Become a Creator today!Start creating today - Share your story with the world!
Start for free
00:00:00
00:00:01
#73: Safety Up North
83 Plays4 years ago
In this episode of the podcast, series host Jill James interviews Ryan Quiring. Ryan is a 14 year veteran of functional safety engineering and process safety - and he’s been applying those principles to safety for the past six years. Ryan is also a Canadian native as well as the founder of his own company.
Recommended
Transcript
Introduction and Host's Background
00:00:09
Speaker
This is the Accidental Safety Pro brought to you by HSI. This episode was recorded March 17th, 2021. My name is Jill James, HSI's Chief Safety Officer.
Guest Introduction: Ryan's Background
00:00:20
Speaker
And today I'm joined by Ryan. Ryan is a 14 year veteran of functional safety engineering and process safety. And he's been applying those principles to safety for the past six years. Ryan is also an entrepreneur and founder of his own company.
00:00:35
Speaker
Ryan is joining us today from his home in Saskatoon, Saskatchewan. Ryan, welcome to the show. Thanks. Thanks for having me, Jill.
00:00:45
Speaker
Well, I was mentioning at the start of the show that our producer Will, who's always listening quietly in the background, is probably going to be laughing this entire time because we have a Minnesotan accent and a Canadian accent all in the same recording. And who knows what will happen, how many abouts
00:01:06
Speaker
and boats and other yeah gotta listen for the A's uh i'll try to keep that to a minimum but we'll see where i end up who knows what happens when you put the two of us together this this this will be entertaining it's gonna get really thick here pretty quick yeah i mean it is the anniversary of the movie Fargo and so maybe you know just like in honor of Fargo and all the accents that came out of that um
00:01:34
Speaker
That will be it today. But Ryan, we didn't come here for
Personal Impact of Workplace Safety
00:01:39
Speaker
that. We came here to hear a story and your story about how it is that health and safety found you in your life and wondering if you might share that. Absolutely. So I have a rich history with workplace safety as a
00:01:58
Speaker
As a child, my father was injured in a workplace safety accident where he worked in a meat packing plant, a meat packing facility, and he was using a bunch of machinery. I'm not exactly sure of the
00:02:13
Speaker
exact terms for the equipment he was using but it had broken the hydraulics had broken on it and it was used to lift pigs pig carcasses into loading bins and loading trucks and the equipment broke and so he was just hand bombing them into a loader bay because it they had to get shipped it was on a timeline and
00:02:34
Speaker
By doing so, like the first 10, the first 50 were fine, it was doing it for a repeated amount of time without taking appropriate breaks trying to hit deadlines that he eventually herniated his lower back vertebrae and required a bone fusion in his lower back.
00:02:54
Speaker
he was 24 at the time. I was quite young and so I've lived what that looks like through him or I've seen the impact that it's had on his life and then how you know it doesn't have to be a fatality to be serious it can be anything. Chronic chronic back injury has been a big problem for many companies and many individuals across the North America and the world so
00:03:21
Speaker
Did your dad continue working at that meat packing facility? No, he had to go into surgery. He was off for six, seven, eight months. I'm not exactly sure. You were little. I was quite young. I don't quite recall all of that specifically, but he had to repurpose his job role. He managed to get a job switching career paths into career where he lightweight,
00:03:50
Speaker
uh, small car career. And, um, unfortunately, so while that worked short-term, you know, after about a decade of doing that work, he ended up, um, re-injuring and, and continuously re-injuring that same lower back injury itself. And it's had a ripple effect through his entire back system and just in general, his whole spinal cord. Now he's had surgeries on his upper neck because the changes in, in
00:04:20
Speaker
the tension on the spinal cord affected his neck and then he had to shave off or remove a disc within his upper neck itself and then he had to have another spinal fusion to remedy another potential herniated disc that was impacting his ability to walk.
00:04:39
Speaker
And so now he's 60 and just to show the financial impact of this, he's been on workers' compensation that have been supplementing his income for 35 years. So just think of that from a societal cost if you want to put a financial number on it.
00:05:02
Speaker
And what was that like for you growing up? I mean, we are such a little kid. This is just how your dad came essentially, right? I mean, this was just part of it, but did his experience color the way that you all approach things in your family from like a safety perspective or
00:05:20
Speaker
What was that? Yeah. So dad didn't like to let this impact him. It was certainly something he hid very well. Sure. And so as a child, I didn't see it initially until I got in my late teens. And I could start to see that, oh, dad's having trouble walking, or he's not able to do certain tasks. Or I've got to help out a little bit more in mowing the lawn.
00:05:49
Speaker
doing any construction projects, renovations in the house and that kind of stuff in heavy lifting. When I really noticed it was when I had kids and he wanted to play with them so badly and he would of course because that overrode. His enjoyment of enjoying his grandchildren
00:06:09
Speaker
was a higher priority than protecting his back. But then afterwards, he looked exhausted and it took a toll on his body. And now looking at, he can only work two, three hours a day.
00:06:26
Speaker
Um, and he wants to work. He hates being sedentary. That is not something that he's chosen to do. He wants to stay active and stay fit and stay moving around. Um, and this is just, you know, that ripple effect that it's had a degradation of his back just in general. So, right, right.
