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#10: It’s not about being more careful.
92 Plays7 years ago
Podcast series host Jill James speaks with Scott, a safety engineer in the telecomm industry, and published author. An 18-year professional safety veteran, Scott started his journey as an undergraduate psych major when a summer job at the local factory gave him his first taste of occupational safety. From there, Scott went on to graduate-level education in the safety discipline, making him a rarity in the field. His diverse career includes stints in consulting, temp staffing, prison safety, and shoe manufacturing. You’ll learn all about how occupational safety principles are applied in the corrections industry, what it takes to write a corporate safety manual, and what machine operators can teach you about safe work design. For Scott, the key to working safely is found through exploration of why people perform their jobs in specific ways. His well-researched conclusion: change the job, not the people.
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Transcript
Introduction to Podcast
00:00:09
Speaker
This is the Accidental Safety Pro, brought to you by Vivid Learning Systems and the Health and Safety Institute. This is episode number 10. My name is Jill James, Vivid's Chief Safety Officer, and today I'm joined by Scott, who is a safety engineer and author in the telecommunications industry in Minnesota. Scott, welcome to the podcast. Hi, happy to be here.
00:00:33
Speaker
This is so great. Your episode number 10, we've made it this far. This is excellent. Yeah. Hopefully our audience has been enjoying the podcast so far.
Scott's Accidental Entry into Safety
00:00:45
Speaker
So Scott, you have been in the safety industry for how many years now? About 18, almost exactly. 18 years, yeah.
00:00:54
Speaker
Wow, so quite a while. So take us back to your accidental story. What happened? What happened first? How did you get that first that first seed of interest in occupational safety and health? Yeah, well, I was an undergraduate psychology major.
00:01:11
Speaker
And I got this summer job working at a local factory and happened to get assigned to the maintenance department. And they had me working on fire extinguisher training.
00:01:25
Speaker
Okay. And so it started out where I would just refill the fire extinguishers, make sure we had enough there and do any, you know, general maintenance on the fire extinguishers and the stuff we're using. Well, I seem to do pretty well at that. And they, they liked the way that I was doing that. So they had me inspect and repair fire extinguishers in the plant. And then that became, you know, fire doors and some of the sprinkler items and
00:01:53
Speaker
and just sort of expanded from there. And I thought, oh, this is pretty fun. And around that time, I also realized that as a psychology major, I had no hope of meaningful employment unless I went to graduate school. Right. I think I wanted to be a psych major when I went to undergrad school as well, and then quickly decided, oh my gosh, how am I going to get a job?
00:02:14
Speaker
Right, right, yeah, so that realization hit and I thought, oh man, what do I do? And I was talking to somebody in my National Guard unit and he knew what I was doing for the summer and asked me how I liked it and I told him and he said, well, you know, you could safety professional.
00:02:32
Speaker
He had gone to the graduate program at University of Minnesota Duluth and so he gave me some information and recommended that and one thing led to another and I ended up going to grad school for safety and the rest is history.
00:02:49
Speaker
Oh my gosh. So came out of a recommendation by someone in your, in your military history. That's kind of cool. Yeah. Yeah. And it worked out really well. And I still see that person from time to time at conferences or other social settings where there's a lot of safety professionals around.
Early Career and Challenges
00:03:07
Speaker
Yeah. So when you were doing those fire extinguisher inspections and all the things that sounds like life safety related, who, who taught you to do all that stuff? There were a couple of, um,
00:03:17
Speaker
maintenance guys who had and it was all men's when I say maintenance guys and they had they had just been doing that for years and it was kind of a nice thing for them to get off of their plate because they had a lot of other you know task list items to do.
00:03:34
Speaker
So they were they were happy to hand it off to me and that after that first summer I had applied again the next summer and they looked for my application and brought me in to do the same thing and I ended up doing that for three summers and I just loved it. I mean I I'm the kind of person who if I can walk around with
00:03:55
Speaker
bag of tools and get dirty and dusty and, you know, bang on stuff with a hammer like a monkey for a couple hours. To me, that's a good time. And so I really had a great time with it and thought, well, this, you know, this could be a great career.
00:04:10
Speaker
doing the safety stuff. And since coming out of grad school, I have not taken apart one single fire extinguisher. But we just gave all kinds of parents out there with teenagers or kids that are just about entering college, boy, go knock on somebody's door and tell them you're going to inspect all their life safety stuff if they'll hire them for a summer job, right? Yeah. That's what I'm thinking right now. And again, man, my kid could do this stuff, test emergency lights.
