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#12: The Swiss cheese model of accident causation.
110 Plays7 years ago
Podcast series host Jill James connect with Paul, a safety professional of 26 years. Paul’s interest in safety took root as an undergrad, and grew after taking advantage of an internship. For Paul, occupational safety proved to be the ideal professional combination: risk management, law, economics, and engineering. He started his career with the technical writing of lockout-tagout and respiratory protection programs, a job that paved the way to a major corporate environmental health and safety (EHS) department. After that, Paul investigated serious injuries & fatalities (SIFs) for a decade before moving to the University of Minnesota’s occupational health division. You’ll learn about the life of a young safety professional on the road, covering 400K miles from plant to plant in America’s heartland. Paul’s also got a bunch of near-miss stories any safety pro will connect with, along with advice for building safety “street cred”, and having rewarding experiences working with Millennials.
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Transcript
Introduction & Guest Background
00:00:11
Speaker
This is the Accidental Safety Pro, brought to you by Vivid Learning Systems and the Health and Safety Institute, episode number 12. My name is Jill James, the Vivid's Chief Safety Officer, and today I'm joined by Paul, who is the Environmental Health and Safety Engineer at Upanor in the manufacturing industry in Minnesota. And Paul is also the owner of Sotera Consulting LLC. Paul, thank you so much for being episode number 12's guests.
00:00:40
Speaker
Oh, you're welcome. Thank you for having me. This is, this is pretty exciting to have a dozen of these under, under our belt. And I just want to give a shout out to everyone who's been following the accidental safety pro and, and say, thank you for listening. I hope that it's, I hope that it's been insightful for so many people.
Journey into Safety Profession
00:00:57
Speaker
So Paul, uh, how many years have you been in safety? Uh, 26 now. Wow. 26 that, that rivals, that rivals me. I'm at number 23, I think.
00:01:08
Speaker
Oh my gosh, we're veterans now. We are veterans, we're veterans. So Paul, the central question for the podcast always is asking people, how did you accidentally fall into this practice understanding that it likely was not your lifelong dream as a little boy? Unless of course I'm wrong and it was. No, no it wasn't.
00:01:27
Speaker
No, I wanted to be a fireman and an astronaut and a cowboy and everything else as a kid. But when I was a sophomore in high school, or in college rather, I was trying to find a direction in life, basically. And up until that point, I was hoping to go to law school after college. And I was kind of falling out of love with that idea. And I kind of
00:01:50
Speaker
was focusing on the area of being an attorney or an engineer or I wanted to do something in economics and finance or maybe go into HR.
Impact of Exxon Valdez & Early Career
00:01:59
Speaker
As I said, I was kind of falling away from the idea of going to law school. The last thing you want to do after getting a bachelor's is sign up for
00:02:07
Speaker
two or three more years of college and I didn't have the aptitude to be an economist or an engineer and somebody talked me out of going into HR but then around my sophomore year I started hearing about this safety profession and it sounded like all of these four things kind of mixed into one you know there was
00:02:28
Speaker
the legal aspect of it and the engineering aspect and the financial aspect and the working with people and managing performance and things like that sounded an awful lot like HR. I said, well, gosh, this sounds like I'm fulfilling all four of those aspirations of mine. There you go. I started taking some courses and that was the beginning of the end. Then in 1992, which is when I graduated, the Exxon Valdez thing,
00:02:55
Speaker
was just happening and it made me realize, got very interested in how these
00:03:02
Speaker
safety incidents can really take a otherwise successful company and turn it into mush in not very much time. And at that time, the job market when I graduated in 92 was just so poor, I ended up going to Ecolab to do an internship after graduation. They were looking for an intern. They couldn't find one, and they offered me this job, which I was able to kind of parlay into. It was supposed to be a three-month position, and I ended up
00:03:30
Speaker
kind of manipulating my way into about a one or two year stint. And then when that ended, I went to Honeywell and did the same thing and spent maybe another year there. And before you know it, I'm three years into the field.
00:03:44
Speaker
Wow, interesting. So when you were, first I just want to say that the fact that you were so young in college yet and had these four points in your head, like boxes you wanted to check in your career, that seems like a lot of clarity for a young person. Good for
Business Education & Role Development
00:04:01
Speaker
you. Well, you get to a point where it's your sophomore year and you better start thinking, gosh, I better, you know, I better nail down a major and I better figure out what I'm going to be when I grow up. And, um,
00:04:12
Speaker
Did the safety background in college, does that come to you by way of a bachelor's degree?
00:04:19
Speaker
Yeah, I actually have a bachelor's in business and economics. And as part of that, I took an awful lot of risk management courses. My business degree has a lot of risk management concentrations. I've taken some risk management courses and some OSHA compliance courses and some management courses and economics and labor economics and management and things like that. So I took quite a bit of the of the safety
00:04:43
Speaker
There was a graduate program in safety there at the time, and I took an awful lot of those courses as part of my undergrad.
00:04:50
Speaker
Mm hmm. Interesting. So when you got that internship, but you said Ecolab said you were first. Right. So what was like the first kind of safety tasks that you had?
Global Safety Programs & Honeywell Experience
00:05:01
Speaker
Ecolab at the time was a one person safety department for even back then Ecolab was a fairly big company. I want to say there were about 27 plants nationwide and just hundreds and it was a very sales centric company and hundreds of sales offices throughout the country. And there was only one person doing safety there.
00:05:20
Speaker
And at the time they wanted to bring in somebody from college with a good writing background and I had done some technical writing and they wanted to write basically all of the safety programs for the corporation. So I spent several months writing, you know, lockout, tag out programs and respiratory protection and whatnot for all of their operations.