00:06:45
Speaker
Yeah, exactly. As you're telling your story about your dad, I'm thinking about my own. My father, before I was born, had a traumatic brain injury as a result of a farm accident.
00:07:00
Speaker
And so, yeah, and so like you, I grew up with a father that had an injury from work, right? And except his happened on a farm and wiped out the frontal bone in his, so the forehead bone. So he didn't have a bone in his forehead. So if you can, yeah, right? I mean, how odd is that?
00:07:25
Speaker
So I grew up in a house where, you know, everything appeared functional with my father, except we were really raised to be super careful around dad's head.
00:07:38
Speaker
So the safety impact of my father's story, which is different than yours, I mean, you're seeing this long-term financial impact and also your dad's want for work and a limiting agent.
00:07:55
Speaker
And mine was colored by being careful the way that we placed things in our house, or the way that we moved about, and things that carry with me to this day. Because you're thinking about, oh, this could hit somebody in the head. And having your dad get hit in the head when you don't have a frontal bone, it sort of would be fatal.
00:08:14
Speaker
and so it colors the way you do things and so interesting how our little lives right i mean even before we're just little tiny kids how these things color our our lens yeah they paint our perspective right and so as i was like getting into the workforce you know after going to school i took electronic systems engineering is what i'm trained in um and then you know heading out to calgary to go work in the in the oil field um i always had that
Transition to Safety Engineering
00:08:44
Speaker
that what can happen in the back of my mind. When I'm programming control systems or when I'm building control systems, if a shutdown doesn't occur and a vessel over pressures or even a valve swings when it wasn't supposed to and it can impact somebody's hands or somebody's, if they're not doing the proper lockout, takeout processes or whatever, systematic
00:09:10
Speaker
policy they've put in place. I was very aware of how that impact could hurt somebody from a personal perspective. And so I think that's what triggered me to get into functional safety engineering.
00:09:24
Speaker
And for those who don't know, functional safety engineering is a process that's been put in place for I think the past four decades now, started in Europe, in Norway. But IEC 61511 is the specification specifically for the processing sector. There's separate policies for nuclear and other processing facilities, but oil and gas is 61511.
00:09:51
Speaker
But it's how do you design a control loop on a processing facility to not fail? And if it does fail, you know the probability of failure, so then you are willing to accept that amount of risk from a tolerable risk perspective.
00:10:09
Speaker
When I started the control systems, I was primarily at the, you know, all of the risk reduction and risk mitigation tactics have already been put in place and I'm just meant to program them in. And so I slowly worked my way upstream to the hazard and operability analysis sector where we would analyze the PNIDs and identify
Principles of Functional Safety Engineering
00:10:28
Speaker
all of the potential failure points and what the risks or consequences would look like with no safeguards and then move up from there, right? So not this similar to a hazard analysis on a new project or construction or something like that. Sure. It's just our safeguards were automated and we would quantify them. So we would take all those high risk scenarios and we would say, okay, now let's put a probability of failure around them. So how often when that valve needs to work, how often will it not work?
00:10:56
Speaker
And there's a database we use called Aurida, and it's a shared database that Shell and ExxonMobil and BP, all of these are big oil and gas producers, put their failure rate data into it so that we have quantifiable information around how often does a 10-inch ball valve fail when it's operating at minus 30 degree temperatures with emulsion running through it.
00:11:23
Speaker
Interesting. Right? Because it could be a chemical plant, which is a bit different, right? So you need to make sure that everything lines up, but then you can say, well, you know what, every time, or one in 100 times is when that valve, all valve fails. And then you would plot that into a fault tree analysis solution to properly analyze what your probability of failure on demand is. And is it falling within the realm of
00:11:49
Speaker
appropriate risk reduction. And if it's not, then we can pump it up. We can put two valves in or we can put more sensors in to make sure that we're detecting things correctly and that there's no issues with or discrepancies between, you know, spurious trips when sensors aren't working. So not only is the safety a concern, but also the availability and reliability of those readings.
00:12:17
Speaker
It's fascinating, fascinating. And who decides what the acceptable level of risk reduction is? Is that something that's in the standard you're talking about? That is part of the standard, and it's up to corporates, like the executive team, to say, what are they willing to lose? What is their insurance going to cover, for example?
00:12:36
Speaker
And there's different probable risk requirement standards with respect to the public, and there are with respect to people who are traveling and arriving on site because the amount of training that people on site have had is far more than the public. And so if you have an oil and gas processing facility, for example, in the middle of a city, well, and you have an explosion, your impact to
00:13:01
Speaker
to people, standbys, citizens is much higher. And so that can impact how risky you can operate.
00:13:13
Speaker
So with that, so usually with respect to human life, loss of human life or impact to human life, it was a pretty high number, like one in a million years or one in a hundred thousand years is the, is you're willing to accept one fatality every hundred thousand years would be a number that they would set as a corporate tolerable risk level. And then we would just make sure that we design the control loops to make sure that we meet those demands.