00:04:40
Speaker
and inspect fire extinguishers. What a great foray into the business. So you're at graduate school, you're wrapping things up. What were you kind of envisioning yourself? What was your next move? Or what did you hope to do with now that you had a master's degree in safety? Really, I just wanted to get out there and start to earn a paycheck. I was, you know, after so many years of
00:05:05
Speaker
of school and sort of being dependent on student loans and the GI Bill and those things. I just wanted to go out and be independent and be able to do my own thing. And it took me a little while. I was, I think,
00:05:20
Speaker
the last person out of my class to find full-time employment.
Safety Projects and Innovations
00:05:26
Speaker
It took a little bit, but then once I did, I was real happy with it. In grad school, we learned all of the technical pieces and the administrative pieces and the scientific pieces.
00:05:42
Speaker
And being able to couple that with going out and getting my hands dirty and doing a lot of Gemba walks and having people teach me how they do their job and putting those together. To me, really, that's a lot of fun. And so that's something that I've really tried to do every job that I've had in safety.
00:06:02
Speaker
Yeah. So what was that first job after, after grad school, where'd you go? I worked for a safety temp agency and they, yeah, they, they assigned me to, let's see, I had, I think three different jobs with them. One was writing a right to know program for a manufacturer. Um, the other one was working for actually for Hennepin County doing injury statistics.
00:06:28
Speaker
Wow, interesting. Yeah. And the big one, the one that I used for my thesis project was writing a corporate safety manual for actually a pretty big company. And that was really neat because it was 2000. So it was a little while ago and it was right when companies were starting to do a lot more of their safety manuals.
00:06:52
Speaker
in an electronic format and to distribute things that way. And so this was their first attempt at doing that. So I spent the summer writing this huge safety manual that would for the company be all in an electronic format.
00:07:09
Speaker
And then I had to figure out a way to print that and bind that to turn it in as a bound thesis, which was almost as much of a challenge as writing the actual manual. I'm sure it was. And everybody who's listening to you say that you wrote an entire safety manual, assuming that that means all the written protocols that are associated with the OSHA laws. Now everyone wants their hand.
00:07:32
Speaker
like raising their hands like could you please pass that my way because that takes so long and it's so hard to get that get your hands on that information and not have to reinvent the wheel and do it well oh i know i know and and since i was a lowly intern they they gave me a laptop and they said okay you
00:07:51
Speaker
go do the work. You can work from home or wherever you want to get this done. The days that you're in the office, we have some space for you in the legal library. And I thought, oh, the legal library, this is great. I've felt all highfalutin.
00:08:06
Speaker
Well, I get down to my space in the legal library, and it's about a 24-inch by 24-inch hardtop table tucked in a dark corner with a little plastic chair. It felt like the Inquisition, not the legal library. Yeah, this little concrete sort of vaulted room.
00:08:25
Speaker
And they had already transferred all of their legal library information to an electronic format, so nobody ever came in there. So I'd go sit in this legal library for the entire day, completely alone, you know, typing away. And it was so quiet, I think my keystrokes would echo throughout this area. And you had a hard time staying awake, typing safety information. Yeah. Oh, man.
00:08:52
Speaker
So have you been able, I mean that was so much work. Have you been able to repurpose that in some of your other jobs? I mean you were the author of it and it became your thesis. Have you been able to reuse some of it?
00:09:03
Speaker
Yeah, and the way that that company wanted the manual written, it was a lot of referring out to the actual regulations. So quite a bit of it was linking information to the OSHA website or the various state OSHA websites and the EPA websites. And so more from a conceptual basis, have I been able to use that and run with that.
00:09:32
Speaker
Yeah, interesting. So you were with the safety. What did you what did you say this company was they did? They they were a 10 page 10 pages. I didn't even know that kind of thing existed. Neither did I. And I think one of my classmates pointed me in, in their direction is how I how I found them.
00:09:52
Speaker
Again, all I wanted was just I wanted to start making money, be an adult, find a place to live. And then I ended up working for a temp agency, which there's nothing wrong with that, but it didn't really feel like what I had been after. It gave you some good experience though.
00:10:10
Speaker
So does that agency still exist? I have no idea. I'm just thinking about all of the employers that contact me, you know, looking for safety people or they have a project or something in there. They're often saying, you know, like, how can I, how can I find somebody or I need this done? Or how can I, you know, like,
00:10:27
Speaker
try a safety person on for size and see if they fit culturally with our company. And I'm always recommending people go to, you know, the college programs. But wow, that's kind of a that would be kind of a neat way for employers to do searches as well. So what happened? What happened next?
Prison Safety Officer Experience
00:10:43
Speaker
What's the next part of your story? So I, I had finished up one of my temporary jobs and had a couple of weeks
00:10:51
Speaker
to think about things. And during that time, I found a job opening at a prison for a safety officer. So I drove down to the prison and interviewed with them. And one of the things they were really interested in was a written right to know program.
