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#27: Big wheels keep on turning
82 Plays6 years ago
Today, Jill James talks with Andrew, JB Hunt’s Regional Safety Manager. Andrew helps keep those 80,000 pound big rigs rolling safely down the highway. In fact, Andrew can maneuver a semi truck like a pro. He looks forward to the journey ahead by embracing new technology and the challenges it will bring. His key piece of wisdom? Earning a little street cred goes a long way.
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Transcript
Podcast Introduction
00:00:08
Speaker
This is the Accidental Safety Pro brought to you by Vivid Learning Systems and the Health and Safety Institute. This is episode number 27.
Meet Jill and Andrew
00:00:15
Speaker
My name is Jill James, Vivid's Chief Safety Officer, and today I'm joined by Andrew, who is the Regional Safety Manager with JB Hunt. And Andrew is joining us today from Dallas, Texas. Andrew, welcome to the show. Hi, thanks Jill. Glad to be with you. Well, Andrew, I think that
00:00:34
Speaker
transportation industry. I don't think we've had a guest in the transportation industry yet. So this is this is maybe a first for the podcast. So thanks for agreeing to talk with us. Oh, of course, glad to. I've enjoyed listening and, and minor actions with vivid. So, you know, being on the podcast is kind of the next cool step.
Andrew's Unconventional Journey
00:00:55
Speaker
So Andrew, you didn't just land in the transportation industry. You found your way into safety and transportation through different means, starting out somewhere else. So can you sort of share with the audience your story of what your winding path is to safety?
00:01:13
Speaker
Yeah, it definitely was a winding path. So growing up, I didn't really have a whole lot of safety in terms of a profession around me. My dad's an electrical engineer on the software and hardware side and an amateur kind of handyman around the house. So we did a lot of work and wiring.
00:01:37
Speaker
installing a speaker system or things like that did you have like a did you have a really cool stereo system in your house growing up oh yeah we we we installed and actually one of the skills that i still have to this day is being able to drop and fish cabling to do uh wiring for a house or for surround sound or televisions that is a talent it
00:01:57
Speaker
Yeah. And so my dad taught me how to do that. Now, the apartments I've lived at don't necessarily like the fact that, you know, I get into the walls and drop wires, but I like not having cables out on the floor, you know. But safety and that was always like, hey, Andrew, we're going to work on the system without tripping the breaker because I don't want the AC or the lights off. Don't touch these wires and, you know, don't touch anything metal. OK. All right. I will do those things. And you just you know, you just never think about it when you're when you're not involved in the industry. Because you don't know.
00:02:25
Speaker
Right, because you don't know. And my dad has made it however many years he had made it at that point and hadn't had an accident or an incident and was perfectly healthy. And so I trusted him and just kind of went along with it. And we never did anything really dangerous.
00:02:41
Speaker
The most dangerous thing we did was working on household 110 voltage wires without the breaker turned off, which can be dangerous. Yeah, it's it wasn't, you know, we weren't out there working on a on a table saw with a guard taken off or doing really, you know, what I would call stupid things. We were just taking chances. We probably shouldn't have.
00:03:03
Speaker
It got lucky. Yeah, it got lucky. Right. And then and then in college, I was I was never in a safety role or anything really like the biggest safety thing we did was when I did food safety because I worked a lot in restaurants and bars, but there wasn't a whole lot of safety.
Transition from Finance to Safety
00:03:17
Speaker
And graduating college, my thought was I'm going to go into financial advising. I've got a degree in economics and political science and I'm going to go help people make money.
00:03:25
Speaker
And for anyone who remembers what the market was like in the summer of 2010 when I got out of school, bad time. Right. Yeah. I picked the worst four months to try to make it in selling stocks and insurance. And so safety came along out of failing to succeed in finance.
00:03:43
Speaker
And I got an opportunity to go to a five-star hotel brand in Austin, Texas for what they called a risk management job. And what drew me to it wasn't even, I didn't even know safety was a part of it. I had done work in college as a door guy. I don't like the term bouncer, but
00:04:00
Speaker
Yes, a bouncer at bars. And so I saw, oh, a security job. Well, it pays, which finance wasn't paying. You needed it. I need a job, and I can do this. I can chuck people out of bars if they're getting unruly. I'm sure I can keep five-star hotel guests from getting unruly. Right.
00:04:18
Speaker
And then I show up and it's a lot more than that. It's security, but it's IT and it's safety. And so I'm thinking, oh, cool, I get to be involved in safety. And I thought at the time that this was like, oh, wow, this is like real safety. And looking back, it was...
00:04:35
Speaker
Quite lax. What did you think it was? When you heard it was about safety, what was the first things that popped into your mind then? Yeah, at the time I thought it was going to be a lot of training, hands-on, working with the employees, maybe helping keep them safe, do some incident investigations.
00:04:54
Speaker
And it really wasn't, I mean, it was on the security side. We definitely did all of that. But on the safety side, you know, if someone had an injury, we basically took a report. If we could
Safety Culture at JB Hunt
00:05:05
Speaker
give them first aid, we did. And then if it was beyond that, we made sure they got to wherever they needed to go for proper care and then turned the file over to HR. And that was. Yeah. So the job was the job was really more reactive than proactive. It wasn't a prevention. Very much so. We had
00:05:24
Speaker
We didn't have anything that approximated a job safety analysis program or really robust training or safety training. We did some preventative in terms of drills, fire drills, testing our communication, our protocols. Life safety stuff. Right. The risk team, we all got first aid and CPR trained, which was good.
00:05:48
Speaker
Fortunately, I didn't have to use that training much, a little bit of applying a bandage or helping someone with a sprained wrist or something. But fortunately, no CPR or anything major. But it just wasn't as, you're right, it wasn't proactive. And then the name OSHA would have been just a complete foreign language to anyone at the hotel. I never heard OSHA once the entire time I was there. And so,
00:06:17
Speaker
And it's not that the hospitality industry is devoid of safety because there's definitely risks. Oh, yeah, for sure. And there were things we tried to do the best we could, you know, keep facilities clean. Housekeeping was a big thing on the safety side of, hey, make sure that we've, you know, if you're in the kitchen, make sure that all this stuff is out of the way so that the people walking back and forth with hot food don't spill it all over themselves or get burned, things like that.