00:13:40
Speaker
Interesting. Yeah, this is great, Ryan. And so did you like that work? I loved it. It was so, so fun. In fact, at quite a young age, I got into it when I was 25. At a young age, I was teaching, there's an authority, or the AHJ, the Authority Having Jurisdiction in Alberta, Northern Alberta with the oil sands there. It's called ABSA, so the Alberta Boiler Safety Association.
00:14:09
Speaker
I was teaching them how we could be building safer overpressure protection systems using this specification, or still loop, it's called safety integrity level loop design, than what a mechanical valve could perform at. Looking at the numbers, a mechanical valve fails one in a hundred times.
00:14:33
Speaker
So if you put... Gosh, that seems like a lot. It does, doesn't it? Yes. But yet that's the bar. So if that vessel gets over pressured 100 times, one of them is bound to fail. And that's what was so intriguing to me was like, well, what does that model look like? How do we determine that? And how do we go from there? Where do we move? And so looking at the Markov modeling for that scenario analysis,
00:15:02
Speaker
And then putting an overpressure protection by systems design, on top of it, it really allowed us to say, well, I can build a system that will fail one in 1000 times, and will have lower environmental impact, because we're not going to pop open a valve to remove pressure, we're gonna, we're gonna shut down before pressure can actually exceed the rated limits.
00:15:27
Speaker
So it's just a much different mindset, preventative measures versus mitigation. Right, right.
International Safety Engineering Experience
00:15:32
Speaker
So how long did you stay in that kind of work? So I did that through the core of my... So I did three years of patrol systems engineering, and then I moved into functional safety engineering and life safety systems, like gas detection and that, and I did that for 12 years. Wow.
00:15:52
Speaker
And did you do that work in Canada? I know that you had told me previously that you've worked in different parts of the world. Where did you do some of this work? What took you on those travels?
00:16:07
Speaker
Yeah, so I started doing this work in Canada at a research facility where we had to have gas detection systems protecting a research facility. So they were doing a lot of oil and gas research.
00:16:22
Speaker
And again, that life safety system. So if high nitrous oxide levels were detected, then we would open up the doors to the facility and turn on hurricane fans to kind of evacuate all the air. And we would do an air exchange within 30 seconds kind of thing. Very exciting and exhilarating to witness. I don't want to be in there when that happens.
00:16:48
Speaker
That's kind of where it started. And then I made really good friends with one of the safety logic solver solutions. So it's like the computer for the safety system. And they started connecting me to their global network of people because I was able to code. But then I also understood how to practically apply the loop systems.
00:17:14
Speaker
So they connected me there and then I started to code like boiler management systems for a firm out in New Zealand. So I went out to New Plymouth. It was July when I was out there in 2011 or something like that. But it was New Zealand. I was kind of disappointed. It was there winter. Not the time to go. But I went out there to commission.
00:17:39
Speaker
a boiler system and a hot oil heater. So the standards in New Zealand and Australia for functional safety are very, they're law. Whereas in Canada, they are not law, they are optional or opt-in kind of thing. And how does that compare to the United States?
00:18:02
Speaker
So the United States is a little more fragmented. So places like Texas have regimented this for law. Georgia, they have laws in place. I think the places where there's a lot more
00:18:17
Speaker
mature oil and gas sector like Texas, for example, in Louisiana. That's where these laws have been put in place because they have an aging infrastructure, right? So if you go to Texas City and the BP had a plant there, it was bought by someone else. I can't remember all the custody transfers, but when you head down there, the amount of issues they have with aging infrastructure can cause
00:18:43
Speaker
detrimental human life loss and it's or an impact to human life in a significant manner and so even when they're trying to ramp up and maybe something they shut down for a couple years the they have to meet these new specifications when they go to do that and you know there's there's numerous examples where OSHA have put out the investigation yeah
00:19:09
Speaker
what happened and those are very informational videos.
Regulatory Challenges and Safety Systems
00:19:12
Speaker
I suggest everyone go and look for some of these accident investigation videos where they animate it and they narrate what actually happened and how everything happened and the sequence of events. And it's all solved by approaching everything with safety first.
00:19:28
Speaker
And it's just amazing. But then you have places like Wyoming, where they have nothing as far as regulations for safety with respect to building processing systems. But then environmental regulations override everything. Because with the national parks that they have there, they don't want all the pollution. So now you're meeting different specifications that are more environmentally driven, where you have to
00:19:57
Speaker
incidentally become safer to operate because of it. So are you accomplishing the same thing or is it like you said it seems sort of helter skelter across the U.S.?
00:20:12
Speaker
Yeah, you know, the US is quite fragmented. Everyone has their own ideas. And, you know, like I was mentioning to you a little bit earlier was the differences between what the federal law states and what the state law has and what they follow and who they follow can become quite
00:20:30
Speaker
convoluted. And so again, I'm outcome based when I approach anything. So if I'm solving something because it's an environmental outcome, safety doesn't get lost. I'm just framing it differently because we need to do it for that outcome.
00:20:48
Speaker
But in the meantime, I think just that extra rigor that you put into the thought behind building a solution or implementing a new piece of equipment is enough to say that the risk reduction has been put in place. Whether you're reducing risk with an environmental impact in mind or with a human life impact in mind, it's the same thing.