00:11:11
Speaker
And I said, yeah, I said, I just did one of those and I did this corporate manual and talked about that. And I got home, it was about a 45 minute drive from where I lived. I got home and I no more than walked in the door and the phone rang and they offered me the job. So, yay. So it worked out perfect. Right. Yep. And that was, that was great. I mean, I, I really enjoyed the,
00:11:38
Speaker
This is going to sound funny, but I really enjoyed working in the prison setting. And the reason for me that it was so much fun is it had everything. It had life safety. It had occupational safety. It had visitors coming and going. It had these security concerns that were just interesting to me. And you really haven't lived until it's 3 AM and you pull a fire alarm and a prison barracks.
00:12:06
Speaker
And you're watching all the prisoners file out. Crossing your fingers. Yeah, as they walk by, they know who got them out of bed. Uh-huh. Yeah. Oh, no. Right. Right.
00:12:22
Speaker
What a fascinating, what a fascinating place to live. I mean, well, live, yes, for the people who are living there. And a fascinating, rather more fascinating is a place to work by way of thinking all of the different, all of the different hazards that we'd associate with campus living, which there's, there's lots of those. And then you take it to a whole new different level because of the level of security too. Yep.
00:12:47
Speaker
Hmm interesting. So you were at the prison for a while and then you made I'm guessing you made your next your next change
00:12:54
Speaker
Yeah. So I went from the prison to a consulting company. I wanted to get some exposure to different environments and so left for a consulting company. And I wasn't at the consulting company very long.
Critique of Safety Practices
00:13:09
Speaker
It just didn't end up being a good fit. But then I went to a shoe manufacturer. Interesting. Yeah. And that was a lot of fun too. And that was where I really started to
00:13:22
Speaker
learn the value of having machine operators and employees teach me why they do their job the way they do it. I would be talking to an operations manager, I'd be talking to somebody in human resources, and they'd say, I don't understand how these people get hurt like this. And I said, well, why are they doing the job that way? And they'd say, I don't know. And so I said, well, let me find out. And just in doing that, learning that takes place and the ability to adapt safety
00:13:51
Speaker
in such a way that I'm not changing the people, I'm changing the job. And if you build a guard the right way, you don't have to do anything else. You put it on, you install it, you're good. We've followed the hierarchy of controls and we've reduced that risk to what we think is an acceptable level.
00:14:13
Speaker
And anytime I've seen safety professionals try to change the people, it's a lot harder because people are really, we're plastic in the way that we behave and the way that we look at things and think about things. And people will tend to flex to where they think they need to go. So if they see the safety person coming, they'll change the way they work.
00:14:36
Speaker
a while. That was the beginning of where I started to really have some doubts about behavior based safety. Yeah, interesting. I want to hear more about that because you are a person who's written specifically about this whole rebuttal of behavior based safety. It's not all that in a box of rocks.
00:15:01
Speaker
So I'm interested to hear that, which I'm sure people may have cringed over just the fact that I use that cliche. But aside from that, you know, so many places of employment in today's workforce really has this notion that behavior-based safety is the thing. So tell us more about why you don't believe that.
00:15:27
Speaker
Well, first of all, it doesn't follow the hierarchy of controls. Yeah. So why don't we, let's review for our audience the hierarchy of controls. Sure. So we start with eliminating the hazard and that will, then we just, we don't have that risk. It's just completely gone. Now, if we can't
00:15:45
Speaker
eliminate that hazard then we engineer the job to be less hazardous. After that we get to the administrative controls which are training and signage and warnings and the last bit of the hierarchy of controls is personal protective equipment. So nowhere in there do we really have a good fit for behavior-based safety. What
00:16:08
Speaker
What I tell people is if you picture the hierarchy of controls as this pyramid, three dimensional, big pyramid, elimination at the top, PP at the bottom, there's this there's the sub basement. And it's actually a permit required confined space. And that's where behavior based safety is. So you've got to go down the ladder into the pit. And it really it just stems from the fact that people are going to behave
00:16:35
Speaker
in a manner that they feel gets their job done in an effective and efficient manner. And it seems like behavior-based safety, not only does it try to change the people instead of the job, but it pushes the responsibility of safety off of the people who can really effect change. So in behavior-based safety, one of the key notions is that about 95%
00:17:04
Speaker
of all accidents are caused by a person's behavior, the implication being the person who was hurt.
00:17:12
Speaker
Right. We've all heard that. Yeah. And I really have a problem with that because if people genuinely thought that what they were doing was going to hurt them, they wouldn't do it. This isn't a behavior issue. It's a risk perception issue. And the people who can effect change in that job are
00:17:34
Speaker
the safety professionals and the managers of the company. And it's a lot easier to just say, well, that employee, you know, it's his fault because he didn't behave the right way than it is to self-reflect, look at your system and understand that you need to change your system or you need to change your design.
