Department of Transportation at that time. And I, and I kind of, I thought, well, this isn't too bad. And, uh, I specifically, um, remembering next, then meeting all of the safety directors for the state where I was working. So all these different district safety directors came together and I was like a 20, maybe one 22 year old punk and they would say, Hey kid,
00:08:11
Speaker
You know, this safety gig, it's not such a bad job. You should go to the university and get your master's degree in safety, and then you get a job like we have. Be able to pay off your student loans, and I thought, well, I don't really have another plan. Maybe that's a good idea. The safety thing doesn't seem, you know, it's not too boring.
00:08:29
Speaker
I guess you can see you can make a difference in the world. And so I applied for graduate school and got into the program that all those safety directors recommended and found myself earning my master's degree in industrial safety. And my family at the time kept asking me like,
00:08:46
Speaker
Oh, what kind of job are you going to be able to get? I was the first person in my family to ever go to college and so everybody was very job focused and said, you know, what are you going to be able to do? And I said, you know, I don't know. I suppose I could work for like.
00:09:00
Speaker
OSHA or something. So I was learning a lot about the OSHA regulations and kind of getting into the study. And I was nearing the end of my graduate work and needed to find another internship. And at that time I was offered a long term internship for like six months with money. And that was also an unheard of thing with the Department of Military Affairs. And I was working at a military installation as a civilian in an environmental health and safety department. And while I was there and doing that work, my
00:09:29
Speaker
old mentor from the Department of Transportation contacted me and he said, hey kid, OSHA is hiring, you should apply.
00:09:37
Speaker
And so I did that and listened to him and interviewed for that job and landed my first professional job in safety with OSHA. And I was an investigator with OSHA inspecting a general industry and construction sites for the next 12 years. So that's how I accidentally got into it, basically by kind of listening to the mentors that were kind of
00:10:01
Speaker
taking me by the hand and leading me along the path. So when you were in college and you were studying public health and that was your focus, what kind of future did you envision? So I loved the education piece of public health. And, you know, I guess I imagined myself just working on educating people on how to stay healthy. But at that time specifically, now we're talking the late 80s, early 90s,
00:10:29
Speaker
and it was now I've aged myself, and it was the height of the AIDS epidemic. And so at that time, there was a lot of education on how to prevent the transmission of HIV and sexually transmitted diseases, and that's actually what I talked about and taught on my campus at college. And so I imagined myself doing some advocacy work to interrupt bad health choices or to educate people on how to avoid diabetes, things like that.
00:10:59
Speaker
I just imagined myself doing a lot of education in my career, but I didn't know exactly where it would go. But I knew I felt strongly about advocating for people, particularly when I was doing that work on HIV and AIDS back in the early 90s.
00:11:15
Speaker
And you enjoyed that educational aspect of public health and getting in front of groups and presenting that something you were not only comfortable with, but, you know, hoping to pursue professionally that kind of travel, you know, travel around, you know, you've got the added good vibes of tackling important public health issues that are fascinating and, you know, genuinely making a difference. Was that kind of your mentality there?
00:11:40
Speaker
You know, I guess it was I really hadn't thought about that piece before that I really jumped in with both feet and doing education without having a big background in like public speaking or anything. But I think at that time, you know, you think about a young college person talking about making safe sex choices.
00:11:59
Speaker
and how intimidating that might be for some people. I don't ever remember feeling intimidated about talking about the subject because I felt so strongly about getting the information in the hands of the people that needed it to be able to protect themselves. That even as a young 20 year old, I didn't think that it was weird that I was talking about it or that I was getting in front of large groups or going into dormitories to talk to students.
00:12:24
Speaker
You know, I guess I've never really reflected back and thought about about how maybe unusual that situation was, but I didn't have any qualms
Early Challenges at OSHA
00:12:33
Speaker
about doing it. And so when I got that interview with the OSHA people and I was sitting across a table as a young 20 some year old just at a graduate school.
00:12:41
Speaker
with never having had a professional job before. And the people who were interviewing me, you know, they were all older men. And I remember the guy who would become my boss, Paul, would look, he looked over the top of his glasses at me and he said, kid. You know, everybody called me kid then. He said, how are you?
00:13:00
Speaker
going to be able to carry a badge, walk into a company without giving them any notice, talk to the president or CEO of a company, tell them you're going to find them. How are you going to do that without being eaten alive? I remember sitting back in my chair from the interview table and I said,
00:13:20
Speaker
I've been doing speaking and education on safe sex practices for the last couple of years on my college campus. And I guess if I can talk about sex out loud to any audience, I guess I can talk to a company about fines. And I think I shocked them so much by the fact that I mentioned all of those topics in a job interview. It just set them back and I got the job somehow. That's a great first impression to make.
00:13:50
Speaker
Seems like you had this combination of just bold certainty, some of it just a credit to youth, you know, that when you're a younger student or young person and you're doing some work that feels important to you, you don't necessarily consider how speech or certain information may land with, you know, years that are of a certain age, perhaps, or experience level. Exactly. The uncertainty or certainty of youth was definitely
00:14:20
Speaker
in that case turned out to be in my favor. So tell me about the folks who interviewed you, your first day on the job, you know, what was it like to earn that opportunity and then, you know, go home and explain what you were doing to your folks, you know, and your family? I'm not, I don't really remember my first day on the job very much, but what I do remember is getting the offer letter in the mail and like snail mail offer letter.