00:21:14
Speaker
So you had started by saying you're an electronic systems engineer and you're also a functional safety engineer. So are those two separate educational paths? Did you pick up one and then the other? How did that happen?
00:21:29
Speaker
I would say functional safety is more of a specialty. It's not a degree. It's taught by the TUV out of Germany. And a lot of other like ExCEDA have picked up on functional safety engineering as well. You can get trained there or I think TUV out of Italy does their own functional safety engineering as well. So it's more, it's not specifically like an engineering course.
00:21:57
Speaker
But what it is is a condensed version of the application of risk engineering with respect to process safety. And so with that in mind, so I took my electronic system engineering and then got into control systems, because those are all electronics, and then specialized in risk reduction or risk engineering through functional safety engineering, taking that course.
00:22:24
Speaker
very interesting path, Ryan. Yeah. And you know, it started off as functional safety engineering was a mandatory requirement in order to program life safety system. So just kind of serendipitous how it all just kind of fell
00:22:43
Speaker
fell in line and then I already had the impact in my life. So it really jived with preventative measures is what really resonates with me. And so you had mentioned selling that to corporations when it's optional.
00:23:02
Speaker
Yeah, right. How have you done that? The manufacturers of these logic solver systems have done a tremendous job of showing how preventative measures with the upfront investment can prevent billions of dollars in objects or mitigation.
00:23:20
Speaker
I was in Alberta selling a pipeline leak detection system. It was a few million bucks or something like that. I don't remember the exact details to a firm and I was trying to explain to them how preventing
00:23:38
Speaker
pipeline, like shutting down the pipeline before too many barrels of oil leak out is way, way better in every single aspect of their reputation, of their production value, of their assets that they're selling for their impact to human life as well. And while that doesn't ever get disputed,
00:24:03
Speaker
It's always a finger-pointing show around, well, we don't have the CapEx to do that. Yeah, we're saving OpEx a bunch of money, but I'm not in charge of OpEx. It's more holistic than that, and I feel like that needs to be implemented as what is the total cost? What is the sum of all costs from a corporate perspective as opposed to a project versus an operational perspective?
00:24:26
Speaker
And so trying to sell that to people who had the mindset of, I need to do really well on my budget for my project if I want to get my bonus. Tie it to money. Yeah, OK. Yes. The motivating factor is money. So having maybe some long term bonuses to say, well, how well does the thing function after?
00:24:51
Speaker
But it's hard. It's hard to sell an optional expense to people who don't see it. And unfortunately, once you implement a control measure, like we can take COVID-19 as an example.
00:25:07
Speaker
Yeah, please implement masks, you know the public health advisors or the public health leaders in our in every single country across the entire globe all agreed that wearing masks was an effective way to reduce risk of catching a
00:25:23
Speaker
of COVID-19, or flattening the curve, so to speak, of COVID-19 so we don't overwhelm our healthcare system. And we did it, and it worked. But then everyone was like, well, we haven't overwhelmed the healthcare system, so we didn't need to wear these masks, right? There's no control case to show what would have happened. Had you not, yeah. So I feel like preventative measures are very difficult to sell, because if we effectively prevent the scenario we're trying to prevent,
Case Studies: Safety Failures and Modern Approaches
00:25:52
Speaker
it will go unnoticed. Or it won't be it won't be properly recognized. Right. I want to ask about some things you've been writing on about the Swiss cheese model. But before we have a before we get into that, I'm just thinking, you know, in the work that you do, which, you know, it's just mitigating such high risk,
00:26:15
Speaker
Is the disaster that is Deepwater Horizon, is that something that you studied? Oh, absolutely. That was a prime example of where preventative measures were skipped more than once and that's the outcome of what happened.
00:26:31
Speaker
Deepwater Horizon was one of the videos they showed where they did the analysis, they did the animation, and they highlighted all of the various aspects that failed. So we put multiple layers of protection in place for a reason, so that when one layer fails, the others can come up to save the date. But when you bypass,
00:26:58
Speaker
your EOS or it was your emergency shutdown essentially, downhole. When you bypass that valve, you've messed up. That was your last line of defense and you skipped over the other lines of defense that you had. All of your safeguards were skipped over or bypassed to get the job done.
00:27:20
Speaker
And the outcome was the wrong goal that we've thought about. So that is something that they touch on very deeply. And not just that, but BP Texas City had an explosion when they tried to ramp up their ISON unit again with gas production. So that's where they take crude oil and they turn it into gasoline.
00:27:44
Speaker
They had a tower that had a faulty sensor and it didn't shut down and they kept on pumping high octane gasoline into this tower and it overheated because of the chemical reaction and it ran away and it exploded and impacted many people's lives.
00:27:59
Speaker
Oh, Brian, I think we need more of you in our lives and then also with your background and practice, coupled with the ability to quantify and sell these systems that you're talking about or put them in place. Yeah, you know, it's funny coming from Europe and coming into Canada where, you know, we would think that we would at least have some sort of equity with their rules and regulations, but we're
00:28:28
Speaker
We're so far behind, and I remember looking at Norway when I was doing gas compression systems back in 2005, and seeing how they're able to not have pressure safety valves flaring through the environment, like from an environmental impact with climate change and everything being so high on the radar for many of these organizations.
