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#82: Can Safety Training Be Fun?
107 Plays3 years ago
The President of SafetyFUNdamentals, Linda Tapp, joins us to talk about her unique journey in safety. What started as a mysterious loss control job opportunity turned into years of safety experience and consulting
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Transcript
Introduction of Episode and Guest
00:00:05
Speaker
This is the accidental safety pro brought to you by HSI. This episode was recorded November 1st, 2021. My name is Jill James, HSI's chief safety officer. And today I'm joined by Linda Tapp. Linda is president of safety fundamentals.
00:00:21
Speaker
and publisher of the Safety Training Net, a monthly safety training newsletter which is available in both English and Spanish. Linda has written several books on using safety training activities to make training more effective and most recently wrote a book focusing on safety training retention scheduled to be published by the American Society of Safety Professionals in 2022.
Linda's Entry into Safety Profession
00:00:44
Speaker
Linda is also a certified safety professional and is also one of only a handful of CSPs to hold the certified professional in training development certification through the Association for Talent Development. Linda, welcome to the show. Hi, great to be here.
00:01:02
Speaker
Well, Linda, I'm excited to hear your story on how it is you got into this lovely land of all things health and safety. How did you find yourself in this profession?
00:01:17
Speaker
I think like many people I never knew it existed until it found me. I started off as a undergraduate at Drexel in Philadelphia as a biology major and if you know Drexel it's a co-op school which means that you go to school for six months and then you work for six months and you do that for five years so you graduate you know year after most of your friends
00:01:39
Speaker
but it's it's worth it in the end you get out with 18 months of experience and for my co-op assignments I worked for Arco Chemical Company and my job was there was a toxicologist assistant which really meant that I just did tons of research for the toxicologists that were working on the hazard communication standard which had only recently been out so
Environmental Insurance and Education
00:02:01
Speaker
Arco really had to go and do an MSDS for all of their products. So they had a whole group of students who did the grunt work, which provided the packets of info to the toxicologist. So that was kind of my first taste to it. I still didn't really realize that safety was a thing. That was part of the Arco's EHS division, but still didn't click at all.
00:02:23
Speaker
Um, then looking to graduate, you know, back in those days, companies would come and put up notices on bulletin boards when they had job openings. There was, there was nothing online, you know? Uh, right, right, right. And as you're, as you're saying that about job, so there's two things that have dated both you and I in terms of how long we've been in this field. One, the first was MSDS. So for any of our, so for any of our listeners who are new ish.
00:02:51
Speaker
to the health and safety profession, that's what an SDS was called before. Before, so MSDS. And then yes, the old fashioned job board where people like hung up job things. So please continue, yeah. You'd have to run to that job board and hope you saw the announcement in time.
00:03:09
Speaker
A company came and the announcement was very vague and said it's a new company and any science and engineering majors could apply for this, you know, mysterious job. So, you know, I knew I didn't want to work in a laboratory and working for Arco was all, you know, office based. You know, I considered science stuff. I didn't have to be in a lab.
00:03:27
Speaker
So I applied and interviewed and found out it was for an environmental insurance company and they were looking for lost control representatives. So I still had no idea what that was and lost control still confuses so many people when you think about what lowered lost control means.
00:03:42
Speaker
I thought, wow, this sounds good. It's not in the lab. And it actually paid more than many of the other bio jobs, which were very low level technician jobs. So I started working for this company. I was the sixth employee, which is kind of crazy. There were two of us right out of school. And that's another story about me and the guy they both
00:04:02
Speaker
offered jobs from that class, offering him 8,000 more a year than me, but that's another path to go down. But that's, I joined this company, the only female, six of us, eventually grew to about 20 people, but it was formed, if you remember, this is going to date us to Jill, the AHERA standards. Do you remember those? So it was kind of formed in response to AHERA, which
00:04:24
Speaker
for people who might not know what that is it's the asbestos standards and all of a sudden there are contractors popping up everywhere to remove asbestos mostly in schools but everywhere and a lot of those jobs required insurance so they they had this pack of us that would go out to job sites meet with these asbestos contractors and see what safety procedures they had in place so that was my the bulk of my job in the beginning
00:04:49
Speaker
As part of that job, my director boss said, hey, we want you to take NIOSH 582. And that's very specific to it. I believe it doesn't exist anymore, but it was a program to sample and evaluate asbestos fibers. So he thought to give us some more street cred, I guess, out on the job sites, we would all be NIOSH 582 certified. So went to this NIOSH 582 class, which was held at Temple in Philadelphia, which is where I'm from.
00:05:15
Speaker
And the instructor of the class started talking to me and said, hey, you know, we have a brand new master's in environmental health program that starts tonight. Why don't you come? So then it was that easy. I was like, okay, I think he was really desperate for students because he had not seen my undergrad grades, which were not good. I probably wouldn't have gotten if it was a normal application procedure.
