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#89: How Are We Practicing and Advancing Safety?
77 Plays2 years ago
Scott Debow is a highly collaborative, strategic thinker with 19 years of progressive leadership in the realm of Risk/Occupational Safety. Jill digs into the passion behind Scott’s goal of developing Safety Leadership across organizations with a targeted emphasis on systems improvements, as well as understanding the unique risks and vulnerability of temporary workers.
Transcript
Introduction of Podcast and Guest
00:00:09
Speaker
This is the Accidental Safety Pro, brought to you by HSI. This episode was recorded March 24th, 2022. My name is Jill James, HSI's chief safety officer. Today, my guest is Scott Devoe.
00:00:23
Speaker
Scott is a highly collaborative strategic thinker with 19 years of progressive leadership in the realm of risk and occupational safety.
Improving Safety Systems for Workers
00:00:30
Speaker
With an inside out perspective as a safety professional in non-traditional employment settings, he sees tremendous opportunity for system improvements between joint employers to create safer working environments for contract and temporary workers. Working to align people, teams, and industry resources for better safety within the joint employer community
00:00:51
Speaker
He devotes much of his time developing safety leadership across organizations with a targeted emphasis on systems improvements, as well as addressing the most critical type of risk far too easily overlooked, serious injuries and fatalities.
00:01:06
Speaker
Until recently, Scott served as the practice leader for risk and safety at Ronstad, a $23.3 billion global provider of HR services and the global leader in the HR services industry. He soon will be transitioning to a new role as the principal HSC advisor at Aveda, where he is excited to expand his contributions to employers around the globe who share the need to better manage safety and labor strategy among a shared workforce.
Career Transition and Reflections
00:01:34
Speaker
Scott, welcome to the show.
00:01:36
Speaker
Thank you so much, Jill. I'm excited to be here. I'm excited to have you and actually honored that you're taking the time to do this because as, as the introduction indicated, you are between jobs. Like you just bookended one and you're starting another, right? Yes. Yes. Kind of like a little space between. The liminal space. Right. Right.
00:02:03
Speaker
Yeah. For those of us who have gone from one job to the next, did you give yourself any break or are you just going from one thing to the next? In a way, it's going from one thing to the next. I have a little bit of time to go outside, to go ride my bike, to a little bit of downtime.
00:02:26
Speaker
Not as much as if, you know, life happened exactly the way I would always like to plan things. So, you know, as good things happen, you know, opportunity and the pace of the next opportunities present themselves.
00:02:42
Speaker
It wasn't a month like I might have preferred, but I had a little bit of time, which is nice. And I'm grateful for, certainly grateful for Ronstad for my previous employer, amazing company, amazing leaders, super understanding and supporting and helped make this transition possible. It's a logical next step for me and my career.
00:03:05
Speaker
Yeah, yeah, you know, I think a lot of us can relate to that and especially the pace with which you move from, you know, A to B and what that what that looks like for for everyone and the reasons why some of us, you know, make the transitions that we do. I know that I'm just thinking about, you know, early
00:03:22
Speaker
your book ending one one job and I think you're done with it now and then you and I were together on a panel conversation with the verdantics organization earlier this week and now you're doing this and then you jump into the next thing and and you know I was thinking gosh did I take a week between jobs ever once and I think I had that opportunity one time
00:03:43
Speaker
But I think our audience can relate to kind of the intensity of what's happening in your life right now. And I'm happy to hear that you're going to ride your bike and you're going to go outside and you're going to do something for resiliency. Yes, absolutely.
Military Influence on Safety Career
00:03:56
Speaker
You got to take that time where you can find it, right? That's right. That's right. Awesome.
00:04:01
Speaker
Well, Scott, in the introduction, you know, I mentioned that you've been at this role of health and safety for 19 years. And as you know, the podcast is all about people sharing their stories and their path and journey and you've got 19 years. And so where did it all start?
00:04:23
Speaker
Sure. Thank you again, by the way, for inviting me to be on your podcast. This is really a special thing just to talk about how do we get in safety because at some point others that hear our story just kind of connect with that and learn about our very noble profession. Thank you again for the invite to be here today.
00:04:47
Speaker
So I think about where did my work career start was really the honest conversations my dad and I were having at the end of my high school career. And to be honest, I needed some structure. Going straight into college for me out of high school was, well, there's a bit of a question mark. What kind of student would I be in college? I like to play.
00:05:14
Speaker
And my dad was honest enough to talk about it with me. So for me, my first work experience, real work experience, and I also say really my first education was the military. So I transitioned very quickly. I had a little more time between my last job and this job.
00:05:35
Speaker
going from high school to the military. I had a month or two over the summer, but I went straight in as an enlisted person in the Navy and went in at 18, knew so little. What an experience. But for me, what I found was, and what I learned quickly is,
00:05:55
Speaker
This is an environment where there's obviously a lot of structure, which is what I needed. The important thing for me is application. In the military training, a lot of things you learn, you will quickly apply. My education in training in the military wasn't so much in English or writing or
00:06:18
Speaker
traditional college courses but it would be very specific to you know my initial what they call a school when you after boot camp you select the school and mine mine was for core school and in the navy your your yeah your your corman rating is a bit of a jack of all trades
00:06:38
Speaker
you learn so much about a little bit. That describes our profession. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Well said, well said. And so, you know, you're trained to do a little bit in immunizations, you learn a little bit about drawing blood, and you learn to draw blood on each other, on your classmates, and that's always fun. And, you know, my first duty station I was I went from
00:07:06
Speaker
medical operations and planning, did some stents through surgical wards. And then very quickly it realized, you know, what I want to do is learn more about physical therapy. And so that's my next school. They call it a C school and went to learn how to be a physical therapy at a technician level, right? So still enlisted at this point.
00:07:30
Speaker
But just fascinating because I so appreciate the environment where, look, again, for me, I had the structure. It was interesting. You would learn to apply things very quickly. So it was a great learning environment for me. So that was my first introduction to kind of, I think, an educational environment and how I learn as an individual.
00:07:54
Speaker
I do well with structure and in close accountability. Let's say that. So you could also say why I needed to learn that way had something to do with my maturity levels at the time. But for me, that's what was good.
00:08:10
Speaker
Right. But I mean, I think even as as full grown adults as we are now, we can relate to that. I mean, we all learn differently, right? We all consume, digest and apply information differently. And yeah, I mean, I know, I know what my learning style is. And I also know what my like, if I'm going to produce something, I know what my style is. And
00:08:30
Speaker
And it's maybe not a traditional one. I wait usually till the last minute for things. It's my style and I'm not changing it at this point because I somehow synthesize information when my back's against the wall a little bit faster.