00:14:49
Speaker
And I was living at my parents' house at the time and I went to the mailbox and I see this letter that came from the government and we had a really long driveway. And I had that letter in my hand and I'm like, oh my gosh, did I get this job? Didn't I get this job? Is this an offer letter? What is this? And I'm walking slowly up the driveway and I'm opening the letter and I see that it's an offer letter. And I see the amount of money that I've been offered, which
00:15:18
Speaker
in retrospect, was a pretty small amount. But what struck me was that it was more than my father had been making at his factory job that he had been at for over 20 years. And I knew that that was a really big deal. I knew that I had this huge responsibility that I know as some young person out of college
00:15:45
Speaker
had earned an opportunity to serve in a way that took my dad more than 20 years to even get close to. And I just really remember feeling the gravity of that responsibility and thinking, wow, what did I just do? Stuff's got to get serious now. They're going to give me a badge. They're giving me money. I've got all these responsibilities. This is a big deal. It's a really big deal. Yeah, today they call that adulting.
00:16:16
Speaker
And that experience is really unique. You will get, I'm trying to think of some equivalent for today's youth, you know, you'll get a letter in the mail from a college saying you were accepted or you weren't accepted. Yeah, but before that, you're going to get an email most likely anymore. And I can't, you just don't get job offer letters, I think.
00:16:41
Speaker
It's not it's that the idea that you're going to figure that information out or it's going to come to you via mail is completely foreign to me. So, you know, how cool is that to kind of have that moment, you know, in your hand and, and it's got a dollar figure attached to it? Yeah, it was. Yeah, that was it was a
OSHA Training and Mentorship
00:17:00
Speaker
big deal. Adulting, that's, that's a very good way to put it. And maybe that's when my adulting started. Yeah. Yeah. And then probably next was, you know, when I actually got there and the
00:17:10
Speaker
The training, when you start with OSHA, at least for me and the agency that I was working at, I was working for a state OSHA agency, and it was six months of training. So it was six months in the office, in the main headquarters office, where I was just learning about the processes, all the government forms, all the processes, all the criteria for writing a report, what made a report solid, and something that could be upheld legally
00:17:41
Speaker
And then all of these interpretations and all of these directives. And if you're in this situation or if you're in that situation and literally volumes and volumes of those things, we'd go over for the first six months. I mean, three months. And then the next three months was in the field with mentors. And I was assigned three particular mentors, Richard, Dale, and Bob. And they would take me for two weeks at a time.
00:18:07
Speaker
And I would go in the field and do investigations with them where I was essentially shadowing them and then they'd give me little job responsibilities along the way. And so for the next three months, I rotated between those three men who had all been in their jobs for a very long time. All former military guys all had their unique
00:18:25
Speaker
personalities and perspectives and approaches and I kind of looked at them as like some kind of buffet. I thought well I'm gonna pick what I really like from each of these and kind of adopt it into my own style because I had no style at that point and so I looked at what I liked from each of them and you know tried to come up with who am I gonna be in this job and how am I gonna do it and they were they were really gracious to me and really took me under their wing and were fantastic mentors.
00:18:52
Speaker
So I forgot to ask this earlier, but was there a scenario where jumping ahead a little bit, you ended up at your father's work environment for an audit or an inspection or any sort of safety related call in your official capacity?
00:19:06
Speaker
No, I didn't. And actually, when I was in that training, those first three months, they really talked about conflicts of interest. And so investigating your own family's business would have been a conflict of interest. And so I wouldn't have been able to do that. So for example, after I had gotten my job, my future fiance and I were living in this
00:19:29
Speaker
community and he had gotten a job at a fiberglass manufacturing company.
Gender Dynamics at OSHA
00:19:34
Speaker
He was an accountant and so he was the company's controller and that company name ended up on my inspection list and we got the names of the companies to inspect and I saw that on there and I thought, whoa, I can't tell him about it.
00:19:47
Speaker
And I can't do the inspection. And so I called my former mentor or my continued mentor Richard at the time. He was the closest person to me geographically. And I said, Richard, his company name came up for inspection. I can't do it. Will you do it? And he said, yes, of course, I'll come there and I'll come on whatever date. He and I set up a date. And I did not tell my fiance because I wanted him to be as surprised as the company and that would have
00:20:11
Speaker
that would have not been appropriate for me to do. You never tipped off anybody where you were going. And so, um, Richard showed up to do the inspection and my fiancé came home from work and he's like, so.
00:20:23
Speaker
We got inspected today. I'm like, yeah, I know that was gonna happen, but I couldn't tell you. So my dad's factory wasn't in my inspection territory. And if it was ever inspected, it wasn't by me and it could not have been. You would have referred it out. Yeah. So we've got Bob, Richard, and Dale, your three mentors. Yeah.
00:20:49
Speaker
All male, all former military. And I wanted to ask you, what was the environment like with Minnesota State OSHA at that time for a female? Yeah, there were very few of us. Most of the women that worked for the agency worked in administrative roles. There were
00:21:12
Speaker
just a couple of us who were women in the field, investigators, and I was assigned to a geographically rural area. So my first inspection territory was 10 counties along the Canadian and Dakota borders. And the office that I reported to had him remembering two women.