00:17:58
Speaker
Yeah, by either by following the hierarchy of controls first. Right. And then, you know, we in safety, we have come to the conclusion that we want managers and supervisors to do a lot of the investigation because they have.
00:18:12
Speaker
a higher level of knowledge of what's going on in their department. That makes sense. But then we teach them, the first thing we tell them is 95% of the accidents you're going to investigate are the employee's fault. So what are they going to find? That's what they're going to automatically look for because that's what we're telling them to look for. What did they do wrong?
00:18:33
Speaker
Yeah, now if we tell them nothing to that effect at all, we just say, just investigate. And here is the hierarchy of controls. When we find out what happened, here's how we determine how to apply controls. I think we would come out with some very different conclusions in the end.
00:18:54
Speaker
Yeah, right. Rather than saying, oh, they should have had gloves on, or whatever. If you're tasked to figure out, follow through the controls, what was missing? Where were the gaps? And I think people would arrive at a very different answer in the end. Oh, yeah. They absolutely would. Yep.
00:19:19
Speaker
Of all of the fatalities I've investigated in my career, which has been many, many employers responses to me have always been curious. And I knew it was, I knew it was coming and I would always wait for it. You know, I'd be in the midst of a fatality investigation and I'd be like, okay, so how's this employer going to stack up?
00:19:41
Speaker
Immediately, everyone is sad. Great human response as it should be. Regretful, mournful. Someone's dead. And then things would start to change. And they'd start to change in those investigations, usually pretty rapidly. And the employers would fall into these two tracks that I identified. This is not formal research. This is my own anecdotal stories from
00:20:04
Speaker
Many many death cases employers would either fall into blame the victim or What am I going to do as an employer to ensure that never happens to anyone on my watch again? And it would happen quickly like I would I just wait for it is like watching through some kind of crazy window like this human behavior of you know blame the victim path, which is Usually the path most people took
00:20:28
Speaker
not always, but it would raise its ugly head and be like, oh man, can we figure out, let's figure out what went wrong here. And let's not blame the victim in this case because this person did not set out to get themselves killed today. And that whole, they should have, they weren't careful. They should have been more careful. Right. Yeah. That be more careful. And it goes back an entire century. It goes back to Heinrich.
00:20:57
Speaker
Yeah. Tell us. Yeah. So, okay. So in the early 20th century, really the safety research that was out there wasn't there. There just wasn't much. It was more incomplete than complete by far. And Herb Heinrich who worked for, I believe it was Traveler's Insurance. He was an insurance guy. He wanted to go out and find out why employees were getting hurt. So he went and reviewed
00:21:23
Speaker
all these incident investigations from clients of the insurance company and came to that conclusion that his statistics were more like 88% of injuries were behavior based. And he wrote a book about it and the book
00:21:42
Speaker
took off and really became the basis for the next 100 years of professional safety, looking at it from an occupational standpoint. The thing that people forget is that when Heinrich was doing this research, there was no Occupational Safety and Health Administration. The Fair Labor Standards Act
00:22:04
Speaker
hadn't been passed yet, and many states still didn't have a workers' compensation system. So we had employees who were in these places of employment that had great variability in what the safety rules were and what the protections provided were.
00:22:22
Speaker
When you look back at the pictures of people building a skyscraper and they're sitting there having lunch on a beam 30 story side, that was perfectly legal. Right. The iconic steel workers in New York. Right. Right. So if one of those steel workers slips and falls off of the beam and dies, the supervisor and the company has motivation
00:22:47
Speaker
to blame that worker because without workers' compensation, the only way for that employee's family to get compensated was to sue the employer. So if the employer could say this was not our fault, that gave them a defense against that lawsuit. And there were no legal requirements for them to have fall protection and all these other things. So it was really easy to blame the workers back then. And I think
00:23:13
Speaker
That whole philosophy still, it just still hangs with us that especially in the United States where people just are really afraid of legal accountability coming back to them and it harms us. It really does. You talk about investigating fatalities and the two responses you would see. I was investigating a fatality with a former employer where
00:23:41
Speaker
an employee had fallen through a floor opening that was normally covered. And in our internal investigation, we determined
00:23:51
Speaker
that, or we found, I should say that the grate that would normally cover that floor opening had fallen along with the employee. And as we were looking at things, my conclusion was that the employee had to be putting the grate back in because he wouldn't have fit through the floor opening without having his hands
00:24:16
Speaker
oriented above his shoulders. Well, the other corporate safety person said, no, we can't do that. We have to say that he was walking on the grate, even though the rules are against that. And I said, no, I don't think that's
00:24:32
Speaker
That's right. And I said, not only do I not think that's right, but what we have to do here is we have to think of these floor opening covers or thousands of them within the company, like any other machine guard where we secure it with a bolt that needs a special tool to remove it.