00:05:38
Speaker
You know, right out of school, it was three months after I graduated and I started going down there two nights a week and in four years ended up with a master's in environmental health. But some of those classes, you know, it was toxicology, epidemiology, all the traditional things, also had one safety class and that kind of opened my eyes to, well, this is a whole thing that people do. This is a profession. So I started, you know, I spent three years with the insurance company, but really wanted to move into manufacturing
Transition to Pharmaceutical Industry
00:06:05
Speaker
So I could get really deep into certain areas and not just be kind of a, you know, fly in safety person at the construction site because I didn't see those asbestos contractors more than once or twice generally. So after three years, I did move to pharmaceutical industry in my first traditional safety supervisor role. And from there, just stayed. Wow.
00:06:25
Speaker
And so when you were working in the insurance industry as loss control person, yeah. And so that was specific to, in support of the asbestos abatement industry at that time. Okay. So you didn't necessarily get to see all kinds of different work environments, like a lot of, yeah.
00:06:46
Speaker
All the best disguise and most of those guys knew, you know, less about safety than I did. We were all kind of like, okay, I just started setting up on standards and trying to see what they knew. And those guys really formed really quickly. It was a big money making opportunity for them. There were so many schools, especially in New Jersey where I was based.
00:07:03
Speaker
um that were doing tons of work but we ended up flying you know all over the country to see contractors like non-stop because everyone needed insurance so it was really successful business for them you know of course they went out of business since then but they uh you know it was really really a big deal and then they kind of spun into lead abatement in the end because i think they saw the asbestos stuff dying. So did you ever figure out why loss control was the name of the job?
00:07:28
Speaker
Yeah, eventually it's like, well, my boss had said, you know, you need to get your ALCM, which, you know, if you're familiar with insurance certifications, it's Associate in Loss Control and Management, which I did take. It's five tests. It's similar to the ARM, which many more people have. That's Associate in Risk Management, which is only three tests.
00:07:47
Speaker
And unfortunately, again, the institutes for insurance who offer those stopped offering the ALCM. So I rarely even put that down anymore because so many people have no idea what that even is. So the ALCM was a really good education as well. And the whole insurance side of things, which, you know, as exciting as it sounds that you had to learn all those insurance.
00:08:07
Speaker
words and contracts and terminology. So my boss said I had to get that. He said you should also do CIHCSP, which I did one of those and then also told me I should get my master's and I did that as well. And he also told me to join ASSP. So he was very prescriptive in what he wanted in his lost control people.
00:08:25
Speaker
with the eight thousand dollars a year yes with with well i did i did call him out on it and did get the same amount in the end so it was a big risk honestly and i tell people that because you know back then it wasn't that uncommon to get paid less and i desperately needed a job and the risk of him not offering me a job at the end was was really scary and i
00:08:45
Speaker
paid for school myself. I had billions of loans. I had worked two, three jobs during school. So the thought of me just saying, oh, I don't want to work for a while was not an option. So it was kind of a big deal to say, hey, I think you made a mistake. And that was his answer was, oh, it was an error in what we wrote down. It was a mistake.
00:09:04
Speaker
okay we're all happy now so way to advocate for yourself you're all happy and you know as you know how most races go it's a percentage of what you make you know every year increase so you're starting off way low and you know you never catch up if you don't start at the same amount that's right that's right way to advocate for yourself so you moved from and and for those who followed you um so you moved right into pharmaceutical industry
00:09:31
Speaker
Way different animal in terms of regulatory landscape. Yeah. What was that like? I mean, you can't you came in with all these with all this cred now I'm and certifications. Yeah, I did and it was it was a good I say it was a good spin job because to sell myself as being someone who could work in that industry.
00:09:48
Speaker
having been just with asbestos contractors was a little bit of a repackaging of yourself. But I still had to know all the standards and insurance. I still had to talk to all different levels of employees down from the construction worker who didn't finish high school to the CEOs of these very large construction companies sometimes. So I could use a lot of those skills from that first job and package them for the pharmaceutical. It was great interviews, got along great with people.
00:10:16
Speaker
So I think it was really a lot of the, just the chemistry with the people I interviewed with there that helped me get that job.
Consulting Career and UK Experience
00:10:24
Speaker
How long did you stick in, stick with, or I guess, you know, what did you learn from the pharmaceutical industry? I learned it was a lot different than construction. You know, it's a lot different as far as just
00:10:36
Speaker
how much more serious people were with listening to the rules. Honestly, the construction was a little eye-opening with trying to, you know, especially the sites I went to, there was nothing else around. Usually it was abandoned school buildings very often, so there wasn't a lot of oversight from anyone. Not like pharmaceutical, they had all kinds of inspections for everybody. And I also saw a pharmaceutical that sometimes
00:10:59
Speaker
The pharmaceutical, the CGMPs they're called the procedures or the policies and rules conflict sometimes with safety procedures. Like, you have to use a certain levels of alcohol and pharmaceutical and the safety side of me was like, no, no, you can't do that. So, you know, that was that was fun. Also, just learning a lot about pharmaceutical industry, which gets a bad rap.