00:21:35
Speaker
One was a woman who was a safety investigator who came up through the ranks who had started as an administrative assistant and had been there for like
00:21:44
Speaker
20 years,
OSHA Career Insights
00:21:45
Speaker
and she became an investigator. And the other one was an industrial hygienist who was, you know, educationally trained to be an industrial hygienist. And then there was me. And so in that particular area, and at that time, there were three of us, and the headquarters office maybe had two more that I can think of. And so in terms of like female mentors and being with other women,
00:22:09
Speaker
there weren't a lot of us. And so that was that was a whole different experience. My mentor, Richard, he just he hadn't worked with women in the field before. And so he never knew like how to refer to me. And he was super proper. So proper. He's a guy like I'm sure he ironed his blue jeans. Everything was proper with Richard. And and so he didn't know how to like address me. And so sometimes he'd call me like guy.
00:22:33
Speaker
He just didn't know. He wasn't sure, like, should I call her Miss? Or, you know, his language is always proper, and so he'd sometimes be like, hey, guy, you know? And we ended up becoming very close friends, but he really did not know what to do with me at first. So you had to relocate to a different part of the state to work this beat regionally, right? Yeah. Okay. So you had to go find a place, get settled, bring your fiance along. Mm hmm. Okay.
00:23:03
Speaker
Yeah, I was given a geographic territory and said, you know, live somewhere in that area and here's a here's a state vehicle. And oh, by the way, we're giving you the crappiest one in the fleet that we need the miles on so that we can get this vehicle rolled over. And it let me sit in a rural area with this alternator out twice.
00:23:24
Speaker
Do you remember the make and model? Oh, um, I remember it was beige and gosh, I, oh, I'm sure, I think it was a Ford. It wasn't a Taurus. It was something worse than that. I don't remember exactly right now.
00:23:43
Speaker
Beige Ford Taurus. Yeah, that sounds like a government ride circa 1990. Was it the station wagon model? That's really the only question I have in mind. No, it was a four-door model. And when it left me sitting on the side of the road, I called Richard. And again, he was the closest person to me about three hours away. And I'm like, Richard, I'm stranded on the side of the road. I had my bag phone.
00:24:08
Speaker
you know, if it's a big antenna. And I'm like, somebody's got to come and get me. So he did. So I've heard you tell stories about these, you know, these mentors you had, these male mentors early on in your career, and you always have a fond recollection to share, you know, a different instance or a different story, or some tip you picked up that was just unique to one of those individuals.
00:24:30
Speaker
I've yet to hear any stories about those female relationships with those, the industrial hygienist you mentioned working with and the other gal who'd come up through the ranks of state run OSHA. And I'm just wondering about, you know, their path to safety was different than yours. What were the kind of bonding points? What were those experiences like, especially early on, you know, since you're brand new there?
00:24:53
Speaker
Right. There really weren't very many, particularly because we didn't often get assigned to work with one another just by way of geographics. And so early on, I didn't have a lot of contact with the other women in the agency. The one who came up through the ranks eventually became
00:25:12
Speaker
the last supervisor that I worked under before I left the agency. And we just had really very, very different work approaches. And so there wasn't, I wouldn't call a lot of bonding there. But I do specifically remember two women. One was the person who was, this is the world of OSHA, called the fat cat clerk. Now,
00:25:34
Speaker
That might sound like kind of a naughty term, but it stands for fatality and catastrophe. And so her job was to be the intake person every time there was a fatality or catastrophe. Imagine having that job. So every phone call that came in where someone was absolutely at their wit's end because someone had just died or had been seriously injured, she would take those calls.
00:25:57
Speaker
and she would gather all the information that was needed to be able to assign an investigator to whatever the situation was. So she had to deescalate a lot of people at their worst moments, gather the information that was needed so an investigator could go and do the work. And she's just a fantastic person, still is a friend of mine. And she eventually became an investigator herself. And when I got pregnant, which was also something that was really rare,
00:26:27
Speaker
My boss at the time, that guy who looked over his glasses and looked at me, how are you going to handle this job, kid? When I got pregnant and told him I was going to have a baby, he about freaked out. He had never supervised anyone who had ever been pregnant before as an investigator. He just had a processing error, just like blew a circuit upstairs, I imagine.
00:26:45
Speaker
he did he was like oh my gosh um how's this gonna work like what are you gonna do well are you gonna stay in the field you know he had no idea and i'm like i don't know i'll figure it out with you in hr and we'll make it we'll make it work don't you know calm down paul it'll be okay
00:27:00
Speaker
I'm shocked that he didn't have a paid family leave policy just in his back pocket, like ready to hand over to you. Here's your six months, you know, we'll see you. It's going to be great. We're going to job share when you return. Yeah, it was, you know, none of that, none of that happened. And so my friend Lisa, the fatality and catastrophe clerk, when I got pregnant, she was so awesome. She sent me gifts, you know, this big box of presents for my baby that had every
00:27:29
Speaker
like she had figured out how old he would be and bought all these little clothes accordingly so he had his first Halloween costume and his first thing with like a shamrock on it or you know something for Christmas holidays and she had all these things in a box for me for my son as he as he grew up his first year all these clothes kind of all titrated out by what size he thought he would be so I remember that from her and then the other woman who came and was hired after I was
00:27:59
Speaker
A number of years later, someone that I ended up mentoring in the field, just like Richard, Dale, and Bob had done for me.