00:24:48
Speaker
Yeah. So you don't have to, so you actually have to have an effort, make an effort to take it off. Yep. Yep. And we argued back and forth about that. And we went down to the OSHA conference to talk about it. And the other safety person outranked me. So he, he presented our case and he presented our case as, uh, we, we shouldn't have any citations on this because the employee was breaking the rule by walking over the skate.
00:25:13
Speaker
And the regional director got a quizzical look on his face. And he asked, do you really want to go with that story? Or do you want to take some time to think about that and tell us something different?
00:25:31
Speaker
And I said, well, can I offer what my theory is? Because we do have two theories here. And I gave them mine and what the plan was. We were already securing these things around the company and we had a timeline on it. And the regional director said, oh, okay, all right. So just two very different responses there.
International Safety Standards Shift
00:25:55
Speaker
You offered up the plausible use of the hierarchy of controls.
00:26:00
Speaker
Right. And at no point was there, you know, this idea that it was the employee's fault. I mean, it drives me crazy. I was at the Minnesota Safety Council.
00:26:11
Speaker
recently, their big conference and they had a speaker in who he was one of the keynote speakers and a very great speaker, you know, did a really nice job. He did one thing that kind of drove me crazy. He ended his speech talking about how his brother had died at work, because he had been assigned to do some work on a 480 volt piece of equipment. And he wasn't qualified to do that.
00:26:39
Speaker
and the boxes where they had to lock out the power were not labeled. So he locked out the wrong box, was electrocuted and died. So very sad story. And his conclusion at the end of the story was that his brother was the one responsible for that because he had decided to do that work and he had decided to do it in such a way that he didn't verify that he had the right box. And I thought,
00:27:05
Speaker
Oh, man. Hold on. His supervisors knew he wasn't qualified for it or should have known. Yeah. And his company was responsible for labeling all those boxes correctly. So what? Why are you blaming him? Oh, man, he was doing the best job he could with the information that he had at the time. Right, right. And that's what employees do. And that's why it's so important as a safety professional to just
00:27:27
Speaker
have this conversation of okay tell me why you do the job this way and now let's work with that. Exactly and to ask and to ask and inform by way of training not to assume that people know what you know or because they're in a particular job field or they do a particular job that they should know everything about their job.
00:27:49
Speaker
I've talked to electrical apprentices, like on construction sites, working with electricians who didn't understand that the bus bars behind the breakers were hot. And they were working with electricity every day. And when I explained that, they're like, oh, oh, because I was explaining like, you can't have openings, you know, if the breaker is missing, it has to be covered and it can't be covered with duct tape or cardboard or, you
00:28:16
Speaker
know, it has to be, which, you know, if you've been in the safety field a long time, you've seen these things, you know, it's got to be effectively closed with the appropriate clip in there. And I remember talking with electrical people who didn't realize that, you know, they just, they didn't know that that was hot in that particular area on the panel. And, you know, every once in a while in this career, we hear those stories from people where it kind of takes you back and reminds you
00:28:42
Speaker
how important our job is to walk into all these situations, not assuming people understand the hazards with their work and how important it is for us to teach that. Yeah, absolutely. And that's a boy, that's a scary one. Yeah, right. And I think I don't know at what point in my life I stopped using the phrase be careful.
00:29:04
Speaker
I don't know when that was, but I certainly don't say it. Do you? You know, I try not to. I do make a conscious effort to try not to. And I try to, you know, drive safely or, you know...
00:29:19
Speaker
Hey, don't call me till you get there or whatever it might be. Yeah, that be more careful thing. That's a classic one. I have a road sign hanging in my office that says be more careful. That somebody sent me who I had worked with because at this company, I just constantly was drilling people. If you send in an investigation that says be more careful, I'm going to send it back to you and make you redo it.
00:29:47
Speaker
And it took about a year before people really got out of that habit because it's so habitual and it's so easy. It's like, well, that person, they got hurt. I don't know exactly how they did it. It's going to be really hard to figure it out and be more careful. Exactly. Anyone who's listening who has ever seen accident investigation reports across their desk that had the end result of the investigation
00:30:14
Speaker
being more careful. It's nails on the chalkboard. It's nails on the chalkboard. Like I said, I don't say be more careful, but I try to be really specific. Like you gave the, you know, you gave the example, you know, call me when you get to your destination. You know, you're going to send your kid or an employee out to do something. It's not be more careful. It's
00:30:37
Speaker
Remember three points of contact on the ladder when you climb it today. Make sure you're checking the footing. It's not be more careful when you're working on the ladder today. It's, you know, specific practices that they may not know or they need to be reminded of.