00:11:19
Speaker
very often, but just seeing how much time and money goes into the research side, it helps you understand a little bit how they have to charge for, you know, so much more stuff. So I got to see that business side of it, which I did really start to appreciate. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, I had I worked in support of pharmaceutical industry for a while as well. And it was like, yeah, it was very eye opening, particularly the numbers of procedures that are written. It was just like, Oh, my gosh, she's like,
00:11:49
Speaker
You think safety has a lot? Yeah. And expiration dates. I tell my kids, because they're always like, you can't take that aspirin that's expired. I'm like, no, it's fine. Because I know from then how much longer things work or things are good after that expiration date stamped on it. Because there's a safety factor added. And so I'm always like, no, it's fine. It's fine. It's fine. So I do pick that up there. So what happened after pharmaceutical industry?
00:12:16
Speaker
Well, pharmaceutical, which I loved, I loved manufacturing. I had a chance to move to London with my husband and he came home one day and said, my friend wants to know if we want to go to London for a couple of years for his job.
00:12:32
Speaker
I was honestly a little devastated at first because I loved this job. I could imagine me being there forever and I had to quit this job and follow him across the ocean basically. So I ended up doing that and had to figure out what I was doing at that point. And that's when I started thinking about consulting and looking into consulting a little bit, but nothing really serious until I got there. So is this where the story that has a turn that has something to do with the cheesecake
00:13:01
Speaker
Like, so I always, just for our listeners, our podcast guests, and I always have a conversation prior to the recording, but if they mentioned something that sounds interesting, like, oh, I've got to talk about a cheesecake. I'm like, don't tell me now because I want to hear about it. So this is, this is where I get to, this is where I get to hear about it. Yeah, the cheesecake story is kind of famous now, but
00:13:26
Speaker
I had gone to the same year, right after I found out that we were moving to London, I had gone to ASSP's annual conference and it was in Las Vegas that year and I was there as my chapter's delegate because I was my very first volunteer opportunity so I went to this conference and there was a networking event
00:13:44
Speaker
around the pool at the hotel one night. And you know, it's always hard to go to those things when you don't know anybody and you're by yourself. But I went out there and I had all my name tag and it had the town I lived in at the time, which was Cherry Hill, New Jersey. And some older gentleman just came up and said, hi, I grew up in Cherry Hill. So struck up a conversation. Your name tags are a great way to start conversations with people. Had this great conversation with them.
00:14:08
Speaker
He talked about all of his favorite places in Cherry Hill, in particular this one diner that he used to go to all the time when he was younger, and he mentioned how much he loved their cheesecake. So that's where the cheesecake first made its appearance in the story. So he asked where I worked. I told him I had a job then at a pharmaceutical company, but I was moving in a few months to London and didn't know what I was going to do there. I didn't have any connections there.
00:14:32
Speaker
and really didn't have another job after that time. So he said, you know, I know some people, give me your card and I'll see what I can do. Or send me your resume, I'll see what I can do. So he gave me his card, said goodbye, he walks away. And then after he walks away, I look at his business card and it says he's Vice President of GlaxoSmithKline, like for the world, globally.
00:14:54
Speaker
And I'm like, wow, I couldn't have bumped into somebody randomly if I had tried to. That is awesome. And you were working in the pharmaceutical industry. And he said, oh, I might know some people. So I didn't realize who he knew exactly. So I thought, all right, I want to mail him my resume the next day, right after the conference. And I didn't really
00:15:16
Speaker
think much about how this would work out but I wanted to make an impression so I went to this diner and got the cheesecake and I nailed my resume on top of the cheesecake to him um and you know regular mail but there wasn't the the shipping options there are now either so I remember buying tons of ice and styrofoam and packing up this cheesecake myself and putting my my resume on the top of the cheesecake and sending it off to his office in North Carolina
00:15:41
Speaker
So, I thought... Did you seal here what you just made? It was like, it was sitting in a nice envelope on top of the box. I thought, all right, he's either gonna get this and think I'm crazy or he's gonna like this cheesecake. So, I didn't hear from him for weeks. I mean, for not even weeks, for months. I never heard anything. Never heard thank you. Never heard I got it. Nothing. So, I thought, oh my gosh, he thinks I'm this crazy person that he met at a pool. He mailed him a cheesecake.
00:16:07
Speaker
And then I started thinking maybe he didn't go back home, maybe he's on vacation and it's like this rotting cheesecake on his desk in his office. All the stories you made. All the stories. Never heard of it. And I still don't know what happened to the cheesecake, honestly. He never mentioned it again. But I did get to London that October. I was there about five days and my phone rang and it was somebody from one of his plants saying, we need to hire you as a consultant.