Transition to Healthcare Safety
00:28:05
Speaker
Her name is Cheryl, and she continues to work in safety as well, not with OSHA anymore. And I remember thinking, wow, now I'm the mentor. Like, how does this work? It felt like a huge responsibility. And she and I just had really different and interesting conversations compared to the guys that I was working with. You know, they were all kind of about the business and Cheryl and I were talking about, you know, life in general and the work itself.
00:28:28
Speaker
And then how do we approach this as women? Because it is a different approach when you're a woman in the field. And so our conversations were different. And with the regard of when you're being threatened, what do you do when you're a female? She and I together had been co-threatened by a company that I took her on an inspection to shadow me. And the employer in that company tried to use his two Dobermans to intimidate us.
00:28:56
Speaker
And, you know, here we are in the middle of nowhere in a tiny, tiny town with this guy who doesn't like the government, doesn't want anybody telling him what to do, and decides to hold two Dobermans at bay barking at us as an Intimidator to see if we'd go away. And so you have to make a decision in that time, you know, are we going to go forward? Are we going to go away? Are we going to leave?
00:29:19
Speaker
go get a search warrant and have the local sheriff execute it with us. What are we going to do? We persisted calmly and he kept the dogs on the leash and we continued with our inspection. Wow. That's a fun call. Right.
00:29:36
Speaker
So I wanted to ask you to continue to take us down your path in safety take, you know, from OSHA to your next job and how did your career progress? I know you were with OSHA for state of Minnesota doing as a safety investigator for 10, a decade? Almost 12 years. Almost 12 years. And so at that point, why did you leave that job?
00:30:05
Speaker
Yeah, right. So a good question. And so with government work, every time there's an administration change, there's, you know, there's leadership change. So whether it's, you know, I was working for the Department of Labor and Industry. And so there's commissioners that work at the governor's pleasure. And sometimes those same commissioners stay, sometimes they don't. And each governor kind of sets their own parameters. That was, that was how it worked in my state anyway, because it was a state run agency.
00:30:32
Speaker
And so every time I think I worked under three different governors and you never kind of knew what was going to happen after the election. Would you have the same commissioner? Would it be somebody else? What would be the mission of this new governor? You know, what would they want to happen?
00:30:46
Speaker
And the last governor that I worked under really changed the way regulatory agencies operated at that time in my state, whether it was OSHA or a different regulatory agency. And it became really about how many numbers that look really good can be put on a spreadsheet and how can we talk about those numbers in a favorable light. And so rather than quality of work, it became quantity of work. And so I always had, there were always goals like, you know,
00:31:15
Speaker
do this many inspections in a year, that's your goal. But the goal got increased and the speed with which you needed to get them done increased, but the quality of the work didn't matter. So you were rewarded if you could do more in a short period of time and it didn't matter how many citations you wrote.
00:31:36
Speaker
So number of citations doesn't mean that you're good, bad or otherwise, but it might be an indicator that you did a thorough job or you spent, you know, if you're at a huge factory, maybe it would take you two days, maybe it would take you eight hours, maybe it would take you a week, depending on how many locations they had. And so when it really became a get it done faster, faster, faster, faster, we don't care if you cite one thing, just do something and get out so we can put some numbers neatly on a spreadsheet. I knew that it was time for me to go.
00:32:06
Speaker
And around that time, I had reached my top of the pay scale too. So it's like, what am I doing here? Let's look for something else. And so I looked around the community where I was living at the time and looked out over all the employers in the area. And I thought, gosh, who would I want to work for? Like, I think I want to maybe work for a large employer.
00:32:26
Speaker
Who are the largest employers in the community? Like, well, there's a meat processing plant and I don't really want to work there. There's a college, there's a city.
00:32:37
Speaker
Oh, there's a really large healthcare clinic system that has clinics all over an area. Maybe I want to work there. Oh, sure. They have an occupational medicine department. What does occupational medicine do? You know, they help employers. And I had that community health ed background and I thought, well, maybe, maybe they need help growing their business in occupational medicine. Maybe they need help having someone explain to employers why hearing tests were important or how.
00:33:02
Speaker
uh, you know, how audiometric screening works or when somebody needs a respirator, what sort of medical evaluations do they need? And so I pulled myself together, updated my resume and contacted the head of the occupational medicine department, had a meeting with her and she pulled in the administrator of the clinic and I made a job pitch to them. And I said, I think you should hire me. And I think this is what I can do to help you grow your department. And they said, cool, we think so too. You're hired. And I'm like, whoa, awesome.
00:33:30
Speaker
So I got to that job first day and the HR director came to me, welcome to the company here. You're going to be working in occupational medicine. Hey, by the way, we've been at this for like a long time. The clinic's been together 60 years or something.