00:06:45
Speaker
But it's not as robust as it definitely should be for the risks. I mean you know you talk about you know a department like the housekeeping department and their exposure to something like blood-borne pathogens and you know the complete absence at least that I experienced of a BBP training program or
00:07:07
Speaker
I didn't even know at the time that the hepatitis B vaccine was mandated to be made available. I didn't even know there was a vaccine for hepatitis B at the time because I never had any reason to know. You had a degree in economics and political science. This was not your wheelhouse.
00:07:26
Speaker
But I will say I did learn a lot of how to interact with people and how to get people together. We struggled with our injury frequency at that property. We could never get more than about 20 or 25 days. And so I got to develop some of my motivational skills and my incentivizing skills and and some of the getting people to pull together and pay attention. But hamstrung by having a
00:07:54
Speaker
a safety team as we could call ourselves that were really devoid of any real good safety education and standards and practices or resources I suppose yeah for sure I mean yeah and you know when you talk about the hospitality industry and housekeeping department you know and you already mentioned blood-borne pathogens I think about ergonomics and you know the ergonomic stresses of the repetitive work of
00:08:20
Speaker
cleaning the rooms and the repetitive stress involved in the laundry facility and the things that happen on a loading dump. If you have forklifts moving and you're moving and lifting equipment and the kitchen, you already mentioned that. There's certainly things that happen in that industry. One of my very first jobs, first thing I did to earn a
00:08:43
Speaker
paycheck outside of babysitting when I was a teenager was in housekeeping at one of those drive up motels. And I was the summer help and the ladies that that usually did the cleaning full time took one look at me
Reflections on Hospitality Safety
00:08:59
Speaker
that summer and said you get the bathrooms all summer so that they could skip it. And this was you know, this wasn't a you know, I didn't know what OSHA was either. But again, another industry that
00:09:11
Speaker
devoid of safety so there wasn't any training on the chemicals that i was using with my bare hands and it wasn't offered any you know personal protective equipment and there was no talk of infectious agents or blood-borne pathogens and and hopefully that tide is changing for the hospitality industry it'd be interesting to talk with a safety professional in that industry and and uh get a take on what's a modern practice yeah and i i've
00:09:36
Speaker
Would agree I would hope it's it's changed I would hope that over the years as OSHA has stepped up enforcement of a lot of industries that maybe they've they've hit the hospitality industry and people realize that it's it's something to take seriously and
00:09:51
Speaker
So when you were doing that job, was a kind of a light bulb going on for you that you thought, you know, the safety thing is kind of something a little bit? Yeah, it was it was definitely something I thought, you know, I don't mind what I'm doing right now, which is, you know, for for the job that it was.
00:10:11
Speaker
was probably as good as it was going to get. I was working third shift, so I was working, yeah, I was working 11 p.m. to 7 a.m. shift, dealing mostly with security, but the safety side of it, I got to deal with the overnight crew, and we were a very limited crew, and so we formed a really good bond, and so I was actually able to get people to pay attention to what they were doing and to be a little bit safer than they had been.
00:10:40
Speaker
Yeah. How did you do that? You know, I've always been a a connector of sorts, being able to connect with people and get people to connect. And and I'm really good at just getting people to to agree to to be a team. And that's all I really did was, hey, guys, if you get hurt, we have to bring someone from day shift to night shift. They don't understand.
00:11:02
Speaker
our night shift culture. They don't understand how night shift works. They don't understand the dynamic and they're probably not going to be as willing to go above and beyond to help each other because they're used to the day shift where you stay in your lane. As an example on the night shift when I was I was a security officer most of the time that's kind of what my main job was but there were times where
00:11:22
Speaker
room service would be you know in over their heads and there was only one person on staff and at one point the lady who was working room service I saw her in the hallway and she tripped and spilled a pitcher of water all over her uniform and herself and you know had to go make deliveries and I was like okay just refill the pitcher of water give me the tray and what room we're going to won't be the world's best delivery service but I'll get the food there and and you can go you know change uniforms or whatever and so we would help each other like that we would
00:11:51
Speaker
You know, things that were in our wheelhouse and we were a really cohesive team. And so we knew, hey, if I do something stupid and get hurt and I'm out of work, it's going to hurt everyone else on the night shift. Everyone will. It'll upset the rhythm. And so we kind of.
00:12:06
Speaker
just had this communal, look, I'm not going to hurt you by hurting myself. I'm not going to let you down by not being here. So, uh, that's kind of as far as I got with, with that team, but it was definitely, uh, successful. We, we didn't have very minimal, if any frequency out of the overnight employees. Generally it was, it was daytime stuff that, that way that would cause injuries. Huh.
00:12:32
Speaker
So how long were you there and what happened next?
00:12:38
Speaker
almost two years, year and a half, almost two years. And I got tired of night shift and didn't really have any upward mobility at the hotel. And I was in a department that didn't tend to pull from the college educated and the upward mobile. It was kind of a, hey, you come here, you do your thing, and you just stay in this lane. And that's not what I wanted. My wife and I,
00:13:05
Speaker
had gotten married while I was working for the hotel and she was working in a
00:13:11
Speaker
the optometric industry, you know, and as an optician and she really loved her career and that was great, but I, you know, wanted more for what I was doing. And so a college friend of mine was working for J.B. Hunt and I'd applied a couple of times, you know, just over the, you know, over the two years, I think at that point since I graduated and hadn't really gone anywhere. And he finally said, hey, I've
00:13:38
Speaker
I'll go talk to our HR rep, send me your resume, put in an application.