00:30:51
Speaker
Yeah, yeah, the be more careful is sort of the admission of I have no idea how to tell you how to do this safely. Just please, please don't get hurt. Yeah, that's exactly it. And then the accidents I've investigated where people would say like, it was just a one minute job. It was a two minute job. I just needed to go in the excavation to make that one connection and the walls caved in.
00:31:14
Speaker
Well, if the directions on the way down into the excavation were be more careful for that one minute job should have been, let's be sure the trench is sloped properly before we get in there for that one minute job. I know that that means we're going to have to take five minutes to slope it better before you get in there for your one minute job. But get in there and be more careful.
00:31:39
Speaker
Watch your back for the dirt that's coming down. Isn't a way to live. So you're presenting this rebuttal to behavior-based safety, part of it based on safety theory dating way back to Heinrich, where we have learned our historical safety baggage that sticks with us to this day. And that makes a lot of sense.
00:32:02
Speaker
Yeah, yeah. And internationally, and this is one of the things that I discovered when I published a book on safety is that internationally, other places are ahead of us in moving past behavior based safety. Because the feedback that I get from
00:32:20
Speaker
The United States is different in the regard of behavior-based safety than it is internationally. Internationally, they say, well, this really isn't that new to us. We're trying to get away from it right now, and we know we need to. Whereas in the US, it's a little more of, huh, I hadn't thought about it like that yet.
00:32:39
Speaker
So what are people doing in other countries? What are they working on right now trying to move away from that? It seems like a lot of it is based on accurate assessment of risk and looking at risk from a management system standpoint. So when you look at, a great example is the new 45,001
00:33:04
Speaker
ISO standard for occupational safety. It's all systems-based, management systems-based, and looking at the work environment and the way that the work environment is managed and the situations that employees are put into.
00:33:21
Speaker
So I still would like there to be more emphasis internationally on a philosophy of making safety fit the way employees work. That I think is one place where we have a lot of room to grow.
00:33:38
Speaker
dating back to what you learned at the shoe manufacturing company. Right, right. Yeah, it's amazing what you can learn just by going out and saying, all right, they want me to, you know, make this job more safe, but I don't know how you do this. And just that admission in and of itself
00:33:56
Speaker
is so important to employees because they see safety as a part of management. And when you come down and you say, I want to know how you do this. I'm interested in your job. I don't know how to do this. Will you teach me? Will you show me? I mean, people love that. They love it. And there's so much terrific information to be gained from doing that.
00:34:18
Speaker
Scott, unpack that a little bit more. Can you think of a story from maybe the shoe manufacturer somewhere else where you're with an employer, a group of employees, and you're looking at a particular job and breaking it down? Can you give an example to the audience of maybe how that worked for you? Sure. There's an example that I love to share. I was working as a loss control consultant.
00:34:41
Speaker
for a company that handles workers' compensation insurance for cities. And we were wondering why we were getting all these shoulder injuries from street crews. And so I went out to fill potholes one day and met with the street crew bright and early.
00:35:01
Speaker
probably met for coffee at 5.30 and got started with work at six. And we walked behind a dump truck full of hot asphalt. And there are probably four or five of us, you'd get a shovel full of hot asphalt, pack that into a pothole and then tamp it down. And I was loving it. It was great. It was outside, you know, manual labor, which I like.
00:35:27
Speaker
And one of the guys hollers at me, he said, Hey, teaspoon, got a pothole over here for you. I said, I said, teaspoon. I said, what are you calling me teaspoon for? He said, fill up your shovel. So I filled up my shovel. He fills up his shovel. He's got about three times the asphalt in his shovel is mine. He looks at his shovel and he says, this is a shovel full.
00:35:49
Speaker
He looks at my shovel and he says, teaspoon. So that entire public works department called me teaspoon. From then on, it was pretty funny. But it taught me so much of what I needed to learn about why they were having shoulder injuries, because then we could talk about, okay, that's a big shovel full.
00:36:10
Speaker
And the deal was, here in Minnesota, for people who may not be too familiar with it, we get probably five good months where you can be out filling potholes. Five, six good months.
00:36:24
Speaker
And a lot of those months are really, really hot and humid. So they wanted to be done filling as many potholes as they could before lunch because at lunchtime it was going to be, you know, the heat index was going to be 102 and nobody wants to be walking around with hot asphalt on a blacktop street and that kind of heat index because that's
00:36:47
Speaker
seriously hazardous, right? That we've got some real problems there. So they would take these huge shovels full of asphalt to reduce that heat risk later in the day. Sure, they wanted to be able to work faster. It's like in any production setting, you think that's easier to equate to like a production line where you're moving along at a certain clip and people have to move a certain speed. This is a similar thing when it's to get the work done earlier.