00:33:45
Speaker
Never had anybody do employee safety here ever for our thousand employees. So can you do that? It's part of your job. We wrote it in the job description and I'm like, Oh, okay. Well, I didn't, that's not what I signed up for, but that's the job that I got. And so I had dual track in that particular job with employee safety and health and reaching out into the community. And so as you suspect, it might end up, I ended up doing a lot more employee safety and health than I ever did.
Improving Safety Culture at Healthcare Clinic
00:34:15
Speaker
necessarily with employers in occupational medicine. Wow. Okay. One question I had just kind of rewinding here for a second. Is it fair, and I don't know this, is it fairly common for state or federal OSHA employees to enter the private sector at some point in their career? I think it's more common now than it used to be. You know, the people that started, you know, OSHA, OSHA, the OSHA act was adopted in 1970.
00:34:42
Speaker
And in the state where I was working in Minnesota, it was adopted in 1973. It became a state agency. And my early mentors, Dale, Richard and Bob, all started in 1973. And that's where their careers ended as well. And so, you know, decades before, people really sought those government jobs and they kept them.
00:35:03
Speaker
And then now the new iterations of investigators based on my contacts, I still have there. People kind of use it as a touch point, a place to launch their career, put in a couple of years because it gives you such interesting context in the workforce because you get to see so many different places of employment. It really gives you a broad skill set. In the time that I was with OSHA, I was the lead investigator for over 500 workplaces.
00:35:32
Speaker
So where else can you get that kind of...
00:35:35
Speaker
opportunity for a career. So people use it now as a stepping stone, I think more than a career path, you know, and that's a generational thing too. And so you end up in the private sector, ultimately, and you're working for a healthcare organization where safety is kind of a thing. And, but that's not necessarily the job you were wrangling for, you weren't trying to be their occupational safety professional for their workforce.
00:36:03
Speaker
No, I wasn't. And just kind of got stuck with the responsibility, reluctantly. Right. Yeah. So what was the pushback like for you? You know, you'd pitched one thing, you'd earned this opportunity, here you are, you're excited about it, and wanting to transition into more of a business role, business intelligence, business development role.
00:36:26
Speaker
What was it like for you to be asked to do that in the organization? And what was your expectation when you reluctantly agreed to take that on? It was such a hard learning curve for me. I was absolutely not set up for that. Think about the fact that I came from my one and only career where I had a badge and a literal stick.
00:36:48
Speaker
You know, I could compel people to do things with the lock. An actual safety cop. Yeah, an actual safety cop. And, you know, whenever I would leave an inspection, I thought, man, I feel sorry for those people. I just left that safety professional who's got to do all that stuff I just told them they had to do because I wouldn't want to have to do that.
00:37:07
Speaker
And then there I was in private sector having to do all that stuff. And so, you know, I approached that job and I remember, you know, finding the first thing that I really wanted to address, which was a fall protection issue on the roof of the clinic. And I thought, well, this is bad. You know, I've got, I've got maintenance employees up on this roof. You know, they're, they're working near the edge. They could, you know, fall. They don't have any fall protection plan. This is a bad thing. So I wrote up like this.
00:37:33
Speaker
giant email to the administrator of the clinic and I laid out my case just like I would have for OSHA, you know, the cases that the Attorney General's office loved of mine because they were so detailed and I sent it his way and said, you know, this is wrong. Here's why. Here's a way to fix it. This is what we need to do. Here's how much it's going to cost. And I got like huge pushback, hard, a hard no, an absolute no. And the response was,
00:38:03
Speaker
too many words, one to two sentence max, maybe a couple bullet points. And by the way, this situation, is anybody else in our space even dealing with something like this? I don't think so. So yeah, go away. And I was like, Oh, no, like big, big fail. And so that was my introduction to real live business practices, where safety and health professionals have to really be skilled salespeople as well.
00:38:33
Speaker
in explaining and triaging their needs and how they approach things. And while I didn't end up liking that administrator very much, he really taught me a number of business skills in very, very quickly, or at least I caught on to them and thought I need to completely change my approach.
00:38:52
Speaker
And this isn't a guy with two dobermans in a small town. This is a guy in a suit in an industry where safety concerns have been, I'd say, on the rise in terms of prominence nationally with labor groups.
00:39:08
Speaker
groups, etc. So what was the lay of the land there? I mean, just to characterize it, like, if you had to grade them, looking back, when you started doing occupational health and safety for them, seeing as how no one was doing it, what did you wade into? Like, how thick was the swamp? It was very thick, I would give them like maybe a solid D, you know, in the in the in the list of things that employers have to do, by way of compliance, just like the basic stuff,
00:39:35
Speaker
They were doing maybe two things that were required out of dozens. And that was because there were a couple of other people who had skills in those particular, those two areas.
00:39:45
Speaker
And so they were approaching and dealing with those. And so, you know, I was able to have some successes in that job, but not others. And when it got to the not others, that was the part that compelled me to move on to my next opportunity.
Ethical Conflicts and Career Shift
00:39:59
Speaker
But, you know, one of the successes was I was able to institute a mercury abatement program.