00:13:43
Speaker
He said, I can only promise that I'll ask her to give you a call and to start the conversation. It's on you from there. And that's all I really needed. All I wanted was a foot in the door. And that led to me getting an offer to join them as a manager trainee in the operations side, which, you know, I wanted to, safety was fun and safety was something I enjoyed, but I was really interested in, I've got to make a career change and I figured,
00:14:10
Speaker
Hey, they hire into this manager training role. It's in operations. I'm going to be an operator. And what I found out very quickly, actually, day one of our orientation. So I pack up my wife and our one cat at the time. And we drive to Dallas from Austin, unload, and I show up for work. And the first thing I do day one is I get to go sit through driver safety orientation.
00:14:34
Speaker
And I sat through two days of driver orientation with the other new manager that was hired the same week and with all of the drivers that were joining the company through Dallas. And then on day two, they tell me, OK, tomorrow morning, be prepared for this thing called Smith System.
00:14:52
Speaker
I'm thinking, OK, what's what Smith system and show up the next morning and it's advanced defensive driving. And they teach us all a class on advanced defensive driving and then put us in cars and make us go out and do these very specific advanced defensive driving technique drives and train us all in Smith system and then
00:15:16
Speaker
The drivers went off and did things that weren't really relevant for the managers and they put us through some maintenance What they call maintenance 101 where we learned about how the trucks have their oil changed and what the maintenance shop runs like and then the final day They put us with an area risk manager and it's a full day of introduction to safety culture the JB Hunt way
00:15:36
Speaker
And, you know, we watched we watched training videos. We there was a PowerPoint and discussions and there were a couple of videos about, hey, these were some major events. And this is what we learned from them. Really impressing the importance of culture and the importance of.
00:15:53
Speaker
You know, hey, ops folks, you know, new ops managers and managers in training. It's not just that you get to push a button and dispatch a driver. There are real consequences to having an 80,000, the gravity, an 80,000 pound vehicle rolling down the highway. And and this light bulb went off like, oh, this is a company that actually cares about safety. They care about their people and about doing things the right way. And then.
00:16:20
Speaker
And so in addition to doing the training, I would also review what we called safety events. We have telematics on our trucks. And if a driver hit the brakes too hard or the roll stability in the trucks activated, we would know about it. And we'd sit down and have a discussion and try to come up with how to change that behavior. Was it something the driver
00:16:46
Speaker
Was doing wrong? Was it something the driver didn't know? Was it something the driver just needed an attitude adjustment or something of that nature? And try to keep the driver safe. And it really opened up this whole new idea of, OK, I'm not an operator. I'm a safety guy who has operations responsibilities, because that's really how we feel
Operations Teams and Safety Management
00:17:11
Speaker
is that
00:17:11
Speaker
Safety is owned by the operations. And to give kind of a picture, now in my current role, I've got seven risk managers that work for me. And we have almost 2,000 drivers across four states at over 100 different what we call accounts, fleet locations. The safety manager can't do it all. And I learned very quickly that because the safety manager can't do it all and really shouldn't,
00:17:38
Speaker
The operators had to own it. And so, you know, I was I didn't have a safety title, but for my first four years, I was very embedded in the safety and the culture of the individual account locations that I worked at. And I worked at a couple of different ones. I went from the pallet customer that we had to a
00:17:59
Speaker
a water distributor to a restaurant that we used to run for, um, or we still do. Excuse me. We still do run for them. And so I, um, I kept promoting up and promoting up and in about, uh, 2015, so I joined Jamie hunting in very early 2012 and in, uh, the middle of 2015, I, uh, they opened up a new area risk manager role, um, in,
00:18:23
Speaker
in Dallas. At the time, there were only four in the region. We were in a smaller region. Well, they opened up a fifth position. And I put my name in the hat because I really enjoyed working with my ARM. My ARMs had been mentors to me. And since they had been good mentors and I kind of liked what I heard about the job, you get to travel, you get to see different accounts, you get to be deeply involved in starting up new operations and the planning.
00:18:50
Speaker
I thought I wanted to go at it. And so I was fortunate enough to get the job. And now I had a real safety role. I was focused as a safety person.
00:19:06
Speaker
And that was a whole different experience. The safety that I knew as an operator was very tactical and very, OK, if A happens, you need to figure out if it was root cause B, and then you're going to take action C. And it was very,
00:19:25
Speaker
procedural, which is what it needed to be for the operators in the field. But as an area risk manager, I got a whole bunch of extensive training. There were several weeks of attend this training course. One of them is we go up to Oklahoma City and attend the DOT's Transportation Safety Institute. They have what they call intro to the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Regulations, which is a week solid of going through
00:19:54
Speaker
code of federal regulations that applies to trucking and transportation and really getting expertise in how those interact those regulations work and how to interact with them. Sure and I'm gonna I'm gonna say that that sounds fun and anyone who's not a safety professional listening to this would be like what
00:20:12
Speaker
Yeah. But really, I mean, who gets to have that kind of dedicated training? You know, when I was with OSHA and I got to go to the OSHA Training Institute, you know, handfuls of times for like a week of training. I mean, it's intense, but, gosh, you learn so much. So what an awesome opportunity. Oh, 100 percent. Yeah, it was great. Now, it very dry because for anyone, anyone who is regulatory, right? Anyone who's read the CFR knows that it's it's the cure for insomnia, but very informative.
00:20:42
Speaker
They brought in enforcement officers to teach certain sections, particularly on the maintenance side. They brought in a safety director from an oil field company who actually at one time helped develop the TSI program. And he talked about logging and regulation. And we spent half a day on a very particular part of the logging regulation that I'd say 90% of people
00:21:08
Speaker
mess up if they if they're not really careful it's it's what's called the split sleeper birth provision and it allows the driver to not take a full break but to split their break over a couple of different periods and it's a very easy one to find yourself afoul of the regulations and and so we spent you know they knew this obviously and they said you guys are going to learn this backwards and forwards so that you are are experts and
00:21:35
Speaker
Got to do that, got to go become a Smith System instructor.