00:08:49
Speaker
It's my style. That's not everybody's style for sure. But we learn these things about ourselves, right? So you
Preventive Medicine and Occupational Safety
00:08:56
Speaker
like structure. Yeah. Yeah. So I like structure. I'm also a processor. So your back's against the wall and you do well under pressure. What I like to do is I like to think about things. So I like to process things. I need time to do that. So I've learned to really appreciate working alongside other leaders who just under pressure.
00:09:16
Speaker
know what needs to happen, that's great, as much as I need to learn to communicate how I think through things and helps other people know that. So that's important, I'm glad you mentioned that. Yeah, I mean, isn't that funny? You know, like, you had said you like to think through things, me too, and I call it daydreaming.
00:09:34
Speaker
And so if there's a task in front of me, I may be daydreaming about that task for a week, for days. You know, I might be hiking or like you said, biking and daydreaming through the process and then back against the wall, all that daydreaming comes to fruition.
00:09:52
Speaker
You know, anyway, all of our processes are so interesting. It'd be great to just have a conversation on what's your process? What's your process? I think so. Yeah. So the military really engaged you where you needed to be. It was good. And, you know, once, once I got out of, you know, the physical therapy, you know, associate or technician school.
00:10:13
Speaker
Part of that was at an Army base, Fort Sam Houston, Texas. So mixed environment, military environment. That was new. That was interesting. And just the training is so good. There was cadaver labs. There was a rotation through BAMC, that's Brook Army Medical Center, and their burn unit. And you just, at that point, it
00:10:35
Speaker
There's such a gravity around your work because your your bedside Next to someone who who is seriously seriously hurt And and they were doing everything right at the moment, right? It was a terrible accident, right? we can look back and say hey if these
00:10:55
Speaker
These events had happened just a little bit differently. This probably would not have happened. But we're talking about children, right? We're talking about adults, seniors, just people that are really, really hurt. And so that was like the practical understanding of what I'd been learning about and how important it is on such a human level, right? Yeah, and really shaped you at such a young age to be able to kind of grab onto the fragility of life.
00:11:23
Speaker
when you're a person who's in your probably then very very early 20s, right?
00:11:28
Speaker
Yeah, exactly, exactly. So fast forward a few years, I qualified for an advanced PT school. I was assigned my own clinic overseas. I was stationed in Sicily for three years, which is beautiful, an amazing place. That's an education in and of itself. Go live overseas in a different culture, different pace of life. And it's a wonderful thing.
00:11:58
Speaker
But seeing people pretty much every day, patient after patient, I don't remember when it clicked for me or how long it took, but eventually it clicked where, you know, the majority of these people coming through have like a musculoskeletal, you know, injury, a trauma, you know, they're in pain. And we can go back and say, all right, well, at some point this is preventable.
00:12:24
Speaker
They're here. And at some point, the way they were taken care of early in the injury was directly correlated to how quickly they could go back to work. And so that clicked for me. And the military would call that readiness. And we call that, you and I call that, just return to work, right? How do we avoid lost sign? How do we get people back to work faster, right? So, well, it's really directly correlated with how do you care for the human being
00:12:51
Speaker
and certainly before injuries, moving the discussions ahead of the injuries, as I like to say, but so if they are injured, caring for the human, caring for that individual, so important. It has such a big impact on their life, on their families, on society, but certainly restoring them to full function. So when that clicked in that physical therapy clinic, I was an independent duty tech in Sigonella Sicily,
00:13:17
Speaker
That was when it started for me in terms of thinking more about prevention from a preventive medicine standpoint, at least from the physical work environment. The musculoskeletal PCS. I served a total of almost eight years.
00:13:40
Speaker
Got out wanted to go back to school and and found myself working Working part-time going to school part-time and then had a had a great job opportunity to Go work for an occupational health care company. It was called Concentra Probably heard of it and there's huge now
00:14:03
Speaker
And what were you going to school for? Were you studying physical therapy or what were you studying? You know, I just needed to go back and get my core things out of the way. The things you don't get necessarily in the military. Got it. At least the enlisted education. So, you know, you're English.
00:14:21
Speaker
Yeah, algebras and all the things biology's and so all the basics towards a bachelor's and so working on that going to school And I got this I got this job with this ock health company and it was it was largely drawing from the things I learned from in the military so I
00:14:41
Speaker
That was a bit of a bolt of lightning where it occurred to me, you mean the things I learned in the military and did at this job, I can start applying understanding in an employer setting. That's where I started to cut my teeth on some of the basics around
00:14:58
Speaker
occupational safety. I learned about OSHA. I did like a million and one blood-borne pathogen trainings. OSHA 10 hours, OSHA 30 hours. They trained me to teach those things, but it always came back to the same thing. During that season of my development career, it seemed to always come down to the same things. People and how we're communicating really matters in terms of
00:15:28
Speaker
creating a sense of a safe feeling, right? And a level of appropriateness to raise my hand and say, hey, something's wrong. I think we should do this different. And when those environments, those safe environments aren't in place, well, you see different outcomes.
00:15:47
Speaker
You see less efficiency. Communication and collaboration is difficult, and certainly from an injury outcome standpoint. Things, I guess, click for me slowly over the course of my life, but when they click, it really sticks.
00:16:04
Speaker
Yeah. And what you're describing is what we might call psychological safety, right? Yes. Yeah. Thank you for saying that. Cause that, I mean, I don't know if I knew enough then to describe it, but that is such an important component of I think what we're about and what we need to be learning about leaning into today.
00:16:24
Speaker
Exactly, exactly. And I think, you know, so many people in our profession and so many of the guests that I've had on the show over the years, we always talk about the rapport and the importance of the rapport that we have with the employees. And that's what it's about. I mean, this is psychological safety. We're building these relationships, you know, often one human being at a time, but it's for the reasons that you just stated.
00:16:47
Speaker
Yeah, yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. So from that season, I spent about eight years in that role learning a lot. And it was during that time I heard about this designation called CSP. And I did not yet have my bachelor's degree, right?
00:17:12
Speaker
I was newly married and had a baby, was a full-time working parent, and heard about the CSP. I don't know why it stuck, but I was really, really excited about it.
00:17:24
Speaker
And learning about that designation and talking to a few friends that had just received that designation, it just really kind of lit me up. I was like, man, okay, that was the impetus to really go back to school and finish my degree.
Challenges in Safety Management
00:17:41
Speaker
Because to achieve CSP, you're right.
00:17:43
Speaker
your bachelor's degree and it's like, okay, for me that's it. So I started going back to school full time while I was working full time. I'm sorry, going back to school part time while I was still working full time and transitioned from the Ock Health Company into an opportunity really with
00:18:01
Speaker
something I'd come across, you know, periodically over the course of my career with, with concentra, but it was, you know, you have a shared workforce, you have, you have an employer that's trying that needs to accomplish work through, through partnering with labor providers, and that could be temporary labor providers, staffing agencies.