00:37:14
Speaker
Right. So that that allowed us to look at the problem in a completely different way. And we could say, OK, so how can we make this more efficient so that they can get this job done a little quicker? And that's what I mean by let's make safety match the way people want to do the job. So ultimately, what did you do? Ultimately, I took that information and and the information from the following conversation that we had over lunch.
00:37:40
Speaker
back to the insurance pool group of cities and we really started to look at providing cities with information about different technology that they could use for some of these jobs and trying to get
00:37:57
Speaker
different cities together to talk about how they do some of these jobs to compare their notes and come up with what best practices and best tools were. And it really spurred a lot of different action than we had been taking in the past.
00:38:13
Speaker
And just to bring things back around to the behavior-based side, had I been out there with a behavior-based checklist, I would have checked not behaving the way that I want because he's taking too much of a shovelful and then coaching him on how much of a shovelful he should take, which I mean, how demeaning.
00:38:32
Speaker
you know, here's this guy who doesn't even do the job doesn't know for all they know, I've never picked up a shovel, they don't know me. And I'm gonna come out and I'm gonna tell them they're doing it wrong. And not to say that your shoulder wouldn't wear out with the teaspoon 100 times versus their
00:38:49
Speaker
giant, you know, three, their tablespoon, 50 times, you know? Right. I mean, maybe, maybe not. But yeah, it makes complete sense that the second you walk away, they go back to doing the job the same way, because they want the outcome at the end of the day to be what they want it to be.
00:39:08
Speaker
Right, right. Interesting. Yeah. Yeah, I get it. That's awesome. So we've got this safety theory, you know, based on all this historical lawsuit practices, and you're bringing into this personal experience, let's talk about the about the human beings who are doing the work and why they're doing it the way they are and how how we can how we can modify and change things to make their lives better if we understand the way they need to do their work.
00:39:35
Speaker
Yeah. Yeah, by having those conversations. Yeah. Yeah. I know you've also written about how some of the practices that we have today in safety came about from historical events. Do you want to talk about, do you want to talk about that piece too? Yeah. And I think right now,
00:39:52
Speaker
In our country, it's really important to remember some of these things because we may be seeing some regulatory changes with the politics that are out there right now, which is really unfortunate.
Historical Context in Safety
00:40:03
Speaker
People forget that there was a time before OSHA. I think we need to take some of those pictures of 10-year-old kids without shoes standing at a loom, and we need to put them up in people's faces and say, let's not get too crazy with this deregulation.
00:40:20
Speaker
It wasn't that long ago. No, it certainly wasn't. And when you look at recent history, a really interesting example is contrasting West Texas, where the fertilizer plant blew up, and Bullpaw, India.
00:40:37
Speaker
Because when you go back to Bhopal, India, for people who may not be old enough to remember, there was a pesticide manufacturer in Bhopal. And as part of this chemical manufacturing process, they had some chemicals that could not come into contact with water. There would be a very bad reaction if that were to happen.
00:41:01
Speaker
somewhere along the line that did happen. These chemicals came into contact with water. A large amount of toxic gas was generated which flowed out into the community around the plant and killed a very high number of people. And you look at the death estimates and it's anywhere from a few thousand to tens of thousands. It was a
00:41:24
Speaker
an absolutely horrible event and it changed the way we looked at chemical safety in the United States. Ronald Reagan was president at the time and it was such a large event that when people decided to strengthen the EPA and create community right to know laws, this president who
00:41:45
Speaker
really did not like regulation and really was not somebody who you would think of as signing more regulatory acts into law was happy to sign that into law. And so fast forward about 20 years to West Texas. No, not that long ago, and we have this fire in a fertilizer warehouse, big fertilizer, you know, building
00:42:10
Speaker
And the fire department responded in an inappropriate manner, right? They responded the best way they knew how, but they didn't have all the knowledge they needed to respond in a way that would have created a safer situation. And that, you know, response probably would have been evacuate, you know, for about a half mile or so and let it burn.
00:42:33
Speaker
And as a consequence, there were, oh gosh, I forget the number. I think it was over a dozen responders that were killed and a lot of other people hurt who maybe wouldn't have been hurt had they evacuated a little further back.