00:05:40
Speaker
worldwide. There were 27 plants in the US, but many more in Canada and other places overseas, etc. I got along so well with my manager, a guy named Bob Ringdahl, who really gave me my start. As time went on, he was able to find more uses for me.
00:06:04
Speaker
molded that job or we molded that job into something that wasn't really totally resemblance of what it started off as, which was an internship to write these programs. I ended up supporting these plans and I ended up being there about two years, I think. Wow, that's awesome. Yeah, it was great. Do you wonder if any of those programs that you wrote live on?
00:06:24
Speaker
I'm sure by now somebody's probably kind of a few years later they hired me back as a consultant to rewrite a lot of those programs. So I would imagine they've been updated since then.
00:06:39
Speaker
Interesting. So then your next leap is into Honeywell and you know that's a giant corporation. What was that like? Did they have like a really well-run safety department at that time or what did that look like? Well yes I mean Honeywell was a much much more sophisticated organization you know where we had a complete environmental health and safety department of you know just there. This is back in the day when
00:07:07
Speaker
Honeywell corporate headquarters was right off of 35W in the Twin Cities and there were probably a dozen to two dozen safety professionals working just at corporate in addition to all these plant people and regional people so they were definitely further along than I had been used to at that time.
00:07:25
Speaker
Yeah, sure. And so do you remember what sort of primary tasks you had back then that, assuming, colored your career as well? It was the same thing. Luckily for me, at the same time, Honeywell was looking for the exact same type of thing that Ecolab was originally looking for, which was to rewrite all of their safety programs for all of the US operations. And in that particular case, that started off being
00:07:53
Speaker
Gosh, I can't really remember how long that job lasted, but that was intended to be another limited term job that was going to last a few months. Unfortunately for me in that case, I didn't have the same luck there that I had at Ecolab. I wasn't able to mold that into a one or two or three year thing. So when my work there was done, it was kind of off to the next thing. Sure, sure. Which was what? Where did you go next?
00:08:17
Speaker
Well, actually after that I was starting to get kind of a taste for consulting and contracting and I worked quite a few little contract jobs and I consulted with several companies. One of them was a company called Mid-America Dairies, which was in Winstead, Minnesota. I managed safety in a plant there.
00:08:36
Speaker
I want to say probably 14 plants in about four states, and I managed safety all throughout those plants. So I spent an awful lot of time on the road doing that. I lived in hotels and I had an old Toyota Camry with about 400,000
Hands-On Safety Practices
00:08:51
Speaker
miles on it. But between covering those plants, I did that for probably a good year or two.
00:08:58
Speaker
So did that take that was that kind of your force foray that moved you out of writing, assuming if you're in plants, you were doing more like hands on plant? Yeah, at that point, we were doing more, I was getting my hands dirty a little bit more. There we were doing more traditional safety, more comprehensive view of safety things, writing lockout, tag out procedures and doing a lot of training and doing inspections and audits and things like that.
00:09:24
Speaker
Yeah, so it was that kind of your first time in like a manufacturing setting to see what I often call the heart and soul of working America? Yeah, it was my first time working to that depth. You know, with Honeywell and Ecolab, yeah, I had been in the plants before but never
00:09:44
Speaker
getting dirty to the level that I was there. Right. So what sort of gear did you carry around with you in that Toyota Camry? I had a lot of music with me and basically a travel bag. You know, you throw a couple of pairs of jeans and socks into a bag and
00:10:03
Speaker
At the time, I was renting an apartment with several friends and they said I was the world's best roommate because I would leave on Monday morning, come home on Friday, write a bunch of checks for utilities and take everybody out to dinner and Monday I was gone again.
00:10:18
Speaker
Wow. Here comes that safety guy in the Toyota Camry. Yeah, yeah. Interesting, interesting. So that sounds like a fun path. How long were you there and what was the next stop? From there, for that I did, I would say probably another two to three years doing that. And then I went to, I started consulting with a firm called Integrated Loss Control, which at the time was in New Brighton. And that's where I made an awful lot of connections that to this day, I still talk to those folks.
00:10:47
Speaker
And I spent about 15 years at Integrated Loss Control. I started off as a technician. I was basically a pump jockey doing industrial hygiene sampling and noise sampling and whatnot. And after a few years of doing that, I was promoted to consultant where I was working with these clients on a more intimate basis, you know, writing their programs and doing their training and doing assessments and things of that nature. And after a few more years of that, then I was managing the safety and health division for them. And I did that for eight more years.
00:11:17
Speaker
Wow. And so that particular job, I think you and I have talked about this in the past, there was a particular niche or focus at that consulting firm, correct? On doing certain types of investigations?
Incident Investigations & Swiss Cheese Model
00:11:33
Speaker
Sure. We had done, well,
00:11:36
Speaker
Our environmental health and safety group did a lot of pretty traditional things in terms of, again, writing programs and working with these clients. But one unusual thing that we did was we did claims investigations. We contracted with a couple of different work comp carriers or brokers. And when there was a loss somewhere, our pagers go off at 11 o'clock at night and we're in the car on the way to
00:11:59
Speaker
Bemidji or Brainerd or wherever to go start investigations and securing evidence and working on subrogation type things. It was a pretty unusual aspect, not an awful lot of people in safety have had, everybody in safety has investigated accidents, but we were doing these fatalities and these real serious amputations and things like that with some amount of regularity. It was kind of an unusual aspect of my job.
00:12:28
Speaker
Yeah. So how did, I bet you, if you, if I asked you and I'm going to ask you, do you remember the first fatality case that you went on with that particular job? Yeah. Yeah. I remember, I won't mention it now, but I remember his name. Um, I remember, uh, I remember in the course of an investigation, uh, learning about his family, learning his kids' names. And to this day, uh, again, I won't be too specific here, but, uh, I drive by that place with.