00:18:26
Speaker
contractors or both. In order to achieve what their business is about, in order to manufacture, make, assemble, ship their widgets and what they do for a living, it required a strategy, a labor strategy to kind of create this shared work environment. So I was introduced to my first staffing company at the time,
00:18:53
Speaker
where I was a safety supervisor, was the position, and was pretty excited about it, right? Get things like a lot of autonomy, you go visit a lot of customers, and this was mostly focused specifically in general industry. But I tell you what, as a place to learn about safety,
00:19:16
Speaker
in a staffing environment where you don't have one employer management system, you have two. And then the perspective I was taught was from the perspective of safety and risk management was strongly influenced from a claims perspective. So there's an underwriting component, there's diligence that you need to ensure is satisfied before
00:19:45
Speaker
A staffing company would place their employees at a customer. And to be honest, that's a pretty low bar, right? The compliance requirements to do that, it's, you know, I think there's challenges with low levels of knowledge about what do we really need to look for. There's challenges from the standpoint of if my job is to go,
00:20:11
Speaker
like sell from a standpoint of get more clients that want to use our staffing services. And I'm also the one doing the risk assessment.
00:20:21
Speaker
there's a little bit of a competing interest there, right? How does that affect my understanding of risk, right? How does, if I'm that salesperson and I'm like, all right, I need three more accounts by the end of the week or the end of the month or I'm in trouble with my boss. How does that, and so again, it takes me a while for things to click, but these things started to click over the, as I grew as a safety professional, graduated,
00:20:47
Speaker
Finally started working towards my CSP, which is, you know, I passed on my first go round. Wow. Yeah, we need to stop and just do an applause. That's a huge deal. Well, here's the thing. And I only mentioned that I almost didn't mention that because it feels a little prideful.
00:21:05
Speaker
Um, but I mentioned that because I would hope it would serve as an encouragement to others to give themselves time to do it. So, um, so I put myself on a very generous timeline that that included years. All right. And that, you know, ASP, uh, for me first and then CSP, but each of those exams, I just gave myself a lot of time and then gradual.
00:21:27
Speaker
Increasing levels of accountability about have I scheduled my exam yet? Yes, no Process yeah process every get process So I gave myself plenty of time and that was that was very helpful for me
00:21:40
Speaker
Yeah, you know, you were you're talking about this, like, as I was listening to talk about, you know, when you stepped into the staffing world, and the opportunity you were you were referring to, to be able to see all these different types of places of employment, you know, there are there are just, you know, so many of us are generalists, right, because our field of work is so
00:22:03
Speaker
big and can be so broad. And there are a few places where you can do what you did where you get to see such a broad sweep of where human beings work. You know, staffing agency is one, the insurance world is another for people who are thinking about their careers, right? OSHA, where I worked is another.
00:22:25
Speaker
where you have this opportunity to see all of these different work environments. And I'm wondering once you got into that staffing role and you were thinking back to your work in occupational health, were you like, oh, like when these people came in and described their work and you're helping them in an occupational health setting, you couldn't teleport yourself at that time probably into their work environment. And all of a sudden you're in the staffing world where you are seeing
00:22:54
Speaker
so many different types of employment settings, now you're able to teleport yourself at any point like, okay, this is what it's like, this is what it's like, this is what it's like.
00:23:03
Speaker
You know, I've never thought about, thought about it like that, Jill, but you're right. Cause I had, um, I had two different perspectives, right? Two, the advantage of, of being in an OCC health setting post incident and then being, you know, feet on the floor next to the people doing, doing the job, uh, as well as alongside the managers and the, the business leaders from both companies.
00:23:28
Speaker
that all have a job to do, so to speak, right? So yeah, I like the way you described that. That was an important part of me growing as a safety professional. And I think about, look, there's...
00:23:46
Speaker
It still comes down to people and how we communicate and keeping it simple. But I think about the number of individual clients and accounts that we work with individually, right? To identify risk, put them on a program to get better, make, you know, we would advance safety, right? We'd make improvements. Injury performance would go down.
00:24:12
Speaker
primarily measured by the number of claims, right? And largely based on the assumption that, hey, if we've had fewer claims this month, we must have done something right last month, right? Nevermind the fact that, you know, luck could have a say in it, you know, the variability within latent risk and those things. So I wasn't necessarily thinking about it at that level at that time, but what I did notice is how often we identify
Leadership and Mentorship in Safety
00:24:42
Speaker
problems in safety after there's a lot of problems in safety. We focus a lot of energy and resources at those problems so reactively. We go in and we do things. Leadership's involved. We have a plan, maybe a five point plan. And they're good plans and we make good progress. And then we put these things in place
00:25:04
Speaker
But how quickly they become. I guess uncoupled from the plan right and it could be something is common as leadership turnover right from a site manager from a staffing company individual who whose safety sensitive information crosses their desk pretty regularly what happens if.
00:25:25
Speaker
You know, they're out on PTO or if they leave the company. And the same could be said especially like at a GM level for the customer, for the host employer. You have turnover to leadership level with one or either company in that case, because you have two employers involved. And that really kind of made things come apart. So reliability was a factor. I was like, man.
00:25:50
Speaker
We just had all this progress and why can't we sustain improvement? So, so kind of, oh, go ahead, I'm sorry.
00:26:00
Speaker
No, I was just going to ask. I mean, you're describing quite a progression in your awareness, in your work, which, gosh, we're all on that journey and path. And it sounds like you're kind of developing yourself and what are the main problems that you're really identifying those key things that need to be solved.
00:26:23
Speaker
Yeah, you know, you're right, Jill, but but if I could just pause for a minute and reflect on why, why was I part of why I was learning these things was because the good teachers.
00:26:38
Speaker
that just came across my path. Good teachers that came along the way and many of them were CSP level. They were our clients, safety leaders. Some of them could have been at HR operations, right? Just good teachers that led well that I learned from.
00:27:02
Speaker
and how important that was, and encouraged and inspired me to, you know, as challenging as things can be in safety, especially in a joint employer environment, well, here's the thing. What are we really doing when we say we're managing safety together in an interdependent, mutual understanding about how we're going to achieve better safety together? What are we really doing?
00:27:28
Speaker
So it was the people, I think the people you meet in the books that you read change your life for the next 10 years. So I started learning about authors and reading authors, but really the people that would just, they were just good teachers.
Psychological Safety and Curiosity
00:27:44
Speaker
And a common trait with these good teachers, they were also great leaders and they had just a humility about them, right? There wasn't, you know, very low pretension. They just, they sincerely wanted better for the workforce.