00:28:50
Speaker
being able to shut down before that high pressure scenario occurs and just like the gas is underground. It's not going anywhere and it's safely stored. Why don't we just keep it there?
00:29:03
Speaker
Right? Exactly. Exactly. Instead, you have leaking and causing earthquakes in places that never should have been. If you flare it, though, like you're losing money, you're burning money now. And that doesn't make that doesn't even compute to a finance person. I don't understand the logic behind it. We have better systems in place today. And if it's just because we've always done it that way, then, you know, that's not a reason. No, it's not. No, it's not.
00:29:34
Speaker
Ryan, let's talk about how you apply the Swiss cheese model to your professional practice. And also, if you don't mind, in the event we have people listening who aren't familiar with it, can you do a little 101 on Swiss cheese model? Yeah. Yeah. So the Swiss cheese model is a model that we use for risk reduction. And it's just kind of a
00:29:58
Speaker
it's a visual comparison to multiple layers of protection that I was mentioning earlier. So, you know, if you try to shoot a rock with a slingshot through Swiss cheese, in one of the holes, you might get through one of the holes, but another, there'll be a blockage somewhere else that it'll hit right and capture it. So that's, that's kind of
00:30:18
Speaker
the visual impact that it's trying to highlight. If you look at it from a layer of protection analysis or layer of protection perspective, if you can have five circles, for example, have a center circle and then an outer circle and another outer circle and then keep on
00:30:34
Speaker
balancing those circles and have an event occur in the center circle for it to escape and impact somebody, it has to go through five different layers of protection in order to do that. And they're all varying amounts of thickness, but all five of those layers must fail at some point in order for that impact or that event to impact anything.
00:31:02
Speaker
And so that's, that's the layer of protection analysis that I've applied from, from functional safety engineering to occupational health and safety. And what I did was I didn't quantify like specifically, I just took some, some rough assumptions around how often humans fail to follow a procedure. And that is one in 10 failure, one in 10 times humans will fail to follow a procedure.
00:31:27
Speaker
Wow, interesting. That is interesting. But that number goes up by an order of magnitude when you put two people responsible for a procedure.
00:31:40
Speaker
So because now they're held accountable. And it's that accountability that creates that extra thickness of risk reduction, which is- So adding another human being increases, interesting. Yeah. So in the purposes of oil and gas, we have a valve that would need to be something that had to happen with the valve, whatever, maintenance or cleaned out or something. And it had to be,
00:32:09
Speaker
walked off with a bypass valve open. If you put one person in charge of that procedure, one in ten times it will fail.
00:32:17
Speaker
If you put two people to go out there and it's called a car seal, so you would have them actually have to cut the car seal. You have a custody transfer of the car seal and you document that car seal, kind of like the warranty sticker on a VCR or a DVD player or whatever, or a monitor. If you cut that warranty seal, it's no longer valid. That's what a car seal is for a mechanical valve or instrument. But just by simply doing that process, that fails one in a hundred times.
00:32:47
Speaker
because each of those people are responsible for it. And neither of them want to fail. So just that in and of itself, human psychology is odd. It's funny how that functions and how that helps. If there's something, if there's some sort of, you know, faster way to accomplish something, people tend to try it. Yeah, every time.
00:33:12
Speaker
Mm hmm. Interesting. That exposes yourself to risk. So what I did was I said, hey, if if we're trying to protect ourselves from COVID-19, you know, we don't need to be putting biometric sensors and our HVAC systems and, you know, limiting remote access to all of these different facilities, we just need to be putting in some very simple, relatively robust layers of protection with, you know, one in 10 times are
Safety in the Context of COVID-19
00:33:38
Speaker
going to fail.
00:33:38
Speaker
But it doesn't matter because we're still protecting ourselves to the best of our ability. And they don't cost anything. So the way you calculate risk reduction in terms of layers of protection is you multiply the layers risk reduction factor together. OK. Yeah, give an example. Yeah. So if I have four layers of protection,
00:34:02
Speaker
And each of them is going to fail one in 10 times. One in 10 failures on demand. I take the inverse of that to get my risk reduction factor. So that equals 10, the risk reduction factor of 10. If I multiply that together four times, I get 10 times 10, which is 100 times 10, which is a thousand times 10, which is 10,000. So one in 10,000 times.
00:34:28
Speaker
all of those factors will fail. And that is a number that is relatively livable for most corporations. Considering no safeguards, where your chance of a COVID infection would be 100%, you're reducing it down to 0.00001%, or one 10,000 of a percent point.
00:34:52
Speaker
That's the power of layer of protections. I'll list out a couple of the four layers of protections that I'm referring to. One is social distancing measures within your workforce, within your workplace. Wearing masks when working nearby other people.
00:35:11
Speaker
monitoring self-assessments and questionnaires, pre-checks to make sure nobody has symptoms of COVID-19, and just increased workforce training during the pandemic in an effort to break complacency, keeping it relevant. Those four things can all reduce your risk of a COVID infection by up to 10,000 times.