00:12:57
Speaker
some regularity. And every time I drive by that place, I think of his name. And I think, well, this guy's kids are probably, you know, x number of years old now. And I wonder how his how his family is doing without them. And yeah, it takes a bit. It makes a big impact on you.
00:13:16
Speaker
Yeah, right. Same for me. In the time that I was with OSHA, investigated many fatalities and serious injuries, just like you did at ILC. You don't forget about any of them. And I specifically remember the first one and what that felt like as well and where I was. And that was at a sawmill deep in the woods where a man, because of a lockout-tagout issue, had been killed.
00:13:44
Speaker
on the job. And yeah, some of them are more clear than others, but they all stick with you. And like you, when you're driving by a place that you know where a death has occurred, it feels like hallowed ground to me and I don't ever not think about it.
00:14:04
Speaker
Yeah. So Paul, those claims investigations that went on and that's very serious work, not only for you as a human being dealing with that, but also the people that were impacted. How many do you think you did? How many fatalities? Yeah.
00:14:26
Speaker
or serious incidents and fatalities probably in the neighborhood of four to six maybe. And then in terms of other types of serious events, probably at least I'm going to say two to three dozen probably.
00:14:45
Speaker
Yeah, yeah. So as a safety professional, and at that time, and kind of being on call and, and being ready to kind of jump into that mode at a moment's notice, how did that kind of color, if it did, or change the way that you, you know, viewed the career, how you approached it? How did it inform your work? What sort of insights did you did you gather from that work?
00:15:11
Speaker
It just kind of paints this picture of how fine a line there is sometimes between getting hurt and not getting hurt and how sometimes people have been so lucky for so it's kind of that Swiss cheese model of accident causation. People have been so lucky for so long and then
00:15:34
Speaker
one day somebody moves that one slice of Swiss cheese, you know, an eighth of an inch. I hope people who are listening are familiar with the Swiss cheese model of accident causation, but one of those pieces of Swiss cheese isn't where it was the day before and that's it, you know, and you're either dead or you are disabled for life or, you know, you lose a limb or you lose a finger and suddenly everything is different. You know, it's this idea of a new normal. Now all of a sudden I've
00:16:03
Speaker
I've got to go through life without my right hand or I've got to go through life with this terrible, terrible back injury that will never get better. I've got to go through life with this brain injury and life as I knew it is over and I'll never be able to fish again and I'll never be able to hunt again and I'll never walk my daughter down the aisle or whatever.
00:16:24
Speaker
And sometimes there's just nothing separating a person from that other than just sheer luck. And then one day they just run out of luck and that's it. That's what always kind of stuck with me after these things, after these investigations is how fine a line that is between healthy and dead.
00:16:45
Speaker
or, you know, disabled forever. Right, right. You know, for our audience who might not be familiar with the Swiss cheese accident causation, I think you should, I think you should share that. I think that might be something, you know, if someone's listening who might want to make that part of their safety cadence, that might be good. Do you mind sharing what that is?
00:17:05
Speaker
Yeah, it's a theory of what causes accidents. If you can picture multiple slices of Swiss cheese, all lined up. And if you can picture in each one of these pieces of Swiss cheese is possible prevention strategy for that accident, whether it's personal protective equipment, or lockout tag out, or the proper type of training, or a proper work practice or whatever. And if you picture
00:17:31
Speaker
On the left side of this series of pieces of Swiss cheese you have a hazard and it's trying to get through to a worker and in a perfect world those slices are aligned in such a way where the hazard can't get through but then one day
00:17:46
Speaker
because one of those pieces of Swiss cheese has shifted. That hazard is able to make it through the holes in the cheese and get to the worker. I'm sure this is not a textbook explanation of that theory, but that's how I tend to, I'm sure somebody will argue with me about
00:18:03
Speaker
It's a good visual. It's a good visual learning. You know, I'm thinking of all the random holes and pieces of individual slices of Swiss cheese. And if you shift them, maybe you can make the holes align and things get through. Yeah, that's exactly right. And they say with any natural disaster like the Exxon Valdez or the or airplane disasters or whatever, they say that
00:18:22
Speaker
these factors always have to come. Three things have to go wrong, you know, all at the same instant for one of those things because most modern-day systems have got redundancy kind of built into it. And when three things go wrong all at once, it kind of lends itself to this idea of Swiss cheese that now this hazard is able to kind of get through to people and something's going to happen. So whether or not that's true or accurate, I don't know, but it's a good visual.
00:18:51
Speaker
It is a good visual. And I think about as you're describing that, you know, like people have been going along, doing the same thing the way they had always done it. And then, you know, the three things align, right? Um, and I, I often think about people who say, yeah, but I've been doing it like that for 20 years and nothing's happened. So it must be okay. Yeah. And then it's like, no, you know, it's the, it's that, um, somebody moves your cheese.
00:19:15
Speaker
Somebody moved the cheese or it's the, what is the statistic for every 660 or whatever it is, number of times that it was an unsafe work practice, a loss occurred. Right, the bird study. Yeah, I forget if it's 300 or 600, but either way, you know, you're gonna have many, many close calls, but eventually it's gonna happen because somebody has moved a piece of cheese on you and you know, either it's a defect with your,
00:19:43
Speaker
Who knows? I mean, it could be any number of things. Right. Yeah, that rings true to the the fatality investigations that I've done in my career. Always, you know, for me, my anecdotes for the 30 some serious injuries and fatalities that I investigated all landed kind of in the same sort of realm. It was either people who were just starting their job, like literally just starting,
00:20:08
Speaker
or people who were very near retirement, like they got to that 661st or 331st or whatever it is time and something happened, the cheese lined up at that time. But there didn't seem to be a lot of people mid-career in my anecdotal experience and what I investigated. It always seemed to be on those two extreme ends. Yeah, I think there's probably a lot of truth to that.