00:27:59
Speaker
And so I just don't remember many of their names. I just remember their influence on me. So that's kind of a thing. Yeah. And that's something I take with me. I hope and it's one thing I strive for. Leave people with that state of feeling encouraged, feeling challenged.
00:28:17
Speaker
Feeling, hey, it's okay if things aren't going your way from a safety standpoint, examining why and getting people comfortable with the idea that, look, nothing's perfect. We don't want to hide failure. Failure is not a terrible word. What do we really have to learn? And kind of to your point earlier, Jill, about psychological safety within the safety profession, how important is that for us to really have a comfortable conversation about, man,
00:28:45
Speaker
I thought we were doing good here. We're not. My boss is coming in next week. The numbers don't look good. It's costing us money. How do we really talk about what's really going on?
00:28:59
Speaker
Yeah, I mean, and that's all part of curiosity, right? I mean, what you're describing and the things that you've learned in your career have really been out of a place of curiosity on your perspective and being curious enough to ask
Role as Safety Director at a Church
00:29:12
Speaker
the hard and the deep questions so that you can apply those preventative strategies that really got you interested early in your career, it sounds like. Yeah. Yeah, exactly. Yeah.
00:29:28
Speaker
So Scott, how long were you in that role with that staffing agency before you made your next move? Yeah, three years. It was like exactly three years. And I had an opportunity to go work for
00:29:45
Speaker
or you could say in one hand a non-profit, but also known as a church, where organization I've been involved in that went from very, very small to very, very big, super fast. And a friend of mine passed a bulletin across my dinner table and said, hey, so why is our church hiring a safety director?
00:30:08
Speaker
And I said, well, I don't know. I don't know that they were. So I reached out to him and said, look, I already volunteered in your music ministry. I show up and I set drums up on Friday nights. I'm already doing things. And this is the area I work in. Could I volunteer? I don't know. Whatever you're trying to do with safety. And they wanted me to apply for the job. So I did. And the challenge they were having is, one, they'd grown very, very quickly.
00:30:38
Speaker
Um, life safety was a big, was a big factor, right? And look for me, I had been up until this point in my career, I had been a guest in somebody else's facility in order to do work.
00:30:52
Speaker
Right. So I would go in and evaluate other side and then I'd communicate. Hey, there's, there's gaps here. Um, you know, people are, people are taping down the, the, uh, the interlocks or the, you know, the buttons on the two hand controls. And we, you know, it was that, it was that type of thing. Or if something significant needed to be adjusted, it was somebody else's budget.
00:31:13
Speaker
Well, this role, it was initially life safety director, but just generally became a safety director focused on everything from life safety to communications between a, it was like a 14 acre campus. We'd have thousands of kids there on the weekend, but you'd have activities going on every night of the week, right? Just to care for the needs of the community, really. But you'd have kids there, you'd have
00:31:41
Speaker
You'd have kind of a complicated array between three or four different buildings. And when it comes to being able to respond to someone has a cardiac event, right?
Focus on Safety in Staffing Industry
00:31:53
Speaker
A mom can't find their child. Or as I came to find out that if there's a police chase around the corner near the church, one thing that often happens is people run to a church if they're in trouble.
00:32:10
Speaker
That doesn't happen all the time, but sometimes, so what would happen? Safe harbor. Right. What would happen if, and that's one thing that I loved about working there is like, yeah, we should absolutely be a safe harbor.
00:32:22
Speaker
Everybody, everybody. But we also realize, look, there's problems with the fire panel, connecting the fire panel to an intelligent way we can understand where there might be an alarm, communications across. I never knew really how a repeater worked until we had to install one to make sure we could connect to our, you know, build out a team of volunteers and professionals that would just be everything from medical to
00:32:50
Speaker
medical responders for pediatrics. And we just started building teams, identifying problems and building teams. And I learned so much in three years until I got a call from a friend I'd worked with at the previous staffing agency saying, hey, you know, we're
00:33:07
Speaker
So we're having some challenges with big accounts and national accounts. So in the staffing world, that would mean you have one customer that has 14 different sites. They generally do similar things, but maybe with different product, maybe they're making windows.
00:33:24
Speaker
Maybe one site makes windows for residential, maybe another site does it for commercial, but they're all generally in the same, but there's sites all over the country. And they're having challenges answering questions around safety continuity or liability, managing risk with the primary employer, which is a staffing agency.
00:33:46
Speaker
We just started talking and started saying, well, what would it look like if we built out a position that could devote only to improving safety at large accounts? So that was pretty cool. That was like the first time I was ever involved in really writing my own job description. Fun.
00:34:04
Speaker
Which was fun, but here it was really connected to my own personal mission. And I had a friend recently say, look, every year, update your personal mission and what you're about and how does it equate to benefiting what you're about. So I served as Vice President of Safety for National Accounts.
00:34:23
Speaker
At this company for the next three years, it eventually was acquired and grew into a VP role over a team, a safety team of about 18 to 20 safety consultants across the country.
00:34:40
Speaker
Um, you know, during this, this period, the next, uh, next six years or so really just began to, to really try to focus more on risk assessment. And where previously my understanding was, well, we need to go, we need to go to the clients and really focus on where's the risks and hazards and problems at the client site.
00:35:04
Speaker
Which was still true, right? And the question I would ask today is, how are we creating safe work? How well do we understand the things we need to accomplish work safely today? And how comfortable are we raising our hand if things are different?
00:35:19
Speaker
and stopping work. That's what I would ask today. But back then, it was just occurring to me, look, we spent a lot of time outward facing. We need to kind of look in the mirror here, a little bit of a log in our own eyes, so to speak, and say, well, look, what is our process, our internal process of understanding risk?
00:35:37
Speaker
And honestly, until this point, the process for the team had been, well, how many claims have we had over here last month? Versus what's our understanding of the present level of risk across the portfolio of accounts? And so perhaps that was another aha moment for me. We started tuning and gearing our teams a little differently as best we could to try to understand, look, when things change,
00:36:07
Speaker
You know we have a site leader leave we you know when we when we have when do we have opportunity to really understand the nature and the present level of risk at these sites. Let's try to be a little more strategic and now that worked that kind of worked okay right what I realized there is to do that well you need.
00:36:25
Speaker
you do need some technology, right? Especially if you're a big company to keep everybody connected on the same platform to be able to connect what you're seeing in your, you know, your RIMA system, your claim systems, and being able to connect it with what you see in your business systems in terms of new accounts, the number of people that are on assignment, the number of new accounts,
Leadership's Role in Safety Improvements
00:36:50
Speaker
How about when a leader turns over in a sensitive area? When should we know about that as a safety team? And so we're kind of relacking some of those connections.
00:37:01
Speaker
These are things that you can't simply manage at that scale through email and clipboards. I think I was really beginning to appreciate the difference between a safety person can show up with their best intentions to make the best change and be exactly right about what needs to happen for better safety.