Becoming a Smith System Instructor
00:21:38
Speaker
So three years on, three, four years on from joining JB Hunt and taking my first Smith System class and then doing the every three year research that we do.
00:21:50
Speaker
I got to go to their Smith Systems headquarters in Arlington, Texas, just down the street and become an instructor, which is a week of advanced defensive driving. And more than just that, they taught us a lot of adult education, how to teach adults, which is very different than teaching children, very different than teaching college students. It's a unique perspective.
00:22:15
Speaker
And then I got to be an advanced defensive driving instructor and had to go through to where I could do this course without notes, basically, because once you're in the vehicle, it's it's all about what's going on. And you've got to even as an instructor, you've got to be thinking, you know, six or seven steps ahead of what's going on while still engaging everyone. And it was it was a great experience. And yeah, and all of that learning
00:22:38
Speaker
got me ready to then start learning how to actually be a safety guy in in the real world because so you were getting your you were getting your baseline at this point yeah and that took a couple months of getting the baseline and at this time while i'm doing the baseline training i'm also working as a safety safety professional and working with my accounts and i got thrown immediately into starting up new business within the first couple of weeks of getting the job and so i'm on the fly developing jsas and and really understanding the
00:23:05
Speaker
the back end of okay so we have this task now how do we figure out how to do it safely and how do we figure out how to do it in the most compliant manner while also making it easy to understand it easy to follow right some of the best ways to learn is is like you're saying doing it on the fly when it's um urgent yes and specific and you have real lives on the line and you you know you have an you have an end goal yeah
00:23:31
Speaker
It was the first time in my life doing this. We started up a customer that required the use of Moffitts, which are the mounted forklifts. A lot of people have seen them. They just don't know what they are. They're the forklifts that look like they're hanging off the back of a flatbed or a delivery truck. Yeah. Moffitt's the most common brand. And we needed to be able to teach this. Well, I had
00:23:54
Speaker
Never even seen one up close, let alone operated one. And so I had to shut myself down to one of our operations in San Antonio that had a an expert trainer there. And he put me through all of the training and the and the regulatory things I had to know how to do the inspection and then.
00:24:12
Speaker
I had to do some training with him and I got my, my, you know, I was internally certified to be an operator and a trainer to then come back up and train the new drivers at this new operation. And so, you know, I'm, I'm, I'm going through all the training with them thinking, okay, like,
00:24:28
Speaker
I know I know what I'm doing, but this guy just told me he's run this equipment before at another company for a couple of years. And here I am. I just learned about it last week. And now I'm the guy who has to do the class. How green that feels, right? Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah. Yeah. Yeah. But it started a habit of mine where I have become
00:24:49
Speaker
the specialized equipment kind of guy in our region, the guru, for lack of a better words, when I was an area risk manager, I would always leap at the opportunity. Hey, we got some new specialized. I want to learn it. And then when we get together as a team for our next quarterly meeting, I want to do the specialized training. And my boss had to pull had to pull back on the reins a little bit and say, OK, you can't always be the one to teach. But I'm going to I'm going to love it. Yes. But I'm going to let you be my specialized equipment guy. And I would just I learned everything that I could. Yeah. And so that's so fun.
00:25:18
Speaker
and so go ahead well i was just thinking about you know when what your evolution has been like from the hospitality industry which was lack and then you you come to your first days at jb hunt where you're hearing the importance that they place on safety you go through this pretty massive sounding orientation which is fantastic where you're really getting as a as a new operations person um
00:25:48
Speaker
I don't know the right word might not be indoctrinated but you're really learning like what the expectation is for safety for the culture and the organization and when you were taking that in I'm curious if you can kind of pull yourself back to that time you know your voice started to get excited you were excited and animated at that time did you think
00:26:07
Speaker
Oh man, what a relief. I landed in the right place, though it might not have been exactly the right fit for the job at that time. Yeah, I definitely thought I landed in the right place. And the fact that they cared that much about the line, employees, the drivers, and they cared enough about the managers to give us the training to understand the expectations, it really made it feel like a family.
00:26:33
Speaker
And that's the atmosphere that I've always had working for JB Hunt is we may be this very large Fortune 500 transportation company, but it feels very familial. You know, I have a good relationship with all of my employees. I used to say I knew everyone in the region and we've just grown so much that I tell people, you know, I'm naturally not good with names and remembering people. But if I see you enough and I shake your hand and we talk, I'll remember you eventually. And I try to remember as many as I can. But
00:27:02
Speaker
You know when when you've grown like we've grown over the last you know, seven years. It's it's hard to know everyone, but I try I still try Yeah, and then when you landed in the job in 2015 as the risk manager role Did you feel like you came home like oh, this is what I've been this is what I've been preparing for all these years Yes, I did. I really did feel like it was a homecoming of sorts like I didn't know it was home
00:27:27
Speaker
I didn't know it was what I was looking for, but when I got into it, I was like, yes, this is what I enjoy doing, because it's a very problem-solving application. So like I said, the operators own the tactics and own the ground level of safety. But as an area risk manager, it was my job to help with the strategy and to help them understand where they needed to go, understand, hey, you're having this issue, so this is how we strategically
00:27:57
Speaker
plan around it and train around it. And then a lot of special projects, you know, the startups, the specialized equipment training when customers come along and say, hey, we've got this brand new thing we need you to do for us. Can you make it happen? And they look to the safety and go, OK, safety guy, how do we do this safely? Because none of us have ever seen it before. And getting to be that that relied on resource really was was what I loved about the role was that I became this guy.