00:20:34
Speaker
Yeah, so you did that job with the consulting company in responding to claims investigations for 15 years. What happened next?
University Role & Safety Culture at Upenor
00:20:45
Speaker
I went to the university. Okay. That brings us up to about 2008.
00:20:55
Speaker
I just felt like it was a change. I felt like I had gone about as far as I was going to go in my current company and I wanted to try something new. In 2008, the University of Minnesota was looking for a person to help with their occupational health division that they had just started. I applied for that and I was fortunate enough to get that.
00:21:15
Speaker
And over the course of 10 years, an awful lot of jockeying around with different departments being combined and formed together. So I moved several times in 10 years and had a variety of bosses and a variety of different offices and desks that I sat at. And I think I moved something like eight or nine or 10 times in the nine and a half years. Yeah.
00:21:37
Speaker
probably five different bosses in that time period. And that brings us up to 2018. So I spent 10 years at the U and I focused an awful lot on our agricultural operations. We had 10 agricultural operations throughout the state that that was probably in the neighborhood of 30 to 50 percent of my job and that was a part of my job that I just absolutely loved.
00:21:59
Speaker
Working on agricultural safety with these folks and just great, great people and traveled quite a bit for that. And then again in 2018, just last month, I again just felt like I had gone as far as I was going to go and I wanted to try something new and I moved on again. So in 25 years, 26 years, in the last 26 years I've had only three jobs.
00:22:24
Speaker
Wow. Well, congratulations on the next, the next chapter. Thank you. And you're just getting started again. Yeah. Yeah. About four weeks. We had an ocean inspection on my 11th day.
00:22:38
Speaker
Of course. Yeah, right. But no, I really feel like this most recent job with Upenor was just, I could not have asked for to land in a better place than this. This is exactly, if I had sat down a year ago and drawn up a perfect job for me, this would be it. So it's really, really been a great experience so far.
00:23:00
Speaker
Yeah, and what what makes it a perfect job? Like, is it like the right kind of balance of the things that you love to do? And like, what are those things? Yeah, it's, for one thing, I like the the breadth of responsibility we have. So I cover all North American operations, which is not quite as impressive as it sounds. There's only three plants in the US, and they're all within an hour and a half of here.
00:23:23
Speaker
and then two more operations up in Canada. So there's an awful lot of responsibility. A lot of their safety program is already developed, but they're willing to add things and mold things a little bit. So I get quite a bit of freedom in terms of what I want to do. And you didn't have to start off from scratch.
00:23:42
Speaker
No, exactly, exactly. And the people there are really, really great people who want to be safe. And our job is to support them and help them accomplish their goals. I mean, it's ingrained in everybody at Upanor that it's not just a platitude. Safety is the number one thing that we care about there.
00:24:04
Speaker
and everybody there is on board with safety and they just want, all we have to do is support them. All we have to do is help them to accomplish their goals and they are all on board. I'm not having to fight anybody who's bucking or protesting or anything like that. It's been a great experience so far.
00:24:25
Speaker
Yeah, wonderful. So, um, one of the, I think you had mentioned earlier in, in some of the other pieces that you had an opportunity to supervise people in the role of safety and it, and do you have that responsibility now where you're at too? No, no, right now there are three safety professionals who actually all report up to the same, to the director of quality. And, um, right now I don't have any direct reports, but you're correct. I've had it in the pa I've had direct reports in the past.
00:24:53
Speaker
Yeah, which is, which is a little bit unusual with our career. Sometimes not, you know, oftentimes we're like solo operators are kind of like your situation right now where a number of you may report to the same person. So what was it? What was it like supervising people? And do you have any, do you have any tips for maybe people who are in that position right now supervising other safety people?
00:25:17
Speaker
Well, I think a lot of it has to do with just plain old leadership. And one of my favorite parts of, at the university, I didn't have direct reports, but I also tried to help develop some of our younger safety staff as much as I could. And I think a lot of those people have got very solid technical skills. They're coming out of college with master's degrees and whatnot.
00:25:42
Speaker
But it's another thing to kind of take that knowledge and apply it to this greater cultural question, which is we want people to be safe. We want people to make good decisions. We don't want to go around scaring people about safety. We don't want to go around quoting OSHA regulations. We want people to be safe. We want people to make good, solid decisions for positive reasons, not negative ones.
00:26:06
Speaker
We don't want to scare them with if you don't do this, you're going to be fired. And if you do this, you're violating an OSHA rule. What we like to tell people at the university and what I'm trying to start at Upanor is framing this thing in a really positive context where if you are careful with this and if you do follow the safety rules,
00:26:23
Speaker
you're going to be around and you're not going to have an injury that's going to disable you for life and you're going to be around for your kids' weddings and you're going to be around for hunting and fishing and the Vikings games and everything else like that. And that's one of the things that we really try to communicate that I kind of look at in the way we communicate and I try to impose that vision on people that I'm working with if I'm trying to develop them or anything else.
00:26:50
Speaker
I want them to know that that's the cultural message that we're trying to put out there to people. Yeah, don't be the safety cop. Yeah, don't be the safety cop. And I tell people all the time, I don't care about OSHA. I'm not scared of OSHA. We don't do things because OSHA says we have to. We do things to protect people from a hazard that we know that it's there. And if that happens to put us in alignment with OSHA, then great. But primarily our motivation is to protect people.