00:40:07
Speaker
And so if you remember mercury containing thermometers and sphingnometers, those things that take people's blood pressure that had the little silver mercury hanging on the wall, that was old school way to take your person's blood pressure. And we had a couple of those spill and cleaning up a mercury spill is catastrophic because
00:40:28
Speaker
It's an element. You can't make it go away. It's there always. You can clean it up, but you have to clean it up through real extreme means and have to have professionals to be able to do that so that people aren't breathing in mercury vapors in their work. And so after the first spill, and I orchestrated the cleanup of it with the professionals and got it done right, and it was a pretty big price tag.
00:40:52
Speaker
Then there was the second one and they're like, wait a minute, all these thousands of dollars again. So that's when I put the business hat on. I'm like, well, I worked with someone else in our purchasing department. And I said, how much would it cost to replace all of these with non mercury containing versus how much we just spent on two cleanups and got the math together, presented the mathematical facts. And pretty soon I was leading the charge of a full on mercury abatement program.
00:41:20
Speaker
getting rid of all the mercury possible in 12 buildings and was successful in that and so that was that was a fun and fulfilling project as well so there were some successes but it also included you know doing some math yeah making a case
00:41:35
Speaker
So good lessons to learn. Sounds like, you know, as it always does, it comes back to culture. And once you got a peek behind the curtain there and maybe a true sense of how that organization valued safety, like the actual safety and health of their employees, time to move on.
00:41:52
Speaker
It was time to move on and, you know, without giving the details of what caused that to happen, when I heard a sentence come out of the leader's mouth that was, um, we're not going to address that because I would rather beg forgiveness later, though what I was putting out was very grave concerns about exposures employees were having. I knew that it was time for me to stop collecting a paycheck at that particular place.
00:42:18
Speaker
It was icky. So time to, well, you know, the silver lining is it's time to start over. Let's go find something new that is fulfilling. Right. So tell me about shifting gears there in your next opportunity.
00:42:31
Speaker
Yeah, so again, I'm in the same community. I'm looking out the landscape of the community thinking, okay, where can I go next? I guess I was never a person that looked for, you know, like through want ads or whatever. And this was, I don't even know if LinkedIn was a thing at that point yet, may have just been getting started. And I thought, well, there's a community college in the city I was living in. And I knew that they had a program called customized training.
00:42:58
Speaker
And customized training was a piece of the college that reached out into the community to provide education on lots and lots of topics that were driven by employer need. Whether it was soft skills training or welding skills or whatever the need was in a community, the customized training department would provide that.
00:43:18
Speaker
And I knew of the person who was the dean of the department at the time, a woman that I respected in the community. And, and I went to her and I said, Kathy, do you have anybody who's doing safety education for, for employers in the community? And she said, no, but we need it. She said, I've been looking for someone, the other colleges in the state, um, have people who are doing safety training and we've got somebody who's been trying to do it, but no one who has, you know, your background or skillset. I think we should do this.
00:43:47
Speaker
And I'm like, great, this gets me back into education again because I really liked that whole education piece, which has seemed to have been a theme in my career, I guess. And so I got that job. She talked to the president of the college and they created this position for me to do customized safety training, which I thought was going to be like the best job ever. And I got there and immediately within the first week, I knew that it was a bad choice.
00:44:15
Speaker
And it was a bad choice because primarily it was a sales job. So not only did I have to write my own curriculum and deliver it, but I had to sell it, pitch myself, price it, and do all of those things that I didn't have a skill set for and I really didn't have an interest in. And while I loved doing the training, the pressure to make the sale and hit my number, I'm not wired for that.
00:44:41
Speaker
Those are special people that do sales jobs and I'm not that special and I don't have those gifts. And so I knew right away, oh, this is that good. And I was there about just under two years and my Dean, Kathy, who I love, came to me one day and she was always pitching me to an employer. You know, she was out doing all kinds of business meetings and she came back to the office one day and she said, Jill, I met this guy at this,
00:45:09
Speaker
at this company. It's a biotech and life safety company, a poultry industry. And I was telling them, you know, you should contract with us. I have Jill and she could help you guys out with so many things. And he said to me, why wouldn't I just hire her myself? Why would I contract through you?
00:45:26
Speaker
And so she came back to the office and she said, I think you're going to get stolen away from me. And two weeks later, I got an email from Jonathan, my next boss, uh, with, uh, with a, uh, job description and said, do you know anybody who might be interested in a job like this? Which is how I got my next job. So you hung around for two years though. I did. Right. It was just shy of it, but I was, I was looking the whole time, but I, you know, I was kind of running out of options in my community.
Biotech Safety Role
00:45:54
Speaker
What was your biggest lesson, like biggest takeaway from that whole experience? That I, I just don't like sales. I mean, and like, I don't know, that's a, that's a hard one. I don't know that I have, like, I just want to help people. And, um, I know that you can help people through sales, but I, I don't know that I had the skillset to kind of the tenacity. Maybe I, maybe I lack the tenacity to be able to kind of keep going after it day after day after day after day. It just didn't.
00:46:24
Speaker
It's not my strength. Sure. Yeah. Yeah. And so what are you thinking at this point in time? It's, it's, again, it's not the right fit. And where are you, where are you wanting to go at this point in your career? Yeah. You know, and I really wasn't, I wasn't thinking about where I wanted to go other than out, um, when I, when Jonathan sent me that job description. And so it was sort of like manna and I read it and I thought, this sounds pretty good. This sounds interesting.