00:37:22
Speaker
But who's really responsible for enabling that, for resourcing? That's your tone from the top. That's your leadership, leader's kind of setting and resetting expectations and casting the vision and recasting the vision for how we need to work. And being really aware, like our role as a primary employer traditionally, what I've heard in the staffing community is like, look,
00:37:48
Speaker
We're required and responsible to do diligence and to make sure compliance is in order, and that's not inaccurate. But the opportunity to improve risk capabilities, to improve system capabilities, to be more in tune
00:38:07
Speaker
with fluctuating levels of risk in a joint employer environment has really been missing. And so that's where I started connecting my personal mission to safety management systems, right? What does a safety management system look like within a joint employer environment, within a staffing agency? And so it was about that time I got another call.
00:38:33
Speaker
And opportunity turned out for me to go work at Ronstadt, which was, which I'd been there about three years, three and a half years, right? So cool things you learn about yourself as you, I guess, as you go through the decades, so to speak. That's, I mean, that's exactly it. Yeah. Is I'm a builder. I'm a builder and I can look back and I was always like, look, I do great things in three to five year increments.
00:39:00
Speaker
I need to go do something different. I'm a builder. I'm good at it. I am really good at it. I'm good at getting people and teams to align on a common purpose, a common goal, working through conflict, working through differing opinions. That's one thing Ronstad taught me well is crucial conversations. Anything that involved differing opinions.
00:39:26
Speaker
Emotions are involved, there's differing opinions, and there's high stakes. So I'm good at building teams and setting a course, setting strategy and direction. But the problems I was hired to come in to really focus on were two things. One,
00:39:45
Speaker
Help the safety team achieve its next level of maturity. Outstanding team. That had been raised largely on the traditional method of like how many claims did we have last month determines where we go spend time this month.
00:40:00
Speaker
So limited optics and to the true level of risk across the portfolio of accounts. So help them get up and look, we just, I did not develop anything new. I borrowed from ISO 45001, right? What's at the center of a safety management system? Strong leader worker participation.
00:40:24
Speaker
You check act so nothing new but new in the realm of of an employer such as this he was by the way very open and super supportive and in a way fun yeah it was because I can I appreciate how the in a way they
00:40:43
Speaker
My role was a bit non-traditional, it was a little unconventional. Everyone Ron Stoddard hired up to that point was a director of safety level, VP of safety level or risk or safety supervisor. So I came in as practice leader for risk and safety. So what does that mean, right? So just look, how are we practicing and advancing safety maturity? First with our own safety team, and then to really focus on the problem of serious injuries,
00:41:12
Speaker
that are occurring to temporary workers that you know been well documented by OSHA by Dr. David Michaels a few years ago when the OSHA temp worker initiative came out but we continue to see
00:41:27
Speaker
I would say unique risks to a vulnerable workforce and the temporary workers, contract workers, the contingent labor community in general is a vulnerable workforce. So the same risks, if I'm a traditionally employed worker working alongside a temporary worker, doing the same type of job, typically we see three things. We see there's a diminished risk perception
00:41:57
Speaker
If I'm a temporary worker, I don't quite understand how I can get hurt doing this thing. And then we combine that with an increased risk tolerance, where if I'm the temporary worker's boss and I say, hey, I need you to do this, you don't want to disappoint me. Assignments are short. This is a whole other conversation, Jill. I'm telling you psychosocial safety and how we manage risks in a shared work environment, psychosocial safety.
00:42:25
Speaker
So if I'm working two or three temporary jobs to keep food on my family's table and the client supervisor says, I need you to go climb that ladder. You go do it. You kind of go do it. That's exactly right. And so the risk tolerance is increased. And then you combine that with limited mechanisms for me to raise my hand. First of all, culturally, it's just
00:42:48
Speaker
If I can shine light on any three things, it would be this area. The unique risks and vulnerabilities to temporary workers because it's hard for them to raise their hand and just say, that's different than what I was taught.
00:43:01
Speaker
And so how do we support them? And that is my personal mission. I believe that's the, it's well aligned with Ron Stott's mission. That's why we did so well. But we started focusing on the safety management systems internally where we would look at, in addition to getting our safety team current with just a better line of sight into the business metrics and the business intelligence. So we know,
00:43:31
Speaker
When there's a significant increase in forklift assignments, say in one site, well, what what is that location's ability to manage risk? Well, they have a brand new branch manager. They're missing a branch manager that probably needs more attention. Let's get direct. Nothing has happened. No injury has happened.
00:43:49
Speaker
But business intelligence is coming into the levels like we're making better risk. It's risk based thinking right to borrow from ISO 31000 risk based thinking and risk based decision making through an intelligent use of business data to help us know where to go. And so we did that with safety and for the.
00:44:09
Speaker
You know, we developed what we call our SIF intervention strategy, so serious interim fatality, using our data to help us define our precursors, right? So, early days we called it predictive analytics, and then I learned some more. I just realized the perception in our environment, and I don't want to harp on that term if other people see value in exploring that, but
00:44:37
Speaker
the perception when we would say predictive analytics in our environment was, well, we're going to be able to predict where these incidents are happening. We can go and that was our hope. That was our language. But it's not that perfect, right? I wish we could wave a magic wand and say, look, I think we're getting there and we're doing better. But we really started to advance and see significant decrease
00:45:06
Speaker
in a significant decrease in serious injuries along with a significant increase in the number of serious risks we were finding and being able to address that risk
00:45:22
Speaker
before it led to a serious injury. And so that was making progress. Yeah, that's huge. That was a strong, strong correlation. And we really started calling, you know, old school predictive analytics. What we developed is our precursors, right? Here's the four things we are specifically targeting and building our optics and line of sight and intervention capability around and risk assessment capability around. It involves technology, communications,
00:45:49
Speaker
Enablement, roles and responsibility, all of these things from safety management systems that so many companies are already doing and doing well, we began applying internally and now are at the point where we're beginning to operationalize throughout the rest of the organization.
00:46:04
Speaker
I wish I could tell you, Jill, that the number of serious injuries was zero, but I can absolutely tell you it's significantly less than it was five years ago, three years ago.
Safety Management during the Pandemic
00:46:19
Speaker
Congratulations.
00:46:22
Speaker
I mean, sincerely, congratulations. That's fantastic for this group of the working population. I'm curious as I'm listening to you, how did the host employers take
00:46:37
Speaker
to what you were doing because you're applying things in essentially their work environment. Sure. Well, the cool thing is, great question by the way, thanks for that. The cool thing is, I think the majority of what we were doing, they didn't know we were doing. We were already showing up and by the way, much of this occurred during COVID.