00:27:19
Speaker
Yeah. And what's in it for them? What's in it for them to continue doing their job and to, you know, like how, how do these, what might seem like silly rules or processes, you know, what's in it for them? What does that mean to them? Yeah, exactly. How does this, how is, does this relate to your life and your wellbeing? And, um, to a certain extent, yeah, you have to tell people about the, if you don't do this, then you might hurt your back or you might have silicosis or what have you. And to an extent, there are certain things that you have to
00:27:50
Speaker
communicate to them that might sound negative, but primarily we try to emphasize positivity and safety and not negativity. Right, right. So Paul, how do you feel, I mean, 26 years, you've ran across and you've worked side by side with so many people in the workforce.
Generational Dynamics in Safety
00:28:11
Speaker
How do you feel about today's workforce? Well,
00:28:16
Speaker
That's a hard question. It's obviously a huge audience, and it's tough to generalize. I can tell you at the U, for example, one of the things that always struck me about working at the U is you're working with all these students. Initially, I was kind of nervous about working with these students and doing training for these students because I thought they'd all be
00:28:39
Speaker
tough to communicate with, and they'd be sleeping through training. But in 10 years at the U, what I found was that these student workers are the most attentive during safety training. They are the most safety conscious. They will do whatever you tell them to do. But at the same time, you also, with these younger kids, you need the younger, I shouldn't say kids, with these younger students, you need to help them to
00:29:04
Speaker
calibrate their risk a little bit. But for the most part, working at the U where I did most of my training, everybody there, but especially the students, they were on board. And I've never really had a major challenge at any one of my employers where I've had to deal with large groups of people who just weren't on board and needed to get kind of roped in a little bit. I've always had pretty good luck with that.
00:29:27
Speaker
Yeah, I'm happy to hear you say that about the younger generation. Millennials in particular take such flack as being dismissive or lazy or not engaged or entitled. And I have to say, in my last two jobs in particular, I worked
00:29:49
Speaker
and I continue to work with the majority of millennials, and they are the best group of people I've ever worked with. Like, so bright, so articulate, way more bold than my generation to admit or ask for what they need. Like, admit, like, I don't understand that. I'm going to need more information. Yeah. And I really appreciate that. And I never like to, I don't think you can
00:30:18
Speaker
take a snapshot of the workforce as a whole and categorize them into one category. I don't think you can. You just can't do that. You can't generalize people. And yes, there are definitely exceptions. And I hear the same things about millennials that you do. And there are definitely cases where that stereotype is accurate. But you can't
00:30:46
Speaker
You can't stereotype people like that. There are cases where that's accurate, but there are millions more where it's not accurate.
00:30:56
Speaker
you have to judge people on their own merits. Absolutely. So, been at this a long time. What's the piece of safety that you don't like doing? What are you loathe doing?
00:31:12
Speaker
I have to admit that when I'm going in to do refresher training on a topic that I know my audience has seen when I was consulting, for example, or even at the U, I would go to a farm and I have to do their refresher training for the jillionth time. I have to talk to them about
00:31:29
Speaker
material or safety data sheets or chemical labels and I have to tell them for the hundredth time and I really just loathe that. I walk into that room and I'm just dreading that you know I try to change my message as much as I can and I change my training materials as much as I can but in the end it's still right to know training and they've had it
00:31:48
Speaker
at least 10 times, just with me, you know, I've done it 10 times at this farm and they've heard it from me 10 times in the past, but you have to go in and you have to sing your song and you have to do it, you know, one more time, but I just, I can't stand that part of the job doing this really, really repetitive training. As much as you try to change it, it's still the same.
00:32:10
Speaker
I think that's what I don't like as well. And not with regard to training, I get what you're saying, but the things that give me like, I go, here I go again.
Challenges & Misconceptions in Safety Work
00:32:22
Speaker
I got to do this again. And it's usually fighting safety cliches for me. That's the thing that gets under my skin the most. Yeah.
00:32:29
Speaker
You know, when people say, but I've been doing it this way for this long and nothing's happened or all that safety stuff just gets in the way and you're making my job more dangerous. You know, just trying to cover your butt. Yeah, right. Exactly. So those like responding to those cliches
00:32:47
Speaker
Yeah. When the person saying them to you is agitated, number one, and number two thinks they're really unique in saying that. Uh-huh. And if they had any idea how many hundreds of times I've responded to that, you know, you wouldn't ask that anymore because then I can tell you a story about how that exact cliche killed someone. Right. I named them.
00:33:11
Speaker
And so like you being repetitive with training and here we go again, I feel the same way about answering and responding to those cliches and having to try to bring your energy to answer it again because maybe you're going to get through to somebody this time or that individual person, though you're giving the same answer that you've given hundreds of times.
00:33:36
Speaker
So Paul, you had mentioned when you first got started, you first had that internship with Ecolabs and then with Honeywell, and you did a lot of writing. And it sounds like you have a real knack and aptitude for writing, like you had said. How has writing carried you through this career? Do you blog? Do you write about safety? What's your writing life look like for you with this career?