00:16:31
Speaker
at one of our UK plants. I'm like wow and then it happened about five or six more times so he spread my resume to all of his plants in the UK. I ended up consulting there for the first time. I ended up working for so many plants which led to me working for other pharmaceutical plants in London as well and throughout UK actually and that was that's how I got in the consulting field because of this cheesecake which I still don't know if it got eaten but it's the crazy
00:16:59
Speaker
you know, kind of take a risk to make an impression. And I'm sure it made some kind of impression, but I ended up with this really amazing connections and opportunity once I got to the UK. Oh, that is so interesting. And that's great. That's great. That's an excellent story. So when you got to the UK, what was the regulatory landscape like for you there? I mean, was it
00:17:25
Speaker
I mean, is it US-based companies, so they're adhering to things from the US, but then were there more things, or how did your learning curve on that go? It really was very fortunate because I was from the US that I was all-knowing, because I think our regulations at the time
00:17:46
Speaker
I don't know how they are now, were definitely a step ahead of the ones they had there. And it was kind of like, well, you're the American. What do you say? So like, okay, this is, this is not a bad situation to be in, but I did learn their regulations when I worked on it, but you're right. They all had to comply with the US regulations. And that's what they were struggling with because they didn't have the people there that had that experience. So.
00:18:09
Speaker
Yeah, it worked out really, really well. I really enjoyed it. I still love pharmaceuticals because it's all the same. Like before you get into it, you really get deep into how things are made. And I love that part of the whole business. So that turned you on to the wild world of consulting.
00:18:28
Speaker
And apparently it's stuck. It's stuck and part of that's because I did end up moving around a bit, which we had talked about also. I'd come back from the UK and I was going to keep consulting and went back to my pharmaceutical company for a short while.
00:18:44
Speaker
And started having babies, which is the big curveball in there. So I had my first one, went back and worked another six months, and then had my second one 15 months later. And after the second one, the company wasn't extremely flexible. There wasn't work from home or flexible hours then at all. And that's when I decided to start doing my own thing from home.
00:19:05
Speaker
And so you then decided I've been a successful consultant and I'm gonna like dive headlong into this entrepreneurial thing. Yeah I really got the bug like I really I really enjoyed making my own hours especially when I had and you know ends up with three kids having three kids and just being able to
00:19:24
Speaker
To do what I wanted to do, like, I could work in the middle of the night and do I had to do during the day and it's in the same thing I do now. I will take 2, 3 hours middle of the days off to now and I'll go hike and come back and then work at night. So the flexibility was really key for me. When I decided to make that move, you know, the other crazy story I'll share with you quickly about the flexibility when I had my 3rd child is my son.
00:19:47
Speaker
who just turned 21 this summer. He was a baby and I was doing one day a week for an excavation contractor as a consultant where I would call them Friday mornings and they'd give me a list of all of their current sites and I would randomly pick which ones to show up at and inspect. So didn't want to let those guys know that I was pregnant to begin with and had to do these job site visits. So
00:20:09
Speaker
I would you know get in my Jeep and most of them same thing were middle of nowhere fields it wasn't like buildings or anything and I would just drive out there walk up check out their site maybe do a toolbox talk for them and then drive away so up until about a month before I had my son I was doing that in a very big windbreaker very big jacket and they never ever knew I was pregnant the entire time they had no idea
00:20:33
Speaker
And even after I had him, he was maybe a month old and I was still breastfeeding. I took him to some of these job sites with my mother in the backseat of the car and I would leave him and her in the car. They wouldn't see where the car was parked at all. I'd get out, walk, do my thing, go back and go to the next job site. So that's the flexibility that consoling really allowed me to have.
00:20:56
Speaker
and the amazing balance. Yeah, I don't know if it was a balance, it was kind of insane, but still, yeah, it's flexibility is really what made it work.
Innovative Safety Training Methods
00:21:05
Speaker
I have similar stories when I was pregnant doing, as an ocean investigator, doing inspections in my really, really large bibbed overhauls with my steel tow boots on.
00:21:19
Speaker
And yeah, I'm sitting with contractors and asking if they have anything that they're concerned about, any worries that they have on this, you know, what keeps you up at night? And instead I got asked on a date. Oh, lovely. Pregnant. Pregnant. Pregnant. Yeah. Yeah. So yes, we have, you know, safety, health and safety professionals have lots of interesting stories and the females among us have, you know, probably an added layer.
00:21:49
Speaker
Let's just put it that way. Yeah. So is this about the time that Safety Fundamentals was born or like, yeah, what were you calling yourself then? It started off Crown Safety was kind of started in the UK. It's why it has the crown. That was when I started doing the traditional consulting.