00:47:04
Speaker
where nobody was going to anybody else's sites. How do we manage risk when we're not allowed in? But a lot of what we were doing was just internally, systems management internally,
00:47:19
Speaker
that better tuned our leadership's understanding of where they need to voice communications, how quickly we rally around a business change. And so a lot of these things the host employer didn't even know we were doing or they didn't know we were doing it because of this new process, because of our development of safety management systems, because of our
00:47:43
Speaker
are thinking around SIF intervention. And I think from a maturity level, the organization's ready now to start taking these lessons and teaching host employers that don't know this. They don't know anything about precursors. Well, how do we develop our precursors? The opportunity for knowledge sharing is rich. It's huge. And if I could raise a flag and wave it and say, someone asked, what should host employers?
00:48:10
Speaker
and primary employers, what should they be working on together? And first I'd say raising expectations for each other, right? Especially the clients, the host employer towards staffing companies, raising expectations for what contributing to safety in a shared work environment means.
00:48:28
Speaker
Moving away from, I need someone with a pulse today. Yes. Yes. Thank you. Exactly. I think the second thing would be like, how are we continually monitoring and assessing risk together? What are the things that change risk in our business model along the continuum of work? Not at the beginning of the relationship, but along the continuum of work?
00:48:56
Speaker
You know, anticipating error, right? How are we doing that? You know, how am I telling you if I have a leader, a significant leader turnover, right? That changes risk. And so how are they just sharing knowledge and teaching one another? I think informally that happens a lot, not on a big industry-wide expectation level. But I think that's changing, and that's a good thing.
00:49:23
Speaker
So it sounds like you've accomplished so much where you're just ending this phase of this chapter, this chapter of your career with Ramstad and you're moving into the next one.
Motivation and Future Generations in Safety
00:49:38
Speaker
I mean, does this seem like a right place in our conversation to
00:49:43
Speaker
I mean, you've got a couple of days before you start the next gig. Like, let's reflect a little bit. Do you mind reflecting out loud? No. Let's reflect. Let's do it. Okay, awesome. So why are you still in safety today?
00:49:59
Speaker
Oh man, what a good question. I think, um, I don't know if I could not do it to tell you the truth. It's sincerely what I think about, um, you know, I think if you're, if you're in, if you're in the profession long enough or if you work long enough, you'll have things that just, you'll meet people that impact you. Um,
00:50:22
Speaker
And you'll experience things and things will begin to occur to you. So I'd say it was maybe five, I don't know, eight years into kind of my safety career when, when it hit me that, so I have a, I have a three year old now. Um, what would it be like for him to, to hear his mom answer the phone, you know, dad's not home, but here's his mom answer the phone.
00:50:50
Speaker
And he doesn't know that much except mom's upset. And he hears, well, what do you mean he's hurt? Oh my gosh. Well, what hospital is he at? Why can't we come see him? And all he knows is that.
00:51:04
Speaker
Dad's hurt, we can't go see him, and he was at work, right? So, you know, it's probably something, I wish I could say, I put this all together before I had kids, before I entered the safety profession, but man, it's just things like, and I think this happens with us, things like this happen that cement in our mind what we're about really matters, and it's absolutely connected with how we're setting up future generations to impact safety better than we're doing it today.
00:51:34
Speaker
Yep, yep, that's right. And I can tell you as a parent of a child who's now out of high school, those first jobs that your kids get in high school, Scott, man, it's a nerve wracking time for those of us who are health and safety professionals. Yeah, like I was just trying to like,
00:51:55
Speaker
teleport myself into that work environment where my child took his first job and trying to describe the hazards before he went there and what mitigation looked like, what things he needed to be careful about and now in college is studying engineering. Awesome.
00:52:17
Speaker
Yeah, right. And so I'm thinking ahead. But this next generation, you mentioned it, your child's generation, my child's generation, the dominant workforce generation right now, it's different. It's different than generations before because of their lived experiences and their level of knowledge. And I think
00:52:47
Speaker
I don't know, to be so bold as to say, I feel like the dominant generation in the workforce right now, which is our millennial generation and then coming right up next to them is Generation Z, they're more empowered to ask curious questions than I think previous generations.
00:53:09
Speaker
Yes. I see. I feel like that's spot on. I see that as well. And that is such a such a good thing, right? Yes. Yeah, yeah. Instead, you know, maybe won't be as apt to like, boss says, do X. Okay, you know, I'm just gonna do this, though it feels not right in my gut. Or maybe I wasn't trained that way. You know,
00:53:34
Speaker
Well, I think about just culturally, what does that give us, right? So being naturally curious I think is always a good thing. That shouldn't stop just because we set foot in a production floor or a work environment, but held up as an admired trait. But what happens when it's okay to be naturally curious and ask questions here,
00:53:58
Speaker
Fostering a sense of use that is a that's an enabler that that's a that's a contributor towards healthier culture and should be promoted right so. Yeah, that that's insightful I like how you said that naturally curious promoting that.
00:54:16
Speaker
And I'd say a much more heightened sense of awareness of what should good organizations look like, right? What are the attributes of a healthy, good organization that's, you know, promoting, you know, think about...
00:54:31
Speaker
attention to safety, environmental, you know, DEI and even abilities, right?
Generational Shifts in Workforce
00:54:41
Speaker
So, so really, I think really, it's really cool. I think there's five generations in a shared workforce these days. But yeah, certainly. Millennials Gen Z are the largest component of that right now.
00:54:56
Speaker
That's right. That's right. Yeah. And I mean, millennials get so much flack. And I honestly don't understand it. I've never understood it. I've been working with millennials for the last probably
00:55:14
Speaker
I don't know, 10 to 12 years of my career. And I've only ever seen them be hard, hard workers, very curious. And through my own bias lens, unexpected leaders. I'm like, wait, what?
00:55:36
Speaker
It's been so good. It's been so good. Yeah, I see that too. And so for a generation that's never known what it's like to grow up without technology.
00:55:49
Speaker
That just has to be different. So I think that's important for where I am. To think about that and appreciate it is their frame of reference for knowledge and learning information and how quickly that occurs.
00:56:07
Speaker
I mean it wires your brain differently wires thinking differently and that that's a thing that I think is important that should if we could just say look in one word that should be respected right respect that should be appreciated respected and that now that's two words I know I'm sorry but but the thing is is like you know
00:56:26
Speaker
What's our role in teaching and leading well to a generation coming in behind us, right? And so that's a mutual appreciation and respect creates an interdependency that is so vital. So I'm glad you brought that up because I think that's spot on and we should be thinking about that as safety professionals.
00:56:49
Speaker
Yeah, so in your reflection here on why you're in safety and what our current role is, I know that you're working on something else that we haven't talked about yet and I'm wondering how you're squeezing all this in, but you're writing a book.