00:34:03
Speaker
I write a lot, whether we're writing programs or procedures and what I call technical writing. I actually took several courses in college on technical writing. I knew it was going to be a fairly big part of my job. So I took several courses on technical writing. And then you write through Ecolab and Honeywell. That became pretty important. In terms of blogging, yeah, I have a consulting website. And on that, I have a blog where I blog about
00:34:32
Speaker
you know, OSHA compliance issues and new cases that are coming up and things like that. So I write quite a bit. Do you love doing it? No. No, I wouldn't say I love it. Fair enough. It's something, I think it's kind of a necessary evil for just about, no matter what your profession is, you need to know how to write. I get emails pretty frequently from, we've all gotten those emails where you have to sit and kind of decipher what a person is trying to say because there's this,
00:35:01
Speaker
there's this set of email etiquette that says, you know, we write these quick little bullet point stream of consciousness type writing styles, and sometimes they're a little bit tough to read. But I think it's one of those universal skills that everybody can, including me, can always get a little bit better at. But no, I wouldn't say I like it at all.
00:35:21
Speaker
got it. But you've developed an aptitude of it. I suppose. Yeah. I suppose you could say that. Yeah. So Paul, in this career, what keeps you up at night?
00:35:35
Speaker
Well, I think just about every safety professional could say the same thing. We worry about what's going on at the plant at 3 in the morning. And we worry, are we protecting people? And have we given people the tools that they need, whether it's a physical tool or a mental tool, whether it's some educational message that we've given to people so that they're enabled to make the right decisions. And we worry about what people are doing when we're not watching.
00:36:02
Speaker
And sometimes we hear about cases where there's been some type of event happens and people did exactly what they were trained to do. I can think of one case at our Morris farm when I was at the university where we had done heat stress training and one of the student workers was going walking alongside a piece of farm equipment and the supervisor for that operation
00:36:24
Speaker
happened to be walking right next to him or driving a tractor right next to me. He looked over at the kid and he noticed that this kid is lagging back a little bit further and further and this was a hot day and he recognized just as he had been trained, he started recognizing the signs of heat stress and he told this employee, let's go, we're going in. And the employee said, no, no, no, I'm fine. He said, no, we're going to, you didn't hear me, we're going in.
00:36:49
Speaker
And by in, I mean to the ER. And, you know, potentially might have saved a kid's life by doing exactly what he was supposed to do. He recognized the issue and he took the appropriate action. So that's what we worry about. I mean, that's an example of where things, people took that training and they took the tools that we tried to give them and applied it correctly.
00:37:10
Speaker
But we worry about cases where that's not true. We just worry about what are people doing when we're not watching and do they have the tools and judgment and knowledge that they need to handle safety on their own.
00:37:24
Speaker
Yeah, right. Exactly. That's the ultimate goal is to have people perform the way we train them to when no one else is watching. Right. Exactly. Yeah. That's the key to it. Yeah. So do you have any particular advice for people in the 21st century, practice of safety or anything that you've seen evolve or change that you think has been maybe helpful in the way that we go about doing our job?
00:37:54
Speaker
Whether it's technology or anything I think people are much more technically astute than they used to be There are so many tools for the safety professional now that didn't exist when I was right out of college
00:38:10
Speaker
between the internet and iPhones and iPads and databases and learning management systems, I guess my advice would be to take advantage of that technology as much as you can.
Prioritizing Real Safety over Compliance
00:38:22
Speaker
The other thing that I would really encourage people to do, especially when I think we've already touched on it, but if I were right out of college and if I was starting in safety today, my advice has been, and always is,
00:38:34
Speaker
forget about OSHA. Don't worry about compliance because most of our consulting clients are still at that point where we're just worried about OSHA coming in and giving us a big ticket.
00:38:49
Speaker
The probability of OSHA coming in is relatively low, and your probability of getting a six-figure citation is even lower, whereas one back injury will be 10 times, it will cost the company 10 times what this theoretical OSHA citation would, and those are happening now. Those are certain to happen. So focus more on actual, how do we manage our program in such a way where we're actually preventing people from getting hurt,
00:39:16
Speaker
and worry less about compliance and jumping through hoops and crossing T's and dotting I's on our OSHA logs. Worry about protecting people and you'll be successful.
00:39:30
Speaker
Yeah, exactly. And I think hearing someone say, like, forget about OSHA sounds obtuse to some listeners, but it's a good message. You know, the OSHA regulations were written to be minimum. They're like the minimum things that people need to do.
00:39:50
Speaker
And so many of them were written or adopted back in the 70s, and there's such a long period of time and effort that's put into promulgating a new standard that the regulations aren't necessarily keeping pace with the rest of how the world is working and how human beings work.
00:40:13
Speaker
And so our job as safety professionals isn't to look to the OSHA regulations and go, oh, they don't have anything on that. Because guess what? There probably isn't because they don't move that fast. Well, right. Exactly. I mean, it took over almost 30 years to promulgate the confined space rule.
00:40:35
Speaker
And let me be clear about this. I'm not saying ignore OSHA. I'm not saying that you don't have a duty to comply. I'm saying that for too many companies, that is the goal, is to be into OSHA compliance. And their goal should be to prevent people from getting hurt by following OSHA and by implementing the other measures that we have to do. But OSHA compliance is not the
00:41:00
Speaker
It should be that, yeah, it's not the target. Right, right, exactly, exactly. It's merely a baseline and there's so much more to do than just that. Yes, very good, very good. Paul, you and I have both been at this job a while and we've had a number of different jobs, met lots of different people, had to figure out how to build our credibility with the workforce so that we could be believable with them.
00:41:27
Speaker
What's some of the craziest stuff that you've did on the job that you never thought you'd do? That's sometimes comical that you went home at night and went, you wouldn't believe what I did today.
00:41:42
Speaker
Well, I think street cred, anybody who's ever worked with me knows that I talk an awful lot about credibility. And I think there's an awful lot of walking the walk and talking the talk. And we had, I won't mention names, but we had, I had a colleague once who went on to a construction site. And this is a person who is now retired. And this person didn't have an awful lot of experience in construction, but he referred to a backhoe as a steam shovel.