00:28:27
Speaker
that my ops leadership, our region ops managers, would call on. I was assigned to two of them. And when they had big deal projects, they'd call on me. So we've got a group of customers in the oil field, in the oil and gas industry. And so when I got into this role, I had to go become a
00:28:48
Speaker
a trainer for our mobile cranes, which we use. And then I had to go take Safeland, which is the the training orientation that allows you to go onto a rig site. And if you don't have this card, they literally tell you, well, that's nice, but sit on the other side of the street. You're not allowed here. And with that, then I had to do hydrogen sulfide training as an instructor for both Safeland and hydrogen sulfide safety training and had to be up to date on all of that. And it allowed me
00:29:18
Speaker
A lot of cool experiences, one of which was kind of really building our company's hydrogen sulfide protocols and response plan because we had just gotten into this industry and then I come along and I get my training and I realize, hey guys, let's put this all together.
00:29:34
Speaker
Yeah. And the coolest thing I got to develop was our customer came to us and said, OK, you normally haul these oversized tanks. That's nice. We would like you to haul the largest tank we make, which is a tank that's almost 22 feet across width wise and is oversized in every dimension. It is the supreme of oversized that we do. Now, it's not the biggest thing that's ever moved down the highway. But for JB Hunt, it was the biggest thing we'd ever carried at the time.
00:30:03
Speaker
And so I got to develop, OK, how are we going to secure this load properly? And not just properly, how are we going to do it in a way that doesn't damage the product? Because the customer, what had happened, they had a specialized carrier for these who got in a lot of trouble for damaging the product because of how they secured it using the chains. And so I had to develop a method that would secure the product, meet all of the regulations for load securement, but wouldn't mark up the paint and wouldn't damage the flanges and anything else.
00:30:31
Speaker
And then how are we going to handle this going down the road? Right. And that was a project. These are. Go ahead. Yeah. These are all the things that, you know, people don't think about. Well, I mean, I do because I'm a nerd that way. And many of us listening to this do because we're nerds in that way.
00:30:47
Speaker
But when I'm going down the highway and I'm coming up behind or next to a semi that's hauling a load that's secured, I'm looking at that load and how it's secured. I'm looking at its straps. I'm looking at its chains. And my naked eye, of course, can't see whether it's right or wrong because I haven't had the specialized training that you have. But I always think about
00:31:09
Speaker
A, did the person that secured that have proper training? And B, what a big responsibility that is for not only the product, like you're saying, and of course the safety of your employees who are hauling it, but everybody else on the roadway. I mean, it's a big deal. And so, well, thanks for doing that training with everyone.
00:31:31
Speaker
Well, you're welcome. And becoming a specialist in there. That's pretty cool. Yeah, of course. And you said people don't really think about it. And you're right. I know I didn't think about it until I got into the role. I never considered what it took to secure a product on a flatbed or have equipment in the right condition. And now,
00:31:51
Speaker
If my wife is driving and we're on the road, we pass an 18 wheeler. I'm, you know, leaning almost leaning out the window and watching the equipment and taking notes. And is that the right way around? And did it go through the rub rail the right way? And oh, hey, look at those chains. And my wife will just put the pedal down and get past the truck. So I'll stop talking about it.
00:32:11
Speaker
This sounds very familiar to my life. I'm naming types of cranes on the horizon or types of scaffolds. And like, you know, my son will say to me, Mom, please. Yes. Please. Yep. But your eyes can't help it. Once you see these things, you can't help it. Yeah, I know. Safety is not a job that you can turn off. I don't get to clock out at the end of the day. I just am a safety guy. So but it but it you know, it was that role for the time that I was in it was
00:32:40
Speaker
It's one of the most rewarding things I think I've done so far in my career because I got to develop these relationships and then see the results. I would have drivers that would come up to me and say, hey, thank you for showing us this. Or I have a driver call me and say, hey, Andrew, I've got this problem. I don't know how to solve it. And neither does my manager because we've never come across this. But I need an answer. What do I do?
00:33:03
Speaker
being that resource and knowing that I've done a good enough job, that the people that I work with trust me, was really confidence inspiring and it told me I'm doing the right thing.
00:33:15
Speaker
And then as careers will do, I had an opportunity come up to me. I'd actually pushed this opportunity away a couple of times internally. They had not offered me this role so much as they had said, hey, would you consider this role? And I'd said, well, no, it's permanently based in West Texas. And at this time, I'm still based in Dallas. And I don't want to go out there. And I have no problem traveling and visiting, but I don't want to live out there. And they came back around.
00:33:44
Speaker
our director of operations and one of the regional ops managers. They kind of sat me down and said, hey, we're going to ask, but we really need you to do this. And so I had the opportunity to go move back into operations and head up one of our accounts out there delivering to a retail customer. And we kind of went through a management transition for various reasons.
00:34:11
Speaker
management team by the time I got there as the as the general manager was a uh was all new we we we changed that over and there was a need for some kind of grounding and you know re-establishing of all the operational and safety cultures and so I went back into an ops role evolution evolution of companies yes it happens everywhere it does and so I went back into an ops role but as a
00:34:33
Speaker
former area risk manager, I went in knowing not only the importance of a safety culture that, you know, JB Hunt develops and all of its employees, but hey, I've actually been on the other side of the line on the safety side. And so I'm going to start making decisions as an operator, like I'm still a risk manager and, and I'm going to keep my risk manager from having to bother us.
00:34:54
Speaker
Not bother us, but having to, well, bother us one, but not having to worry about us. I actually told the guy that took over my territory when I left to take this operations role. I said, hey, you don't worry about me and this account. If you see that I'm messing up, call me out on it, please. It's still your job, but I'm going to take care of this like I'm still an area risk manager and keep it off of your plate.
00:35:19
Speaker
With varying degrees of success, we were able to do that for the time that I was out there. And I thought I was going to be out there for quite a while. I was prepared for that. And in late 2017, so I moved out there right around Thanksgiving of 2016. And in late 2017,
00:35:41
Speaker
the gentleman that had been my boss when I was an area risk manager, he got promoted. So he went from the regional safety manager for our region and actually moved to another division as their safety director. And once again, your region leadership came to me and said, hey, Andrew, would you come back to safety and be our regional safety manager? And so I was fortunate enough to, you know, I interviewed and there were a couple of us that
00:36:07
Speaker
really wanted the role and were kind of the guys that it's gonna be one of you. And I was fortunate enough to get it and I got to come back and now lead the team that I had been a part of. And so I've been in that role now since late 2017 in charge of the risk management team for our little four state region.