00:22:08
Speaker
and it came back and I did tons of traditional consulting you know lots of crawling around machinery top of roofs all that good stuff which I really enjoyed for a while and now I feel like I'm kind of old and don't want to be crawling under machines anymore but so I don't really miss that part of it so I did that at least 16 to 20 years somewhere in that range and I eventually started to
00:22:29
Speaker
spin off into just the product creation side, which is what I do now. So I think maybe four years ago, I officially stopped the crown safety part and then focus mostly on the safety fundamentals part, which is the product creation stuff and did those simultaneously for most of the time. I think I didn't spin that off as a second company until I was doing the regular consulting for maybe six or seven years and decided to do a little differently. So yeah, so that's when it started.
00:22:56
Speaker
Yeah so tell us tell us more about safety fundamentals and and you know so for people who can't see your logo with your company the emphasis is on the word fun and um yeah so I know I get some flack for sometimes because you know some people think safety should be all serious all the time and I have have many people say oh it's not fun how can you say it's fun but
00:23:20
Speaker
You know, they're not the people who need to use what I'm offering. Right. So you said the company is about product creation and, of course, fun.
00:23:34
Speaker
So yeah, how did you come up with this concept? Where was this born? And of course, what is it? I can tell you how it kind of hatched was with my two-day, I was still Crown Safety and I was doing a three-day supervisory leadership class for a chemical company in Kearney, New Jersey. And I always tell people if you don't know Kearney, they'd actually film some of the Sopranos there. So it's a pretty industrial kind of area. Some pretty rough guys work in that area too.
00:24:03
Speaker
So I went to do this three-day, as I call it, touchy feely class, which a lot of these guys don't like because it was all safety supervisor, leadership skills, things like how to get feedback and how to talk to your people and things like that that they didn't really want to hear. So it was a three-day mandatory class as well. So I knew what I was going into. I knew that they were going to be a little difficult. So I started doing some research and found this whole idea of accelerated learning. And there's a whole
00:24:31
Speaker
books on everything you can imagine on accelerated learning principles. And part of that is including fun, making people actually enjoy their time.
00:24:41
Speaker
in a training class. So read through this book, got some ideas, did some more research and came up with a whole bunch of activities to include in this three-day training class. So show up for the class. And again, it's another little risky idea to just start off doing activities with this group of people. But, you know, they walked in and I had soprano guys and I joke and they look just like the soprano. They look like soprano standbys, like
00:25:05
Speaker
big guys, arms crossed, you know, across their chest, sit there and instantly pull the newspaper up in front of their face and, you know, just not wanting to be there. And I'm, you know, very chipper. We're going to do an activity every 15 minutes for the next three days, you know, so I was ready to have it not be accepted at all and started going through all these activities.
00:25:24
Speaker
It went really, really well. And after the first or second break, I had a few of them come up to me and say, you know, we're really, really thankful to be able to do something because they expected to sit there for three days straight and just, you know, do nothing. Just listen and just be expected to absorb information. And that's one of the big things in accelerated learning is that it's, you know, learning is not passive. It's all the act of creation of, you know, learning and knowledge.
00:25:49
Speaker
so they have to be involved if they're actually going to understand it so it was all activity based for three days it's exhausting as a trainer to try to do that and tons of preparation honestly to set up that much of it for that long of a class but it went really well uh ended up doing it for
00:26:05
Speaker
I don't know how many other of their plants, maybe 60 more of their plants in Canada and the US, they went that well. And we did those activities everywhere. So it went really, really well. I started talking about it at conferences and so many people were telling me, you need to share this. You need to put it in a book. You need to teach me how to do this. So I really started not doing as much of it myself, but really developing the products to help other people be able to do the same thing and be able to use those activities.
00:26:32
Speaker
Wow. And so, I mean, Takako, a maiden voyage with the... I know, another big risk, right? Right. I mean, you did that for three days every 15 minutes. 15 minutes at least. We had activities, lots and lots of... And then rolling that out across the country in Canada was really tricky as well, just getting materials to people. It was a big logistics exercise as well.
00:26:57
Speaker
But it went really well. I just started doing it everywhere then and didn't even think twice that people would accept it. You know, I speak on the topic at a lot of conferences and people will say to me, oh, that would never work with my workforce. That'll never fly. My guys wouldn't do that. And I think just have an open mind and give it a try because you'll be hopefully, and I think so, pleasantly surprised.
00:27:18
Speaker
So can you give our audience an idea of like one activity so we kind of just can picture this in our heads or along? Yeah, really simple one. One really simple one. I have a whole book on these called safety sequence activities and any kind of activity, any kind of safety procedure that requires a specific set of steps. So you think like putting off all protection harness or cleaning up a spill or using a fire extinguisher, which you know, as example, I'll give is a very simple one.
00:27:49
Speaker
I have each of those, I started off having each of those steps written out on a card and you make a set of each steps, even something as simple as an index card. So all of this stuff is really cheap too. There's nothing fancy. They can hand write index cards with the different steps. So say for how to use a fire extinguisher, you have seven steps and you write it out, give each set a card and you're mixed up.