00:42:49
Speaker
that there's still this gap. So we created the community right to know laws and we did all these things in response to Bull Paul because we didn't, as a society, didn't realize how precarious some of these situations were and how dangerous some of the situations were where we had chemical processes and other manufacturing. But we still had gaps. We still didn't understand those gaps. So when West Texas happened,
00:43:18
Speaker
Now people recognize those gaps and realistically there should be some changes to laws and I don't unfortunately think we ever will get to the changes that we need. But looking back at safety, it really is written in blood.
00:43:36
Speaker
tend to create safety rules until people get hurt or die. Yeah, it's so true. It's so true. We are so good. Our country, the United States, is so excellent at response.
00:43:51
Speaker
We are so good at coming to aid when something has gone sideways. What we're not so great at is prevention and learning from our history and learning from other history. And then once we figure that history out to build upon it and build upon it again to take us to the next place,
00:44:09
Speaker
You know, Bhopal was in 1984. West Texas was in 2013. That's 29 years of history that was not built upon to take it to the next level or forgotten about. And how many examples do we have that in our safety history? You know, we hear, we hear complaints often as safety professionals. How do I keep up with these safety laws? They're changing all the time. They're changing all the time. No, they're not. Right.
00:44:33
Speaker
They actually seldom change. The ones that were adopted in 1970 are many of the same ones that they were there. They haven't changed much. I mean, you and I can articulate and list out a couple that have changed. Walking working services was updated in the last year, but it's not always changing. We're kind of doing things the way that we've always done them. Yeah.
00:44:57
Speaker
Yeah, which, which doesn't mean it's the best practice for the 21st century, right? Yeah, there's, there's been so much technological change in the last 40 years and so much more to come. So much more to come. I mean, right now.
00:45:11
Speaker
transportation is consistently one of the top two or three causes of death in the workplace. By the time you and I retire, Jill, it's not even going to be on the list. Yeah. Isn't that exciting? Yes. And you know, we don't want to make people feel disheartened, of course. But you know, also, I guess maybe invite the audience
00:45:33
Speaker
to knowing that your hands aren't tied, right? We in this profession don't necessarily have tied hands to make changes. We have the ability to make changes in our own companies where we work if we think things could be better than what the very bare bones minimum law requires or where one isn't exist or in our communities and in our states.
00:45:56
Speaker
I took an opportunity back in the 90s to write a safety law for the state of Minnesota that was passed by the legislature and is still on the books today with regard to the construction industry and the operation of mobile earth moving equipment. And, you know, I was I was young and in my 20s and idealistic and, you know, I just kind of plowed ahead with this idea along with a coworker of mine, and I still can't believe that I did it. But, you know, we can all be doing those things.
00:46:23
Speaker
Whether, like I said, whether it's in our own backyards or in our own communities or even on a state level or a federal level. So know if you're listening and you've got an idea for something that could be better or a story that was written in blood, you don't have to wait for someone to come and ask you to do it. That likely won't happen. So make that change yourself and connect with other professionals who can help you along that journey. Yeah. And that's a great message. Very excellent message.
00:46:52
Speaker
Yeah. So Scott, in the minutes that we have left, what would you like to share with the audience about what you think we should be shifting to, away from behavior based, away from that, be more careful. What do you see, what do you see for our future in safety right now? Well, I think it's, it's important for safety professionals to be able to articulate how we affect success of the business.
00:47:19
Speaker
We're not here just to put up great motivational posters. We're not here just to make sure that people get their annual safety training. We're here to help our companies compete and perform at a high level and make the profit that is needed to stay in business. That's something that the safety function forgets a little bit about. And when we properly use the hierarchy of controls,
00:47:46
Speaker
we will create environments that are not only safer but result in a higher level of quality and more efficiency. And safety really can be the motivator to affect all of that change. Yeah, right. Because if employees are able to do their work without being inhibited by fear or pain, it would only make sense that the quality and efficiency is going to improve.
00:48:15
Speaker
Right. And then that gives safety a seat at the table, just like operations would and all of these other departments that we sort of compete with as safety professionals. Everyone else is like, hey, we're all moving this company forward toward profit, toward success, toward all of us getting a paycheck at the end of our day. But safety has a seat there and it's not one that we often pull up and say, hey, this is how I can help. Right. Right. And we do need to do a better job at that.
00:48:45
Speaker
Yeah, great. Scott, it has been so fun talking with you today. Thanks for sharing the history on why we have our safety baggage that we do, reminding us of who Heinrich was. And again, hearing from yet another safety professional why it is so important to talk with employees and ask them how they do what they do, why they do what they do so we can learn from them.
00:49:10
Speaker
Yeah, it's the way to go. Well, thank you, Jill, for the time. I really had fun. Great. Thanks, Scott. And 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 even if it's you,
00:49:36
Speaker
please contact me at social at vividlearningsystems.com. Until next time, thanks for listening.