00:36:26
Speaker
Right. And so did that feel like a big yes when that opportunity came your way? Like, oh, yes, it did. In fact, I had because I still came to Dallas a lot to visit friends. And one of the friends was the at the time, the current regional safety manager. And we were sitting on his back porch after dinner, you know, just just catching up like you do in Texas. Yeah. You know, it's a it's a very Texas thing to do. You know, you have dinner and then then you go sit on the back porch because, you know, in the evenings it's it's quite pleasant. Yeah. Yeah.
00:36:56
Speaker
And he was talking about, well, you know, um, something may come along in my career. And I just offhandedly said, Oh, well, you know, if you ever up and move and vacate this role, you know, I know, I know what I'm going to put in and apply for. And he just kind of said, Oh, well, that's, that's good to know. And then magically, you know, a couple of weeks later he's promoted and they're coming around to me going, Hey, would you like to interview? And
00:37:17
Speaker
and be a part of this. Nice. And so I wanted to come back. Sure. You had made a home there. Yeah. And so I came back and I have been in this role and it's.
00:37:29
Speaker
We've had a lot of change on the risk management team and I've got to do a lot of training with my area risk managers and bring new guys on and keep the culture going. And I still hold true to how my previous regional safety manager and the guy before him ran safety, but I do it in my own way. And it's really, we've continued to push as we've grown and had additional customers added that,
00:37:56
Speaker
It's got to be a cultural thing for us. And so I really tell my guys when they come on board that we are sort of the vanguard of the culture. That's so true. That's a beautiful way to say it. And it's our job.
00:38:11
Speaker
to teach the culture, to preach the culture, to live the culture, and to make sure it's properly owned by the operators. But it's not our job to micromanage. It's not our job, unless we absolutely have to, to be what I call a compliance cop. I think we all know the safety guy that is a compliance cop.
00:38:27
Speaker
Yeah, none of us wants that job. Yeah, walks around thumping the regulation book. And it doesn't endear you to your people. And it definitely doesn't make you effective. Everyone knows the regs. All of my operators know when their driver has to shut down. The thing a risk manager has to do is make sure that the managers are teaching the drivers and holding the drivers accountable.
00:38:50
Speaker
And when we successfully do that, we're really successful as a region. And when we stop holding people accountable and we get a little bit lax, then trouble creeps in. Right, right. So Andrew, I'm curious to know with the now years of experience that you've had and the training that's kind of behind you, all of your career starting back in hospitality to today, what would you say are the three biggest things that you've learned?
00:39:18
Speaker
Yeah, so the three biggest things I've learned first is is expertise. I always tell people that join my team, look, you're never going to be an expert the first time around, but you must become an expert at the things you are going to be expecting of your people. And so particularly and I'll take specialized equipment, things like
00:39:41
Speaker
forklifts, power pallet jacks, the moffets, flat beds, even our yard tractors. I myself am trained and certified on all of them and have operated all of them at one point or another in my career with JB Hunt. And I expect all of my risk managers to do the same. In fact, just recently, because we had a whole bunch of new risk managers join the team as I've promoted, as people have gotten promoted from the team and have moved on to other roles,
00:40:09
Speaker
We did our yard tractor certification, and I got to take several guys who had never even hauled a trailer behind a pickup truck and teach them how to move 53 foot drive vans around a yard and do backing maneuvers. And I told them, hey, I'm going to get you started, but you have to become the expert. I told them, go to your accounts that have this equipment.
00:40:30
Speaker
wait for the down hour or the down 30 minutes and go get in the yard tractor. Make sure the operators know what you're doing, but go get in the yard tractor and practice because when next year comes around and you have to do the recertifications for all of your yard drivers, you need to be comfortable not only doing it, but teaching it. And the only way you can teach it is by knowing how to do it.
00:40:49
Speaker
And it buys you street cred with the people who are expected to do that work. It does. I've got a funny story on street cred. This was back when I was an area risk manager in Oklahoma City. We had a group of accounts, and we had some newer drivers struggling with their what we call close quarters maneuvering, generally backing, but really anything you do on a lot or in a dock situation.
00:41:14
Speaker
And so I went up and I set up this training course. It's it's it's an old test, really, that drivers used to be given. It's called a serpentine. You basically have to move the truck in the trailer like a snake through a course and then park it in a spot. And it's set up very tight on purpose. And, you know, so anytime I do trainings like that, I've got a whistle that I that I hold on to and I tell the drivers if you hear the whistle stop, that means you have, quote, had a collision and we're going to look at where you're at and
00:41:43
Speaker
And review. And so I spent hours out there just blowing the whistle constantly because the drivers couldn't get it. And one of them finally hops out of the cab and goes, OK, safety man, this is impossible. You do it if you're so good. So, OK, I get the truck set up and it's a sleeper truck with a 53 foot trailer. So it's about 75 to 80 feet long. And I get in and I get it in gear and I go back through the course and get it back into the spot at the end of the course where it's supposed to be. And I get out and
00:42:13
Speaker
I walk over and I call the drivers together and I pull out my wallet and I pull up my driver's license and I say, I'd like you guys to tell me what's special about my driver's license compared to yours. And they all look at it and then one of them kind of hangs his head and goes, you don't even have a CDL. And and and I said, yes, that's that's the point. I don't have a CDL and I'm not a driver.
00:42:35
Speaker
The first thing I tell them is I'm not a driver. I'm a safety manager. I'm a risk manager. But I said I don't have a CDL and I just took that truck through the course and put it into the spot. It's not impossible who thinks they can do it. And one by one they lined up and walked up to the truck, got in the cab, and in one shot put it all the way through the course, each one of them, one right after the other. And they didn't have to touch my whistle again the rest of the day.