00:28:09
Speaker
and then you have them have to stand in line each holding the card in the correct step you know faster than the other groups can do that so for fire extinguisher that's really easy i do a 10 step one for lockout tag out that that gets really hairy because they always argue over it which i love because
00:28:25
Speaker
It's like, wow, I'm having them argue over safety. This is great. But they argue over one or two steps in who's right and who's wrong. And then if their order is not right, they have to try again. And it also throws in the competitiveness. They get to race as against the clock. It brings in a lot of the unification principles as well. So I started using that with the lockout-tagout one.
00:28:45
Speaker
Not just the words, that's where I started using images. And I know we've talked a little bit about the image-based safety stuff I do. I started adding images instead of the text, or sometimes both. So when you're showing a lockout-tagout procedure, you know, 10 different illustrations of someone doing the lockout-tagout steps.
00:29:02
Speaker
And then, you know, mix them up the order, give them to the different teams so we have people work in teams as well and that's that's for accelerated learning reasons. And then have them, you know, basically get out of their seats and move around and stand in line in the correct order, which makes them get up to which is always a good thing to add the
00:29:19
Speaker
the physical part of it and they have to work with each other to come up with the correct order. So with the images you know we've talked about how a lot of people don't have great reading and writing skills and we think it's just people that don't have English as their native language but it's also it's also you know a huge illiteracy problem which we don't even think about and it's
00:29:40
Speaker
If you don't have a fifth grade reading level, you're technically illiterate. So that runs into a lot of people. So the images help everybody. It's always a good idea to throw images in there and not junk images. I always tell people with PowerPoint, you don't put like a cutesy thing in there just to have an image on your slide because everything should have meaning.
00:29:59
Speaker
related to the content. So the image-based safety sequence activities are really effective because if they can't understand the text and they can at least see what I'm talking about in the image without being embarrassed to say, hey, I don't get this.
00:30:13
Speaker
So you said that people were, you know, you, you did this for a while and people are like, you should write a book. You should develop this. So did you? The first one was I think 2006, which was a long time ago now, which is, um, that was the safety fundamentals, you know, 77 games and activities was the very first one that,
00:30:33
Speaker
that I did and it just kind of spun off like I mentioned the safety sequence. People liked that one activity so now there's a whole book of just that activity and you know just the other ones that came after that are more themed based. There's um safety latte rea is like a safety bingo game which many people know but latte rea is a mexican bingo game that uses images so it goes back again to the the image based safety and there's a whole book of those as well too so the all the books after that first one really were more more themed
00:31:01
Speaker
as far as specific collections of activities.
00:31:04
Speaker
Well, congratulations on being published too. Thanks. Yeah, it's fun. I love to write. So that's actually a really fun part of my job. Yeah. And so are you, are you, I mean, I know that in the introduction, we talked about the fact that you've, you're, you're scheduled in 2022 to release a book that you wrote, um, on behalf of the American society safety professionals. But, um, I mean, you can tell us about that book if you want, but in terms of like your creative process now, are you still producing
00:31:34
Speaker
um books yeah exactly and other content like yeah what does work look like for you today and now i'm i'm really you know i mentioned also that i'm doing this newsletter now that the safety training net which is you know full of all of these resources usually an activity or two like i mentioned there's sample stuff in all of these newsletters there is a you know a free version a paid version and i kicked off the spanish version two months ago because
00:31:59
Speaker
the Hispanic Safety Professionals Group from ASSP was strongly encouraged me to do that because there aren't that many resources in Spanish. You know, there really are. We start looking at it. It's really not that much out there. So for not
00:32:15
Speaker
a ton of money. I still have to pay a translator because my Spanish is nowhere near good enough to write this myself. I can do the Spanish version of it. So that just kicked off recently and it's the same newsletter that everybody else gets, but the activities are all translated. Everything's available in Spanish too. So Linda, who is the consumer of your books and materials and the newsletter?
Involvement with ASSP and Networking
00:32:42
Speaker
They're all safety people, like all over the world. Like, I just got a message from someone in Venezuela, which was great, was really made my day. Because, you know, sometimes you send this stuff out there and you don't hear back a lot, like if it helped people, but at conferences, people always, you know, will find me and say, I love this activity, this work's got great, so I love the feedback part of it. I just heard back from this person who said he met me 15 years ago at an AIJ conference and he's been using this stuff since then. So that part's always really good to hear.
00:33:10
Speaker
Yeah, awesome. And so the project that you're working on for ASSP.
00:33:16
Speaker
Yes, that is a book mostly on attention, retention, and transfer because transfer is the forgotten piece a lot of the times where we do the training and first of all, we hope they remember it, which there are some things you can do to help them remember it and not just sign a paper at the end of the class and leave, but then actually be able to use it when they need it. That's the transfer part and that's missing in so many places and
00:33:40
Speaker
you know, we don't measure that very often either to see if they actually use it, but the transfer is really what this book is helping people to, you know, you have to plan for transfer. It doesn't happen by mistake and you can plan for it in these activities and some of the follow-up stuff and even some of the pre-class things. So the book that ASSP now has, you know, it has, I'm done with my revision, so it's in their hands now, so hopefully it's out. In 2022 is the plan that covers all of those things.