00:46:53
Speaker
It's a really large organization. They had multiple types of business lines in multiple states. And I thought, this sounds pretty interesting to me. And I liked him, the person who had become my next boss. And so it wasn't really so much of where I wanted to go as more it was like this job just sort of dropped out of the sky for me. And so I took it and it turned out to be a really good career choice.
00:47:20
Speaker
and really built a lot of skills that I hadn't had before that I was able to develop. When I took that position, it was kind of funny, they too, like the clinic, had never had a safety person in a 65 year history of the company, so it was starting out square one. And they didn't have anything for me to jump into or start with, it was me starting everything. And additionally, he said, I also need you to manage all the workers' compensation cases. We don't have anyone
00:47:50
Speaker
who can do that job. And I had never managed workers' compensation in my life. I don't even think it was touched on in my graduate program. Like I knew nothing. And he said, this is your job too. And so I really needed to get myself trained quickly. How do we even approach it? And it turns out I was supporting five different insurance lines over five different states. And so I made very quick friends with
00:48:17
Speaker
one of our workers compensation companies and I asked them if I could take training from them and they happen to provide training.
00:48:23
Speaker
And so I took a couple of sessions and seminars with them, and I was constantly on the phone validating like, I'm going to do this. I'm going to make this decision. I'm thinking about handling it this way. What do I need to know about this? And they really held my hand for a while until I got going. And it ended up being an absolutely wonderful thing. I love doing workers' compensation case management. It was helping employees. It was helping my employer. And I was able to whittle their costs down very quickly by taking care of people in a way they hadn't before.
00:48:51
Speaker
But that company was not, you know, they were so scared to hire an OSHA person. They were one of those employers who really didn't like a lot of government around them. And so they had this, this board meeting before they extended the offer to me. Jonathan told me afterward and they were all like debating, should we hire her? Shouldn't we hire her? She's a former OSHA person. What if she's the safety cop? How are we going to handle that? Is she going to be able to operate, you know, in the gray area? How's this going to go? Is she going to be bossy? You know, all of that stuff.
00:49:20
Speaker
And Jonathan reassured them that I would be able to see shades of business gray. And they decided to take a leap. And I'm glad they did. So building a program completely from the ground up is some experience. And you were there how many years? A little over three. A little over three years. When you left, did you feel like you had that thing dialed in? No. Is it ever finished?
00:49:43
Speaker
Um, I think every safety health professional tell you we're never done. There's always more to do. But when I left, I would say that even some of the basic elements were still missing. And you know, a lot of that was, again, I was a sole operator, 1500 employees, 11 different companies, five states, and managing over a million dollars of workers compensation cases a year.
00:50:08
Speaker
and all of the insurance companies that went with that, which ended up being the biggest part of my job. And so the safety things were happening for me in fits and bursts. I was able to get safety training nailed down.
00:50:20
Speaker
and have that taken care of, which was my highest priority. I was able to do auditing of almost all of our facilities and sometimes a few times, which was great because I was really worried about the physical hazards people were exposed to. I was able to make a lot of inroads where I was training other people in safety so they could see through my eyes.
00:50:42
Speaker
hazards and correct them in the workplace. And when I left, I was working on a project on getting all the safety programs and policies and procedures together. So I didn't, I didn't get it done. Yeah. Where did you start? Right? I mean, you're starting from zero. It's scratch.
00:50:58
Speaker
Like what, what do you do? Right? Where, how do you, how do you determine the priorities? I mean, I imagine it's probably based on, since we're talking about occupational health and safety, what are the, what are the top hazards now? Like what are the most dangerous scenarios, you know, for workers and like, how do I put those fires? Right. Exactly. So what I did was I started with the workers' compensation data. When I got my arms around that and into it, because I was looking at the, the sheer
00:51:23
Speaker
Numbers of injuries that were occurring and the amount of money they were spending on it on them I got with a business analyst and since we had so many different insurance lines we really needed kind of be able to find a way to compare apples and oranges and pears and bananas because that's really how it presented itself financially and I needed a business analyst to help me with that along with the insurance companies and so through a lot of work I was able to get a pretty quick
00:51:50
Speaker
picture on what was driving the injuries in each of the company business units, you know, whether it was an eye injuries or back injuries or whatever it was so I could figure out how to triage and start working my safety engineering skills on trying to mitigate some of those hazards that were causing those injuries and hurting people. And so that's what I use for
Joining Vivid Learning Systems
00:52:11
Speaker
my baseline. And then with the
00:52:13
Speaker
with the dollars and the numbers broken down by injury types, I was able to use that data to compel the leadership for all of those different businesses to make decisions. And when I say make decisions, I sold them on the idea that they needed to do safety training. And if they did investments in these areas,
00:52:34
Speaker
which were causing X, Y, and Z injuries at this sort of rate and frequency, at this sort of cost to them, we would be able to see that take a downturn. Trust me, let's go along on this ride. Here's the facts. If we put this interrupter and the interrupter being training in place, I think you're going to be getting some benefit from it. And they went with it. And so when I started with that organization, they were spending, on average, I did a five-year look back for their leadership.
00:53:04
Speaker
They were spending anywhere from $1.2 to $1.4 million a year in work comp. And after we started doing training and I was managing the cases closely, and when I say managing them closely, I was getting people to report injuries early and often before they became catastrophic. The next year, the total was $850,000.