00:42:57
Speaker
You mentored your way through that one or there was competition. Yeah, well, and so I've actually, I got to see, I was thinking about telling this story if it came up. I got to see one of the drivers who was in that course this past week. I was back up in Oklahoma City and I saw him and I shook his hand and he's like, you know, it's been a while but
00:43:18
Speaker
Why do I remember you? And I said, well, do you remember the closed quarters coast? And he goes, oh, yeah, you're that's that's where I've seen you before, because it's been a couple of years since I've been up in Oklahoma City as a risk manager. And we got we got to laughing and talking about it, you know, and it's that thing that, you know, the guys remember, they go, yeah, there was that risk manager didn't even have a CDL and could do this course. And that safety guy. Yeah. And so, yeah. So street cred is incredibly important.
00:43:46
Speaker
After expertise, the next big thing is is culture. And it's really this is the biggest thing I've learned. And JB Hunt having a very strong and well-developed mature safety culture kind of helped me learn this. But it safety is everyone's job. And that's not just a cliche that we say in the safety industry to make ourselves feel better about the fact that we're out there fighting this battle against the world. But it's it really is it. It has to be the line supervisors, the line employees, the next level managers, the
00:44:16
Speaker
the directors, all the way up to the chief executive officer of the company, they've got to believe in it. If they don't believe in it, it's going to break down.
00:44:25
Speaker
And it's the job of the safety manager then is to be, like I said, is to be the vanguard of the culture and to grow that culture. You know, you can't you can't encourage safety culture if you yourself aren't really good at believing in it and abiding by it. And it can't be a do as I say, not as I do. You know, you have to be that example. And so, you know, I really work with my guys on presentation on
00:44:52
Speaker
walking the walk as well as talking it, you know, talking, talking it. And so that means things like, you know, we're a system instructors and we're a system driving company. Well, that means, OK, guys, back upon arrival, park your car backwards in the spot when you get there, because that's what we expect our people to do. And you can't be this teacher and this leader if you yourself don't believe in it and don't act on it. And then making sure that the culture doesn't lose focus of what's really important, you know, so.
00:45:22
Speaker
particularly with how we handle safety events. There's the coaching, the training, the safety side, but there has to be behavior modification as well. We have to change behaviors and that unfortunately means sometimes discipline. And through my training, there's always this real sharp divide between
00:45:39
Speaker
safety and discipline and review and discipline. And there's a lot of very good instruction that says the point of doing reviews and the point of doing investigations is not to discipline employees. It's to figure out root causes and learnings and make sure it doesn't happen again. And that is 100% true.
00:45:58
Speaker
However, there are those that don't take it the next step that goes, okay, and once you've done that, if an employee's behavior needs modifying, how do you modify it? And how do you modify it in a way that's going to be effective and fair? And as an area risk manager, and now as the regional safety manager, we have to manage both sides. The culture can't just be a nice thing to talk about. It also has to be something with some real consequence to give it some weight. And so we try to avoid, you know,
00:46:26
Speaker
bringing down a hammer and and and disciplining when we don't need to. But unfortunately, there's some people whose behavior you have to modify and they only modify their behavior a certain way is when you make it uncomfortable for them not to modify their behavior. And so right, I mean, it's the genius of knowing how adults
00:46:46
Speaker
Yeah, we'll react 100%. Right. Yeah, I had a I had a I had a mentor to me, who's not a safety person, but really deeply mentored lots of aspects of my career, who's a industrial psychologist.
00:47:03
Speaker
And we were doing some training around safety together, and then he was teaching me more than I was doing anything with him, frankly, because he was so genius. And he had this thing that he taught me, stop, start, continue, when you're having conversations with people that might be difficult.
00:47:22
Speaker
And, you know, framing it, and you could think about this with, you know, like kids, even, you know, how you want to change a behavior. You know, stop, I need you to stop XYZ, thing, thing, thing. I need you to start doing blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, or this way. And I need you to continue, you know, really highlighting the things that are done well.
00:47:44
Speaker
And, you know, it's a way to present information to people that, you know, acknowledges what's right. But clearly, clearly using the word stop, you know, like this is the part. Yeah. And that's an that's an incredible way to think about the conversation because it really is.
00:48:01
Speaker
If I'm having that conversation with a driver, I recognize you do a lot of things very well, driver. I recognize that you've got experience in the truck that I will never have, and you've got a good record. But I need you to stop doing this one thing. And then instead, I need you to do it this way so that you can continue doing all the good things that you do.
00:48:24
Speaker
um and that's a big part of of where i see my team's role now and my role is to be the mentor to the operators who have to have those you know tough discussions on a daily basis and to teach them about right you know hey this is how you need to address this and if you need me to sit in with you or sometimes i have to sit in with you you know this is this is how i'm gonna approach it so that they they can learn as well because
00:48:47
Speaker
The best thing as a risk manager is that your people manage safety and you get to be the one who has the oversight and then gets to work on the special projects and the and the really challenging things. If you're stuck in the weeds managing the day to day tactics of safety when now.
00:49:04
Speaker
Everyone's every industry is different. But in my industry and how we work, if my guys were doing the day to day, every little, you know, detail of safety, we'd never get anywhere. The whole thing would stop work. Right. And because you'd just be right. You can't be.
00:49:20
Speaker
You can't build anything to last. So the culture is the most important. You can have everything else in the book. You can have all the posters and the training and the PPE and the everything else and the most advanced safety knowledge. And if there's no culture, it's all for naught.
00:49:35
Speaker
And so having that really well-defined culture is what's truly the most important thing I've learned, but the most important part of being a good risk manager, a safety manager, is being able to be that culture champion.
00:49:51
Speaker
And then along with that, the third my third thing is the importance of embracing the new.