00:34:09
Speaker
Wow, congratulations. And so people who might be interested in getting their hands on that book, will they go to ASSP? Yeah, ASSP has a little bookstore tab on their website, so eventually it'll be there. But so we have to get all the other stuff done.
00:34:25
Speaker
Yeah, yeah. Awesome. As long as we're talking about ASSP, I know that you had mentioned earlier that you were a delegate and you went to your first conference, but you're still involved with ASSP. Do you want to talk about what does that look like?
00:34:41
Speaker
I've been involved for 30 some years, I guess a long time. I don't know, I've been volunteering because I just really enjoy the volunteer experience, especially I think working for myself for so long. I call them that my watercolor group. If I want to bounce an idea of someone, I have my ASSP colleagues that I will talk to. I was very involved with their consultants practice specialty for a while, which is a great group of people that would just share ideas and techniques. I learned a lot from them.
00:35:10
Speaker
and from there I ended up getting involved with ASSP's foundation and I tell people this story even though it I want to say it doesn't sound great but I one year I made a donation to ASSP I think it was like $50 and I encourage everyone to donate I'll do my little part there and as a donor I got invited to the foundation had a reception at the annual conference so
00:35:32
Speaker
you know as a consultant you want to meet people, you want to network. So I went to this reception, I walked into this reception and was just blown away by the other people in this room. They were everybody I ever wanted to meet in the safety world because they were all donors, they were all supporting the foundation so they were they were all there and we made some great connections in that group and then just started being a regular donor to the foundation and
00:35:57
Speaker
Ended up as a foundation trustee and then chair of the foundation for which I stopped, I think 2 years ago now. And then from there, I moved to the board for where I am now. I'm the finance.
00:36:08
Speaker
Oh, that is fantastic. And what a great tip for anyone who's listening. It sounds kind of weird. It's like, donate, not because you want to help people, but you want to go to reception. But I do want to help people, and I did stay on, and I still donated. But I started thinking, well, this is a great place to be. And you get to go when you make a donation.
00:36:29
Speaker
Yeah. And so are you also involved in WISE Women in Safety with ASSP? I'm a member. I've been a member a really long time. And, you know, before WISE was WISE, you know, we had to have our unofficial WISE meetings at the conference. We, you know, we put notes in the bathroom mirrors saying,
00:36:47
Speaker
because there were so few women there. Anybody want to meet? Meet at Starbucks, you know, Wednesday at 5 and we had our unofficial little get-together. So a lot of those original groups of people, there was maybe 15 or 20 of us after a few years, are still active and wise, but that's just amazing how much that group took off. Like there's such a need for people to, you know, have that place where they feel comfortable and safe asking questions and, you know, meeting other people.
00:37:13
Speaker
Yeah, right, right. And yeah, thank you for that. You were talking about 30 years or so in ASSP. I got a surprise over the weekend. I got this envelope in the mail and it was from, it was from ASSP. And I'm like, it feels like a certificate and there's like a little bump in it. What is this? And I opened it up and it said, thank you for being a member for 25 years. Here's a, here's a lapel pin. And I'm like,
00:37:43
Speaker
What? It's like time flies. How did that happen? Congratulations. Yeah, thanks. Anyway, that was cool and like, oh my gosh, it's been a long time. Regarding volunteerism, you've mentioned it a couple of times. Yeah, what do you want to say about volunteerism and career path and volunteerism in general?
00:38:10
Speaker
I think something else I always tell people in addition to ASSP, I was on BCSP's board for six years and now I'm on BCPE's board, but you don't know that when it's the board of certification and professional ergonomist. And obviously I really like board work because I keep putting my hand up and I end up on these boards. But I think there's so much value in kind of stepping at that level and seeing the big picture in things and helping to plan strategy and not just working on the day-to-day.
00:38:40
Speaker
So, you know, I encourage people to volunteer and I see these calls go out all the time that say, you know, new directors are needed new board members are needed, you know, throw your application in and so many people won't do that. They sit back and they're waiting for someone else to say, oh, I want to nominate you. You should do this, but you really just have to take control of yourself.
00:39:00
Speaker
and step up and not be afraid and not be embarrassed if you don't get picked, which no one's going to know. It's just this committee who looks at your application. But there's so many opportunities to volunteer at really high levels. And depending, even if you don't want to be a consultant, if you want to work, just the connections you make are invaluable. But people just hesitate to nominate themselves and put their arm up. When I did BCSP, I remember reading the newsletter. I said, we're looking for directors. And I thought, why not?
00:39:28
Speaker
through my name in the hat. I remember I did a lot of consulting for the Philadelphia Mint, which I love. It's heavy, heavy manufacturing. I remember being there by all the presses and getting a phone call from Roger Brower, who was their executive director at the time, saying, hey, welcome to the board.