00:57:06
Speaker
Oh yeah, that's right. That's right. Thanks for reminding me. So it's been through one round of editing and I'm re-editing and updating, hopefully by the end of 2022. This is my first book. I don't know how long it takes to do these things.
00:57:23
Speaker
But it's my approach to writing the book was the same as my approach to getting my CSB. I gave myself plenty of time, don't know what it looks like. It's been described as very casual. And I think, you know, safety, right? A lot of safety books, they're academic. I don't know if I could come across as an academic author.
00:57:48
Speaker
Very well and probably shouldn't because it won't be authentic, but it's the book is this it's safety management and a joint employer environment And it talks a lot about what we've talked about now it goes into you know
00:58:04
Speaker
opens with where do we get our concept of work from and respecting human beings in general when we're in the work environment. And as a safety professional, what struck me is the people I've worked alongside.
00:58:20
Speaker
that maybe are a generation ahead of me had a lot to do with shaping the way I approach work. And so, you know, my dad was a bit of an engineer mechanic. And I grew up is like, look, you don't leave tools laying around. You clean them and put them away. Everything has a place, a place for everything. The value would be on, on, uh, well, we, you know, we'll get everything just perfect before we put it all together.
00:58:49
Speaker
And later on in life, I began to work with someone that was, their experience with work was based on who influenced them. It was their father that was also a mechanic that grew up on a farm, fixing farm equipment. And when farm equipment comes in and there's not a lot of money, you fix it however you can. And the value was, if you gotta hold it together with a leather strap,
00:59:16
Speaker
And your belt buckle and you know you make it happen and I'm not doing I'm not doing them service right describing this but they make it happen so that the equipment gets back out in the field and it's done in foods on the table and that is the value imparted from one generation to the next.
00:59:35
Speaker
Now, just fast forward to where Scott shows up in a warehouse or a manufacturing environment alongside a mixed group of employees that all have different leaders that imparted the concept and the value of work to them. I could be technically accurate, Jill, on what I say is like, we need to do this, we need to not do that.
01:00:02
Speaker
The messaging can be spot on, but if we don't respect the workers, and especially temporary workers, we don't respect our messaging to them.
Value of Neurodiversity and Individual Strengths
01:00:13
Speaker
We can be 100% accurate and right in what we communicate, but if we don't connect to the value and the appreciation that what they learned from, the value of work in that moment, their completing work in a series of system pressures and competing interests,
01:00:30
Speaker
that I don't have to manage, I know about, but how are we really sending our safety message? So that's where the book starts. It goes into a little bit history, the staffing industry, OSHA's influence, which I think, you know,
01:00:48
Speaker
I really have never had a negative experience with OSHA. I have to say there's, you know, people can say they've had negative experience with Scott and safety, right? So, I mean, I'm no different than OSHA in that respect. But overall, you know, OSHA and collaborating and, you know, they've done work in terms of being inclusive with their recommended guidelines for safety management systems, right, includes multi-employer work sites. And then we talk about the consensus standards and at the end of the day,
01:01:19
Speaker
The message is it's time to raise expectations for how primary and host employers work together to achieve better business to deliver the safety outcomes everybody says that they want. It's time that we raise the bar there and I believe we can do it. I think the answer is market driven expectations, consensus standards, leveraging knowledge and consensus standards. So that's what the book's about.
01:01:47
Speaker
That's fabulous and honoring the work of human beings and that every human being has a right to a safe and healthy work environment and every employer has that responsibility. Yeah, well said.
01:02:03
Speaker
Yeah, so, well, congratulations on getting the first draft to the editor. That's huge. And we'll have to have you back on the podcast once you've got it published so we can talk about it because this is information that needs to be shared. Okay, thank you. Absolutely, absolutely.
01:02:22
Speaker
So in your liminal space time here between job A and job B, we're talking about where you're at with safety today, what our role is, and you've touched on this so many times throughout our conversation, the value of relationships and what that means to our work.
01:02:42
Speaker
and the things that we're noticing about human beings and meeting them where they are. And I had the great opportunity to listen to you speak when we were at this joint conference speaking together this week to talk about one element of those relationships and meeting people where they are and knowing human beings and it was on neurodiversity. Do you mind talking about that?
01:03:06
Speaker
Yeah, yeah, not at all. So maybe set the stage for that. Yeah. Cause I'm not sure I did it justice. Yeah. So I'll tell you what. So, you know, having just departed Ronstadt is one of the things for us that does so well is, you know, their, their concept is, is human forward. Um, you know, really well-built, uh, attention and leadership in the, in the realm of DE and I, um, you know, in terms of creating what they call business resource groups, right? So business resource groups.
01:03:32
Speaker
African-American heritage, Hispanic community, there's military, and they recently added so DEI slash A, right, which is abilities. And so AIM is the business resource group for abilities and motion is the one I had been a part of. And one thing we also
01:03:56
Speaker
really focused on is lean, right? So small incremental improvements and how are we continually doing that and building a lean culture. And we were on a lean call, the kickoff for the year, and a courageous brave soul spoke up and just shared her experience about neurodiversity.
01:04:17
Speaker
And I was thinking, okay, I feel like I should be able to articulate what that word means, right? But I just was not informed or educated. And so I reached out to her and said, hey, thanks for speaking up.
01:04:33
Speaker
I learned something do you have a few minutes to tell me more issues like. Yes let's make it happen when we had a conversation later in the conversation like this we introduced each other she talked to me about her diversity her experience was in the realm of dyslexia.
01:04:54
Speaker
as well as being a degree on the spectrum. She was telling me these things. Here's the thing. Let my naivety and poor listening here be a lesson for all of us.
01:05:11
Speaker
She told me these things early in the conversation and we're talking and talking and she's already told me that she grew up with dyslexia and she already told me that reading is not her thing. And she learns really, really well over here. In fact, if you give her a data set, she'll see patterns no one else sees.
01:05:28
Speaker
because that's how gifted she is. She's already told me this. And what do I ask her 10 minutes later? Hey, so yeah, it wasn't that, but it may as well have been. I said, so, so have you read this? Do you, do you like, have you ever read? And she said, no, you know, and she was so gracious. She, she recognized where I was in my undeveloped thinking in that moment. And she, she taught me.
01:05:54
Speaker
She reminded me as like, okay, Scott's a listener up to a point, but then he changed here. And so how well was I really listening? And there's a degree where we can listen to respond or listen to learn. And it's like, okay, you know what? Learning moment for me, because this woman was courageous and gracious and taught me.
01:06:14
Speaker
And that's a lesson from the neurodiversity community that I think we can all benefit from because truly it's an entire workforce that is gifted in areas we are not and we should know that. So that's like where we start promoting the beauty and the value of just promoting people's giftedness and enabling that and sharing in that is really what it's about.