00:53:26
Speaker
And so when I went back to that management team with that dollar amount, they were like, okay, so that training investment worked. So they're like, oh good, that's cool, well done Jill, what are you gonna do for us next year? There was a very short pause of celebration followed by how much further do you think you can drop it next year? I move on next to Vivid Learning Systems.
00:53:53
Speaker
Yeah, which is of course where I am today. So when I was at that job that I was really loving and a few crazy management changes took place and some things that I could no longer support were happening as well as a number of other, along with a bunch of other colleagues of mine, and I knew that it was time for me to move on.
00:54:18
Speaker
I was, again, you know, I took a weekend and I made a list of things that I really loved about the field of safety and things I didn't love and industries that I loved and industries I really didn't love and kind of where did I really see myself going in this career that I had now been at for quite a while. And so I made my pros and cons list and what I liked and what I didn't like. And I, you know, I decided on a couple of industries that I'd be interested in and rushed up my resume one weekend.
00:54:48
Speaker
and went off to a safety conference that was already scheduled and I ended up meeting with the sales manager with Vivid Learning Systems whom I had met like 10 years before that at a trade show in safety. He had lured me into the online safety training booth for Vivid Learning Systems and he said you should really come to my breakout session. This was like now some
00:55:14
Speaker
13, 14 years ago. And he said, come to my breakout session. I'm gonna talk about online safety training. And I said, okay, sure. That sounds like the most ridiculous thing I've ever heard of. I'm gonna sit in your audience and I'm gonna like poke holes at how ridiculous this is. I'm a trainer. I stand in front of people. I do the teaching. How can you do it on a computer? This sounds lame and boring. Yeah, I'll come to your breakout session.
00:55:39
Speaker
So I went to his breakout session and he completely converted me. I was able to see in this training program like, wow, I imagine the Code of Federal Regulations open in my hand and I was seeing how they actually sketched this stuff out and it was meeting regulatory compliance plus it wasn't boring. And I thought, wow, if I am ever in need of safety training, I might actually have to call this company.
00:56:03
Speaker
And so I put all my notes from them in a file, tucked it away. And meanwhile, I had been at that job at the clinic where I didn't have a chance to pitch that kind of thing. I'd been at the job at the college where that wasn't something they were into. I got to my job with the life science and biotech poultry company, and I absolutely needed training. And I couldn't be the one to deliver it all because I was in way over my head.
00:56:27
Speaker
So I took that file out that was now like, you know, dusty from being years old. And I called James, my now coworker, and I said, Hey, I think I need to hear a sales pitch from you because I think I need your product. And that's the product that I pitched to those management people. And so, um, you know, fast forward, I'm, you know, now looking for my next opportunity and had kind of decided what field I maybe wanted to go into. And I'm attending my conference and I already have my.
00:56:53
Speaker
annual lunch date set up with my friend, my now friend James, who I saw at the conference every year. And he said, Hey, you know, how's it going? What's happening in your life? Let's, you know, catch up. And we're having lunch together. And I said, you know, I need to tell you, I'm going to start looking for another job. I kind of have some ideas on maybe where I want to focus. And, but I want you to know, I'll do what I can. So you don't lose the contract with this company that was out at the time.
00:57:17
Speaker
And he said, well, where are you thinking of going? And I said, I kind of whittled my ideas down to these particular fields. And he said, well, what about working for us? I said, what do you mean? He said, well, what about coming to work for Vivid? I said, what would that look like? He said, I don't know, but I think it might be a good idea. Let's talk to the CEO.
00:57:38
Speaker
And so that's how that came to be with an individual that I had met so many years before and just kept in contact with. And so that's where I am today. It's been a good almost, gosh, coming up on four years now. But since we've been talking about education this entire time, and I really hadn't considered that what I've been doing in my career the last 23 years,
00:58:04
Speaker
It's that, you know, so is it chief safety officer? Is it chief educator? Maybe it's educator, right? And so where does that education go?
00:58:14
Speaker
It goes to instructing our sales team to understand the work of safety professionals so that they're able to meet them where they are and talk with them about their work in a meaningful way. And with our customer service people and everyone who touches our customers through our company, but then there's more. And that's with the employers that are our clients that I get to interact with on a day-to-day basis.
00:58:40
Speaker
I get the opportunity to talk with safety and health professionals across the country every day who are trying to solve their latest problem. Many of them have been at it a long time like I have and just need somebody to run something by and say what would you do or here's what I was thinking or some of them are brand new in the profession have are just getting started just like I did so many years ago and they really don't know where to start and need some guidance or maybe they just got the job
00:59:07
Speaker
And they're the HR director and they're like, gosh, I have no idea what safety even is. It was on some test I took one time, but I, you know, I don't know what it all is. And so I get to do education, um, from all kinds of different levels and all kinds of different vantage points. And I really, I really love that about my work. Sure. Sure. Well, this seems like a natural ending point for us today. And I'm so looking forward to all of you joining, joining me next time.
00:59:33
Speaker
we'll be able to hear other people's stories of how they became an accidental safety professional. For the Accidental Safety Pro, this is Jill James. Thank you for listening.