00:42:06
Speaker
And those guys just about ate them a lot. Don't get your heavy equipment wrong ever. Oh, and don't screw up your terminology and get the slaying correct and everything else. But there's also this part of kind of looking the part. I used to play an awful lot of hockey. And I learned very early on that if you're in the locker room and guys are getting dressed and they're taking the price tags off their equipment as
00:42:33
Speaker
Those are the guys that you have to look out for. So I learned kind of early on that you have to look the part too. You don't want to be out there with all brand new matching stuff and you're all red, white and blue or orange or whatever. You need to look the part. And my neighbors laugh at me because now whenever I buy a new Carhartt jacket or a pair of boots or whatever, I will literally go out in the yard, dunk it in mud.
00:42:57
Speaker
Tie it to the back of my car, drag it around the street, literally. I just recently went out and bought a couple of new high visibility t-shirts and I washed my car with them, rubbed all the dirt off my tires, dragged them behind the car a little bit. You have to look the part and if you show up on a job site wearing all brand new car hearts,
00:43:22
Speaker
you're not going to look credible. So you need to scuff this stuff up as much as you can, splash a little paint on it or scuff it up with a drywall knife or whatever you have to do. You got to look the part. When I got my first Carhartt jacket, I remember some contractors giving me advice on how to clean it. They were sincerely giving me tips. Don't put that in your washing machine.
00:43:47
Speaker
You know, like, I know it looks like you got a little dirt on it or whatever, but don't put it in the washing machine. The things that you have to take to the dry cleaners. It's going to ruin, you know, whatever protective quality for wind barrier, whatever it was that they were coaching me on. Oh, I thought you were saying they were telling you not to wash it.
00:44:03
Speaker
Oh no, they were telling me, if I'm going to clean it, do it this way. Don't do it this way. No, you never wash your car heart jacket. I know, exactly. I don't think I ever have washed my car heart jacket. No, no, no, because if you did, eventually the cuffs on the sleeves will start to get a little bit ragged. You know, you'll spill something on it and you'll end up with a cool stain and now you look like you belong.
00:44:28
Speaker
I think one of my early mentors at OSHA, a man named Richard who I've spoken about before, he was teaching me credibility one day and he knew the OSHA regulations like the back of his hand. Like literally they were all memorized in his head. He'd write down, you know, we were out on an investigation and he would write down in his notes that it was a violation of 1910.147C1 or whatever. And he knew what that was.
00:44:54
Speaker
And he took me one day to the regulation book on, oh, let's see, where is it? I can't remember exactly where in the regulations, maybe in the scaffold regulation, where it talks about Boson's chairs. And he pointed out to me that it's spelled Boats Wayne's. And he said, never say that. Never say that out loud.
00:45:20
Speaker
He said, it's Bozen's chair. And he goes, because you were going to get laughed at if you say Boatswain's. And I think I made a note of that in the margin of my regulation book at the time. And I've always remembered that with regard to credibility, like don't say that.
00:45:38
Speaker
Yeah, I couldn't agree more with that. Those guys are just, you know, the construction guys are a different breed sometimes and they're just sometimes looking for an opportunity to kind of pounce. And once you've lost that credibility, you know, it's not coming back.
00:45:55
Speaker
That's right. So if the word's not coming to your head, here's the tip. If the word, you know, belly dump isn't coming to your head or, you know, what was the word? What was the machine that the guy called the steam shovel? The backhoe. If the word backhoe isn't coming to your head, don't try to make it up. Just call it a piece of heavy equipment. It's a piece of heavy earth moving equipment.
00:46:20
Speaker
Yeah, yeah. Put it in a category. Do anything you can to not use the term that you're tempted to. You fake a heart attack if you have to. Don't use that word that you think might be incorrect because once that credibility is gone, it's not coming back. Right, right, right. Oh, man. So what drives you to keep at this, Paul?
00:46:46
Speaker
I mean, other than the paycheck. Yeah, probably the same thing that every other safety professional would say, the idea of protecting people, trying to give people the knowledge that they need and the skills that they need to. I mean, sometimes people just aren't aware of these hazards, or they know those hazards are there, but they need help kind of calibrating their level of tolerance of risk, basically.
00:47:14
Speaker
we need to continue to help to educate those folks. And that's what keeps it going. Why do people do not so smart stuff? It's because they either don't realize there's a hazard or they realize it, but they need some help calibrating. And that's what keeps us going. I would imagine any safety professional would say the same thing. We've got to protect people.
00:47:35
Speaker
Mm hmm. Absolutely. So what on the other side of that what drives you crazy about this
Perceptions & Cultural Integration in Safety Roles
00:47:41
Speaker
profession? We talked about what you loathe doing, but what drives you crazy about it? There was an article in a magazine that I read a couple of fairly recently, but they took a survey and they asked people from all walks of life, what's the most ironic thing about your job? Not not the best or the worst, but the most ironic thing.
00:48:00
Speaker
Coincidentally, there was a safety person who responded to this survey. He said, the most ironic thing about my job is that I've dedicated my life to protecting people and making sure they aren't killed on the job and they hate me for it.