00:35:33
Speaker
And enforcing those things, right? I mean, how many times have we heard our health officials say in the last year, just because you have a mask on doesn't mean you can get close to someone. Yeah, you can't go rub your face on someone else. But that's where that education comes in, right? Exactly.
00:35:50
Speaker
And it's, you know, enforce, when we had our call last week, enforce is a word I like this, I try to steer clear from because it shouldn't be about enforcing should be built by and worker like, let, let these individuals get them participating in this system, voluntarily, like, it's for them.
00:36:10
Speaker
You know, if I give you the keys to a Lamborghini and I say have it, you're not going to go and destroy it right away. You're going to take care of it, right? Because it's for you. It's a gift. And we need to be approaching safety with the same rigor and regard. Right. And so I think you're getting to understanding the outcome versus knowing the regulations. Yes. The regulations are fine.
00:36:34
Speaker
The regulations are in place for a reason. It's because they needed some way to penalize somebody for not doing something. But when you come from an outcome based approach and the workers in your workforce understand that this is here so that we don't get you or your family sick. That's the only reason.
00:36:53
Speaker
You being sick and your family being sick does the company no good. Why would we ever want to put you in harm's way? That has negative impact any way you spin it. So asking you to try to do something without a mask on is detrimental to our operation.
00:37:16
Speaker
and detrimental to your family. Yeah, exactly. So let's not take this virus home. So one thing I noticed with COVID-19 was health and safety was, was prioritized very quickly within an organ. Never in my life that I seen government leaders talking about PPE so much in my life. I know, isn't it? It's, I mean, we're, we have such an opportunity right now as professionals to
00:37:42
Speaker
you know, because people are talking our vernacular. And so what can we what can we do with this opportunity that we have right now, right? Yes, exactly. And use it as a, as a jumping off point to further, you know, health and safety from again, removing that, that
00:37:59
Speaker
Negative connotation of enforcement or you're doing something wrong and make it more Involved with the work force to say hey look I didn't see that you wrote this thing down. Let's talk about that and understand why
00:38:17
Speaker
Yeah, so I know that you've told me before that you'd like to talk about empathy and how this comes into play,
Digital Safety Systems and Culture Change
00:38:27
Speaker
right? I mean, which is interesting to hear from someone who's an engineer. You're very systematic, you think linearly, you're measuring everything, right?
00:38:36
Speaker
And now we're gonna put something that seems a little mushy like empathy, which you and I both know it's not, but you're putting it into practice. So tell me how that works and how you view that. So I mean, empathy can be measured through engagement. And so that's something that, that's a metric that I feel most companies should start thinking about in measuring or putting into their safety reports. What does safety engagement look like?
00:39:06
Speaker
And once you understand, I mean, the number is irrelevant. It could be 30% engagement. It could be 70% engagement. You just need to know. Once you know. What does engagement look like? Can you give an example, right? And then how would you measure it? Yeah. So engagement to me starts with just, are people completing things on time?
00:39:28
Speaker
you know, every morning, and you know, highly risky scenarios, or before you perform tasks, you're supposed to do some sort of hazard analysis, or you're working from heights of all protection plans should be implemented, you know, if you have material up on a high rise, you should be doing material security checklists, like
00:39:47
Speaker
All of these different things, toolbox talks being another, you know, safety meetings being another big impact to the risk reduction, overall risk reduction of the organization. Measuring how often the frequency, you know, the timing, the regular timing on when these
00:40:05
Speaker
when these documents are being submitted or completed. That is a really simple measurement to be putting into place and then trending it over a week, week over week. What does this look like, right? And then get a belter. So something that I've always thought about is if your worker engagement is a median at 30%, you have people on one side doing really, really well. And those are your champions.
00:40:35
Speaker
And you have people on the other side who maybe don't connect safety to their wellbeing.
00:40:42
Speaker
And that's room for improvement. That's where now as a safety leader, as a safety manager, you can focus on, you know what, your safety champions, they're doing phenomenal. You do not need to go and have confirmation bias talks with them, right? They get it. Let's let them continue to operate. And let's focus our energy on the individuals who maybe didn't submit a hazard assessment last week.
00:41:07
Speaker
you know, or, you know, retroactive submissions and, you know, falsifying documentations and other big aspect is now you're sure you're compliant to an enforcement perspective, but you're not getting any benefit from performing like the safety is null. It's actually a cost center now. It's not there's no investments anymore. Yeah, I saw that so many times in my work as an investigator with OSHA, particularly during accident investigations when I would ask for, you know, particular
00:41:37
Speaker
um, paper trails, if you will, you know, particularly when it came to lockout, tag out or confined space entry procedures, you know, things that really need to be systematic and how many times that, um, that didn't exist. Or if it did, it was like, you know, big, big line drawn through all these checkpoints like, yeah, we did all that stuff except, except it didn't, you know, it didn't happen.