Integrating Technology in Safety
00:49:58
Speaker
And by new, I typically mean technology and and approaches. You know, there's a there's a lot of and I've talked with other safety pros in my industry and in others, there is a lot of well, we've always done it this way and it's always kept us safe. So we need to continue and.
00:50:16
Speaker
To some degree, that's probably a good idea. We've always worn hard hats on this job site, and we've always kept our people safe. You know what? You're right. Let's continue wearing hard hats on this job site. But then there's things like technology. And how can technology be our friend and be our supporter? We use a couple of technologies.
00:50:35
Speaker
Collision mitigation, forward radars on the trucks. It's my safety director likes to say if you jump into one of the new freight liners, it is the exact same suite of safety tech that you get on an S-Class Mercedes because it's made by the exact same person, Daimler. Daimler is the parent of both companies and makes the same tech.
00:50:57
Speaker
So there's some really cool advances in truck safety tech, and that also includes the deployment of forward facing, not driver facing, but forward facing cameras and the way that the camera and the radar can make a safe driver better because
00:51:12
Speaker
Every one of us gets what we call transiently inattentive. You're going down the road and, oh, that's a nice cloud. And it happens to the best of us. And there's nothing wrong with that. That's how the human mind works. But having this technology that can say, oh, we're coming up on that car a little too quickly, and I'm going to slow your speed down to increase your following distance. Or you're in cruise control, and I'm going to make sure you don't get any closer than
00:51:38
Speaker
however many seconds from the vehicle in front of you, it makes drivers better and it helps us keep these behemoths that we call tractor trailers upright in their lane and going from point to point not getting involved in collisions or incidents.
00:51:53
Speaker
Go ahead. What's your favorite piece of technology that you think is specific to our practice? Maybe that you or your safety manager. So my favorite one right now is as far as on the truck is the safety direct.
00:52:10
Speaker
And other associated camera systems that look forward because it nothing helps a driver understand what you're talking about more than being able to show them a video of the incident or the event. And then in addition to that.
00:52:26
Speaker
nothing protects your driver better when he's doing everything right than having that video. And being able to turn over to our claims and the legal teams and say, hey, here's the video of what happened. The other party is accusing us of X, Y, or Z. And the video very clearly shows that we didn't do X, Y, or Z. In fact, we did everything the right way. And they're the at fault party. And being able to show drivers that, hey, if we didn't have this video, it's word on word.
00:52:54
Speaker
And 90% of the time, guess who's losing because of the cultural perception these days of all the ambulance chasing lawyers that get on television and say, have you been hurt in the truck wreck? And it creates this false perception about the trucking industry and being dangerous when really.
00:53:13
Speaker
The majority and the statistics back it up. The majority of the collisions are caused by, you know, your personal vehicle mode operator not operating safely around us and having that video to be able to back a driver up and to be able to get a driver off the hook and say, hey, no, you did everything right. And we've got your back. And here's the video proof. It's a it's a really cool piece of technology and it's moving forward. And I can talk about this because we've publicly
00:53:40
Speaker
I already stated our partnership. The next step is actually replacing the mirrors with cameras. And we've publicly supported a company called Stone Ridge that is doing this. They call it Mirror Eye. The FMCSA just approved earlier this year, approved it for on-road testing. And so we've been testing it with mirrors still installed. And now we're going to get to start pulling the mirrors off the truck, opening up the driver's space, visual space around the truck and giving him
00:54:09
Speaker
a near infallible view of the sides. I say near it of the side. I was just going to say near infallible because I've actually been in the truck and it has such a wide angle that we had. We had the truck parked and we were sitting in it and.
00:54:25
Speaker
We had one of the people who was there had his daughter with him and she was a seven or eight year old small kid. And she walked around the edge of the truck trying to hide from us and outside of being directly behind the license plate, we could see her through the camera system in almost any point on the truck and that sort of visibility.
00:54:45
Speaker
Not only is it not only is it going to help the driver, but it's going to help the general public because drivers are now going to be able to see the mistakes that car drivers make that normally we couldn't see because it's a big bulky piece of equipment that's really hard to see around. And it's going to it's going to be the next wave forward, I think anyway. This is the world according to Andrew. I think it's going to be the next big wave forward in trucking. Safety is taking those mirrors off and replacing them with these systems.
00:55:11
Speaker
That is fascinating. And I'm super excited about that. So I mean, the biggest, the big things, like I said, culture, got to have a good culture. You've got to have expertise. If you're a safety guy who thinks safety can be done from behind the desk or behind the clipboard, please do all of us a favor and go get hands on because you have to have that hands on expertise. And then embrace the new. Don't fight the new because new is never going to stop and technology is going to keep changing. And it's going to keep making us better. And those of us that rely on it,
00:55:41
Speaker
you know, are are going to be better in the long run. You know, I've I've complained for years that baseball is being ruined by analytics, but safety is not being ruined by analytics. It's that sort of stuff makes us better. And being with a company that has bought into that and believes it and wants to promote it is is one of the best things about being in safety with with my current role is that I know it's not me against everyone. I know it's all of us together in the mission of keeping our drivers safe.
00:56:11
Speaker
Beautiful, beautiful story. Andrew, thank you so much for sharing really an uplifting story about safety. I really appreciate it. Really appreciate it today. And, you know, to love what you do and feel that it matters, what could be more fun, right?
00:56:30
Speaker
That's a quote that I've stolen from Washington Post editor, Catherine Graham, and I just love that one, and I think about that often with our work. So thank you for sharing your love of the practice, your excitement around it, and pretty exciting to hear about new technology. Thank you for having me on. I've really enjoyed this.
00:56:50
Speaker
Yeah, thanks so much. And thank you all for joining today and listening and thank you for the work that you all do to make sure that your workers make it home safe every day, including your temporary workers. You can listen to all of our episodes at vividlearningsystems.com or subscribe in the podcast player of your choosing. If you have a suggestion for a guest, including if it's you, please contact me at social at vividlearningsystems.com. Until next time, thanks for listening.