00:48:13
Speaker
I said, boy, isn't that the truth? That's what kind of drives me nuts is that employees still look at safety as sometimes. They sometimes look at safety as a negative, something that we have, oh, we have to go to this lockout, tag out training, or we have to go do our arc flash stuff. And they still look at it as a negative. They still look at it as something that they have to do or they're going to get in trouble. And again, I've said it a couple of times already today, I want them to go,
00:48:43
Speaker
All right, today I'm going to learn more about how to be safe in my job and so I can go on living and so I can continue to hunt and fish and everything else and do the things that I love. If I were one of those people working in a foundry or whatever,
00:48:58
Speaker
I would be I'd be on board with safety training. Okay. All right today They're gonna talk to me about I'm going to the safety training at 11 o'clock and they're gonna talk to me how to make sure I don't get silicosis You know, I would be signing I'd say sign me up for anything I got so that's one of the things that kind of drives me nuts and But the other thing is that
00:49:20
Speaker
In the end, we can do all the training we want and write all the programs. But the other thing that kind of drives me a little bit crazy is that in the end, we still have to rely on people to do the right thing when we're not watching. And people are unpredictable and they have different frames of reference and they have different tolerance of risk. And sometimes they're going to do the things we want them to do and other times not. But in the end, it still comes down to that.
00:49:45
Speaker
Yeah, absolutely. And it is ironic, right? I mean, our career does have extreme ends. There doesn't seem to be a lot in the middle. Either it's like, oh, here we go again. We have to do this training. We have to sit through this. We have to have these policies. We've got to follow this procedure, blah, blah, blah. And then
00:50:03
Speaker
When the worst happens, the dial gets immediately turned up. Yes. Safety is at the absolute center of everything that's happening. Yeah. There doesn't seem to be like a medium setting in safety. It's either like sort of like on this, you know,
00:50:19
Speaker
Simmer? Yeah, there's no three. Yeah, there's no three. A scale of one to five, there's no three. You know, you have these people who are really, I don't see an awful lot of people who are just staunchly anti-safety, but you see people who kind of lean away from the middle. And then you have people who lean, you know, towards the top. And then you have these advocates, these people who no matter what you do, they want more.
00:50:44
Speaker
And we see a lot of that in my current job now. We see, OK, hey, we have a great safety program here. How do we make it better? And I've been fortunate in my current job and well, at the university, but even more so at my current job, where we're seeing the fives. But you're right. We don't see an awful lot of threes in there.
00:51:01
Speaker
So you're starting out this new job and maybe this is where we kind of close out our time together today, 26 years into it, you're in your fourth week, I think is what you said on your new job.
00:51:16
Speaker
How are you starting? How are you approaching it? Do you have a schedule that you put together for yourself or some goals or priorities? Maybe someone who's listening who's just starting their next chapter can hear about how you're approaching how you're going to do this one.
00:51:36
Speaker
Yeah, they asked me this during my interview. I obviously met with several people while I was interviewing, and one of those persons said, what would you do for the first week? And my answer was nothing. I guess that's not totally true. I mean, I would want to know, are there any ticking time bombs? Is OSHA waiting for a check? Is there anything that we have to get on right now, today?
00:51:59
Speaker
But for the most part, the answer is nothing. I'm going to learn as much as I can about the operation, about the industry, about the competitive environment, about the culture, about the staff and who does.
00:52:11
Speaker
Who does what and how do we do things? And, you know, I'm going on, well, like I say, probably my fourth week now, I think. And I'm just now getting to the point where, all right, let's start updating some written programs and responding to some of these questions. Some people are looking for help on lockout, tag out issues and confined space issues and air quality issues. But I purposely did not do
00:52:37
Speaker
what you're describing, which is to have a 30-day action plan or something like that. I wanted to take the first 30 days or whatever and just learn and do nothing. Nothing in terms of, you know, changing anything. And it's been working out really well. I've had a very chaotic approach to it. I'm just saving documents on my computer desktop and later on I'll kind of
00:53:02
Speaker
try to put them together in some type of format. But for now, it's very chaotic learning. Everything is everywhere. I have post-it notes all over everything. And over the course of time, I'll start to make things a little bit more cohesive and identify not only what those priorities are, but how do they need to get tackled. Yeah, how to triage them.
00:53:25
Speaker
Yeah, exactly. How do I triage these things and how to in what priority and who are the players in this and what are their motivations? And that will become more evident. And I don't think I would have gotten that type of gut level reaction to things if I had set to rigid a work plan for the first 30 days. So my answer is do nothing for the first 30 days, you know, other than just learn as much as you can.
00:53:51
Speaker
Yeah, to, to really do what I might call rapport building, find out who, who are your people that you'll be working with? Who are your foremen? Who are your supervisors? What is the staff like? Like the culture? Yeah, right.
00:54:07
Speaker
And then to find out where the tribal knowledge lies and how might you leverage that tribal knowledge, I think is never to be underscored. You know, we come in as professionals having all these years of experience and ideas, but there are so many people who don't have our backgrounds but have the tribal knowledge and we need to know it and respect it.
00:54:29
Speaker
Yeah. And especially for us, we're an internet, we're based in Finland. So there's this international component that kind of comes in my responsibilities stop at the borders, you know, we have North America. So I don't have to worry too much about that. But my boss does. And you know, he's going to be hearing things from Finland and and everywhere else. And how does what we've learned? And how do we run things here? How is that going to translate to Finland or China or Russia or anywhere else?
00:54:58
Speaker
Right, right, right. Yeah, the optics are important. The technical aspect and the optics are so important with the work that we do to be successful. Yes. Yeah. Paul, it has been so wonderful to have you as guest number 12 of the Accidental Safety Pro. Really appreciate the time and generosity that you've given our audience today, particularly as you're just starting your next chapter.
00:55:26
Speaker
Oh, it's my pleasure. Thank you for having me. Oh, you're welcome. So thank you all so much for joining in and listening today and thank you for the work that you all do to make sure your workers make it home safe every day. 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 maybe if it's even you, please contact me at social at vividlearningsystems.com. Until next time, thanks for listening.