00:42:03
Speaker
Yeah, you didn't do it at the right time. Like there's a reason that these forms are engineered. These safety forms are not just locked out of thin air. They're asking you very relevant questions, very relevant job duties and scopes for safe work practices. Answering them before performing your job task
00:42:22
Speaker
Sets up your subconscious to recognize where the risk lies hmm while you're working like these are very like so this is where I I look at empathy as a solution to safety engagement
00:42:40
Speaker
and empathy is the instrument that we use in an effort to champion new safety champions who maybe don't know yet about all the things. And if you don't measure engagement, you don't even have a metric to work from. So, I mean, you can go and start championing people and you'll probably see an improvement, but you won't be able to quantify it or justify how you're spending your time to your executive team as a safety manager, right? They're gonna be questioning, what are you doing?
00:43:10
Speaker
And while you may be able to show them a decrease in incident rates, it'd be great to show them an uptick in engagement. And so how do you start those conversations to improve that engagement with people? Yeah, I mean, there's a lot of problems when measuring engagement that are quite costly if you try to do it on antiquated systems like paperwork, where that data is just locked
00:43:37
Speaker
on paper and then stored in file cabinets. It may be transcribed into a database at some point in time, but you don't have the insight that you need to properly measure it. So the first step that I talk about safety managers is to take the leap and get into a digital system of some sort. Which one? I don't care. It doesn't matter.
00:44:01
Speaker
The outcome being an improved safety culture, get a digital system. Start getting time stamp submissions in real time where workers are held accountable to the timing when they're performing their meetings and when they're performing their jobs. And so that's what I really push for. I don't think that it's possible
00:44:23
Speaker
to nurture a safety culture without going digital. Sure. And so the point being to be able to find those outliers.
00:44:32
Speaker
And be able to address them in a very pointed way. Yeah, nowhere you should be exerting your energy. You are a knowledge worker. As a safety professional, you are a knowledge worker that needs to deliver knowledge. I think the 80-20 rule for a firm that's implementing safety on paper, 80% of their time is on administrative duties.
00:44:54
Speaker
and 20% of their times work on knowledge work and value creation. Let's flip that and remove that burden of administration from their plate so that they're able to start to think, sit back and stop responding to firefighters or the whack-a-mole
00:45:09
Speaker
solution, or, or, you know, being a safety manager of just arriving to problems that always arise. And let's get proactive about this and start, you know what, you might find that your board for a little bit, that's great, because now you can get creative, right? It gives you that ability to free your mind from just being busy for being busy, say,
00:45:31
Speaker
Yeah. So Ryan, you've been doing, you've done your work, you know, in different places on the planet. I'm curious with regard to what we're talking about right now. Are you finding different countries or maybe even business sectors that are more inclined to say, yes, of course we're going to do this. This makes complete sense.
00:45:56
Speaker
Yes, I wish that I could say that I've seen that. Okay. Just checking. Yeah. There's a few rules and regulations coming down the pipe from a regulatory perspective where they're, I'm seeing in Canada anyway, where they're mandating
00:46:18
Speaker
a company must implement safety on a digital platform or a digital system because auditors are tired now of getting milk crates of spare documentation that is, you know, booger and sonic, coffee stains, and it's illegible. I've had this kind of stuff rolled to me in little bread wagons.
00:46:39
Speaker
Like, look at all of our binders. You want me to live in the stop work order? Right. And this is what you're going to give me to do that? No, like I can empathize, right? I can understand as a business owner, you want to continue working, like this is impacting your ability to make money, but you're not doing it safely.
00:46:59
Speaker
So what's the priority now? So with this new, I don't know if it hasn't been formalized into law yet, but I know it's in the works. And with the way things happen, when one country or one province or state adopt something, usually some
00:47:22
Speaker
of it trickles into everyone else's plans or the law. That is hopeful. That is hopeful news.
00:47:30
Speaker
Absolutely. And you know, people think of, you know, a subscription to software to go digital or building a software to go digital, whatever you want to do, is going to be costly. But I bring up the fact that, you know, that I mentioned earlier, preventative measures versus mitigation, CAPEX versus OPEX, where do you want to save the money? Because if you continue doing it the way you are, you're going to ultimately spend way more money and reduce in incidents and WCB premiums and
00:47:59
Speaker
Unplanned work stoppages caused by occupational injury, like Buddy hits his hand or Buddy drops a board on his toe because he didn't wear steel-toed boots to site, he didn't have proper PPE. Now he's not working. And you know what, chances are the people he's working with aren't working either. So now that's an impact to your productivity. Every year, every year, over 55 billion dollars gets spent.
00:48:26
Speaker
through productivity hits on site due to occupational injury. That's not even fatalities. That's just people breaking their arm or falling because they didn't have fall protection gear on. Yeah. Or back injury like your dad's or a musculoskeletal, you know, something or other.
00:48:44
Speaker
Exactly. So, you know what, if we can make any impact on that, we're net win. Absolutely. If we do a 1% impact on that $55 billion, that is a net win. So, and you know, that's the high level. When you bring that home to the impact that's going to have on people's families, long term, over decades, generations,
00:49:08
Speaker
that, it's life experience now that you're impacting. And there's no amount of money that you can spend that can rectify that.