01:06:40
Speaker
Yeah, I mean, working to our strengths, right? I mean, and knowing who you are, and also your employer to know what your gifts, your strengths are, and how it is that you best work and can best show up to support not only your own career, regardless of what that career is,
01:06:59
Speaker
but also support the organization that you work in. You and I started out talking earlier about the way that we get work done, how our creative process works. And neurodiversity, it's part of it.
01:07:14
Speaker
That's right. All of these things make up the whole human being. And how much better of a workplace and world can we be if our employers and we as individuals know those things about ourselves and we're not always trying to fix what is perceived as a wrong or the right way to do it, but really engaging with our strengths.
Advice for Safety Professionals
01:07:37
Speaker
You just completely, perfectly described. She was great at noticing patterns. That's right.
01:07:44
Speaker
That's so wonderful. Thank you for sharing that story. I appreciate that. So as we're coming to a close today, I'm wondering, Scott, in this little bit of reflection that you have before you jump in with both feet into the next adventure here, things that you'd like to share with our audience. We have people from
01:08:10
Speaker
In all stages of our working career, from people who are just starting out, people who are maybe still in college, people who are tenured in this profession, people who are retired, what are your pieces of wisdom you'd like to share with any piece of that audience?
01:08:30
Speaker
Well, I, sure, I guess like for, you mentioned the, so those that are ahead of me, they're like retirement or, you know, ahead of me in their career, just, you know, at some point, you know, I've learned from you and I'm grateful and hope to pass that torch on to others who will be grateful and to do so with the, you know, humility that I think breeds humility and better leadership. So, so I'd share that.
01:08:54
Speaker
And to all my friends that are, you know, not just staffing agencies, but in the contingent labor community. So they are employers that are working with staffing companies or contractors. The staffing companies and contractors is like, hey, listen, the traditional view of how we think about safety
01:09:18
Speaker
is really important to learn about how limiting it is, right? We've been given kind of a status quo that repeatedly shows this. It does a pretty good job at setting up the business relationship.
01:09:32
Speaker
but the status quo is not doing a good job at all at managing risk along the continuum of work. And we need to do better. We absolutely can do better. And I think my final point, Jill, would be we can't do it alone. We can't do it alone. So some of the groups I get to work with is like, so NIOSH is a pretty small division of the CDC, but they do amazing work.
01:10:00
Speaker
And they have these groups called NORA work groups, so National Occupational Research Agenda. There's one for contingent labor. There's one for traumatic injury prevention. But just it's a collection of academic and professional and regulators and insurance all commonly coming together to focus on solving some pretty important problems.
01:10:27
Speaker
And, you know, if you think about, Jill, you probably have examples or, you know, we have an entrenched position and I'm the regulator and I have the checklist right here and you're not measuring up to it. How well does that really come across in terms of creating collaborative problem solving?
01:10:43
Speaker
It doesn't, I can be right, but it doesn't, right? We need more, right? And I may have been doing this for a while and learned a lot, but I can't do, I shouldn't do it alone, right? We can't do it alone. We need to solve some problems together. And if there's any silver lining in COVID, it's that look as a recent example.
01:11:09
Speaker
Our leaders reached down to the organization and just asked, hey, is there a common framework for us to communicate safety and health from? And we said, well, yes, by the way, there is. And let's talk about the hierarchy of controls in a shared work environment and how we identify, think about, and understand risk to lead to better decision making.
01:11:30
Speaker
And so I think we already have the frameworks we need to draw from. We really need to get together in terms of collaboration and problem solving and paying special attention that, look, between each employer, there's a combination of transferring risk, one employer to the other. I won't say who.
01:11:49
Speaker
That's good for that one employer. And there's another set of employers here that's in the joint employer mix that is very, very eager to say in a sales compressed environment, yeah, we'll do that for less money. We can do that a lower markup. We can solve these things. But in so doing, this kind of weird mix removes capacity to manage risk.
01:12:12
Speaker
And so we just need, I think we just need help. I'd do anything I can to help someone say, why should I care about this? Because maybe I'm not, maybe I could do a better job at explaining it. But hey, it really matters. And if you ever sat bedside next to someone that's been seriously hurt, you know, we all asked the same question, what do we wish we knew yesterday? So we would not be here today. And we're only going to get there if we do things better together.
01:12:39
Speaker
That's right. And we are at two-year points, Scott. We are at such a unique place in this time right now.
01:12:47
Speaker
If there are benefits to having experienced and continue to experience a global pandemic, our profession has had this unique opportunity that you articulated for collaboration. When it happened, when this pandemic happened, we all remember where we were, what we were doing,
01:13:10
Speaker
And in our profession, we were engaged with in a way that professionally, we likely haven't been engaged with before. We were invited to tables that we haven't been invited to before. It's all of the things that our industry has been talking about at conferences and writing about forever about getting a, how did you get a place at the table? How do you get a place at the table? How do you get your leadership to buy in? All of these things. It like happened overnight when
01:13:39
Speaker
when leadership and industries went, oh, hey, can you help us? And like, here's a seat at this table. And here's a seat at this table. And suddenly we're overwhelmed, right? But we have a place at these tables. And guess what? Those of us who are invited in and the people that you and I have been talking with are like, we're not going back. Because guess what? We learned that there are many hands make light work. And we have collaborators now. And so I think that, like,
01:14:09
Speaker
gosh don't step back into that silo keep going forward.
Conclusion and Acknowledgments
01:14:13
Speaker
I think we all learned I mean I thought that makes me think of look the you know who I have a newfound respect for accountants CFOs you know they understand risk on a level I don't because they're responsible for numbers and
01:14:27
Speaker
and making hard decisions around money, so the question comes, how am I doing better at informing them better? So to make better informed decisions, because I so respect the CFOs and leaders that are making hard decisions, I don't have to make. But how can I make their job easier? How can I make their job better?
01:14:47
Speaker
Right, right. So we're all making better, more informed decisions. Fabulous. Scott, thank you so much for your generous time and wishing you so much success, enlightenment and curiosity in this next chapter. Thank you, Jill. Thank you so much. I hope we can do this again and thank you very much for allowing me to be on your podcast.
01:15:11
Speaker
You're welcome. Thanks for being here. And thank you all for spending your time listening today. And more importantly, thank you for your contribution toward the common good. Making sure your workers, including your temporary workers, make it home safe every day. If you aren't subscribed in one of your past and future episodes, you can subscribe in iTunes, the Apple Podcast app, or any other podcast player you'd like.
01:15:32
Speaker
We'd love it if you could leave a rating and review us on iTunes. It really helps us connect the show with more and more health and safety professionals like Scott and I. Special thanks to Naeem Jarisi, our podcast producer. And until next time, thanks for listening.