00:49:20
Speaker
This is such an interesting topic, Ryan, and such important work. I'm wondering as we're winding down with our conversation today, are there other things that you'd like to leave our audience with? Or if someone wants to study some of the same things you've studied, what would you recommend if what people are hearing is eye-opening and thinking
00:49:45
Speaker
This sounds really interesting to me. Where can I learn more about these things that Ryan's talking about? What would you recommend? Absolutely. Your first question is, one thing I'd like to leave the audience thinking about is from my experience in control systems and functional safety engineering,
00:50:06
Speaker
Things came from the world of pneumatics, where there was no sensors. They were all just felt and they had pneumatic sensors that were with like physical plunger systems inside of them that would all work kind of automatically. But none of them talked to each other.
00:50:26
Speaker
They would only respond to the thing that was right in front of them. I can draw a parallel to that being the paperwork system that we have in occupational health and safety today. Right? Yep, I got it. And then how we got to where we are today was by putting in electronic sensors.
00:50:46
Speaker
putting in digital systems that would function and talk across the whole platform or offshore rig or facility so that everyone knew what was going on, everything was visible and transparent.
00:51:01
Speaker
That's how we accomplished the specifications that I'm talking about of risk reduction today. And that is what going digital means, is you've turned everything into a sensor, a data entry point where you can start to measure things and actually perform really high level work that can make a way bigger impact.
00:51:23
Speaker
and just responding to OSHA investigation or a stopped work order or an injury that happened on site.
00:51:33
Speaker
Makes so much sense. Yes. That's the future that I'm looking forward to, is to see these digital systems. You know, everyone has a smartphone nowadays, and if they don't, that might be a signal that, you know, that you should get the person one or some other digital entry point.
Resources and Educational Recommendations
00:51:51
Speaker
It doesn't have to be a cell phone. It could be a tablet or a laptop or whatever. But the cost of the hardware is minuscule, the cost of one incident.
00:52:00
Speaker
where you didn't have the data. To learn more about what I'm talking about, I'd suggest, like I mentioned, a couple of organizations that run the lead on functional safety engineering. It's TUV out of Germany. They're the governing body of a lot of functions. They're like the originating
00:52:22
Speaker
regulatory authority, kind of like UL in North America or ISA. And then there is ExCEDA, E-X-I-D-A, who do a fantastic job. There's many textbooks that I've read, that I bought from them about implementing functional safety engineering. And it's a life, like, it's not just
00:52:44
Speaker
it's a holistic approach to an asset. So if you consider a facility to be a singular asset that has inputs and outputs, then let's maintain that asset and its life cycle is 50 years, 75 years, somewhere in that realm. Let's make sure that not only are we protecting ourselves up front, but also in 25 years from now.
00:53:09
Speaker
We're not losing sight of keeping people safe. With the functional safety engineering, when you're designing these loops and building out this fault analysis and all these different requirements, maintenance is a big role. There's a very big role in this. If I could draw a parallel to that, and that's our training.
00:53:33
Speaker
for occupational health and safety, right? If you consider your workforce as the production side of your company, the maintenance for your workers is training and education. Good analogy. So when you're doing these fault analysis on, yeah, this valve will fail one in three times, but if I maintain it every three months and I go and check it, it'll fail one in a hundred times.
00:54:02
Speaker
A person will fail one in 10 times, but if I continuously keep them up to speed with the latest and greatest training requirements and education that I can perform for them, they're going to fail one in 100 times. That's not quantified, I'm just making assumptions, but that's the style of thought process that I'm trying to apply to occupational health and safety, that I'm bringing to occupational health and safety.
00:54:28
Speaker
Hmm. Thank you for that. And maybe Ryan, you can give us some links to the TUV and Exceda that we can put in the show notes for people if they want to learn more about that too. Absolutely. Yeah. Thank you.
Conclusion and Community Engagement
00:54:43
Speaker
Thank you. Ryan, thank you so much for sharing your story today. This has been, this has been really enlightening and interesting. I appreciate it.
00:54:50
Speaker
Absolutely. This is a this is a blast. I love talking about safety and just in general doesn't really matter what the topic is. And I'm so I'm so happy that there are people like you in this world. So thanks for the work that you do and that you've been doing. Not a problem at all. And I appreciate you bringing me on to to share the story and and hopefully inspire more.
00:55:10
Speaker
Very good. Thank you. Without being too convoluted with our accents. I don't think we were too bad there. That's right. I think, you know, we think maybe we did okay. All right. All right. And thank you all for spending your time listening today. And more importantly, thank you for your contribution towards the common good.
00:55:28
Speaker
making sure your workers, including your temporary workers, make it home safe every day. If you'd like to join the conversation about this episode or any of our previous episodes, you can follow our page and join the Accidental Safety Pro Community Group on Facebook. If you aren't subscribed and want to hear past and future episodes, you can subscribe on iTunes, the Apple Podcast app, or any other podcast player that you'd like. We'd love it if you could leave a rating and review us on iTunes. It helps us connect the show with more and more safety professionals like Ryan.
00:55:58
Speaker
Special thanks to Will Moss, our podcast producer. And until next time, thanks for listening.