Overcoming Challenges in Safety Leadership
00:39:44
Speaker
I was just blown away that this person was calling me to welcome me to the board. I don't know how that happened. I wasn't recommended. I didn't have anybody behind me saying, you should take her, you should do this, but I just threw my name in.
00:39:57
Speaker
I started on that board, which, you know, great, great connections working with that group of people. Again, showing up the only female with, you know, 11 guys and, you know, making my way there, getting mistaken by one of them for the secretary, which, you know, happens sometimes. Like, are you here to take notes? Oh, no. But, you know, that happens. But I just, especially younger people, just, you know, put your hand up and, you know, step in and just go for it. Yeah, right. I mean, and
00:40:24
Speaker
I mean, I don't know what the psychology of this is, but the whole imposter syndrome thing is a big deal. You know, everybody has it. Yeah, right. Yeah, regardless, regardless of age and experience, unfortunately. But yeah, really, you know, people who are listening, you have something to contribute, you have value.
00:40:49
Speaker
Absolutely. Absolutely. You're never going to be 100% ready. You have to understand, too. You read the requirements. It's like, no, you don't have to check off every single box, too. Put your hand up for that. Just try it. If you're not right, they won't select you. You can do your part by putting in your information.
00:41:08
Speaker
Yeah, this is a good part of your career path, Linda, to hear how you've involved volunteering and your entrepreneurship.
Career Planning and Resilience
00:41:19
Speaker
And I know that being an entrepreneur is kind of scary from an income perspective. And I know that you've previously mentioned something to me about multiple income streams.
00:41:32
Speaker
So for people who are into consulting or maybe thinking about it, do you want to talk about what some of those realities have been for you? Yeah, I think it's not even just consultants. I've done a lot of presentations called Mind the Gap. That's the name of it because you don't want to have a big gap in your resume or a big gap in your employment. Sometimes you can, but the longer the gap is, the harder it is to explain away sometimes.
00:42:00
Speaker
There's four really big reasons people may have this gap and it could be to leave to take care of a child. It could be taking care of an older parent, spouse, anyone who's sick. A lot of elder care with people no matter what age you are. It could be because you have an accident and you just can't work for any period of time or it could be that you're following a spouse.
00:42:20
Speaker
or a significant other somewhere, which was kind of how I started moving around the world. I think I mentioned to you after moving to London, I ended up moving to Munich and then Amsterdam, following my husband's job also, which I never could have done without having a consulting business or these other streams of income. So what the multiple streams of income really are is just you're not relying on one paycheck, to put it really simply, because imagine you go to work and the next day you suddenly lost your job. The company's out of business.
00:42:49
Speaker
You want to have something to fall back on, even if it's minor. You want to have something else lined up. The more streams of income you have, the more stable that you're going to be able to be going forward. And it could be anything. And usually these things aren't planned. I mean, the baby's obviously planned, but if you have an injury and you can't work for a year and a half,
00:43:10
Speaker
then, you know, you need something there. And I always tell people to plant your seeds before you need shade. You think that's the way I always say it because just like, you know, I'll get messages on LinkedIn and probably like many of you saying, Oh, I, can you have any jobs for me? Let's connect. You know, like they're, they're working on building these connections, you know, when they need the job because they just got laid off and you know, it doesn't work that way in, in the real world or in, in,
00:43:36
Speaker
I guess your income levels as well you need to plan for stuff before you actually need it so even if someone doesn't think they need a multiple stream of income right now it's really good to take the steps to set up you know think what you might want to call it think what you might want to do maybe
00:43:49
Speaker
begin the rough draft of whatever you want to come up with. If you have an idea for consulting Sunday, check out that domain name now and save it and renew it every year. It's like seven bucks a year, which depends on where you do it. Like there's certain things you can do to really set yourself up. So in case you have to make that pivot and start doing something different, you can do it pretty quickly. Great advice. And I think that, um,
00:44:14
Speaker
younger generations in the workplace right now are better at that than older generations. And I include myself in the older generation piece. There's so many people who have side hustles. Yeah, it's not even just safety. You know, you see it everywhere, which is, you know, it's, it's great. And the gig economy is so much more popular than it used to be. I spoke at an ASSP chapter meeting and it was all older men in 60 plus, and this was my topic for them.
00:44:40
Speaker
And, you know, actually a couple of them worked for OSHA and they're about to retire and they thought they'd be a consultant. That's fine. And we started talking about it and part of this presentation, I give people, you know, exercise to think about what they might do. We went back around the room and every single person but one wasn't going to do safety. One guy wanted to open a metery. I was like, a metery?
00:45:00
Speaker
And his whole thing was he wanted to have bees and honey and have a meter. And we spent a while talking about a meter at the safety meeting, but that was his plan for his backup plan, which was great. So it's really good to start thinking about what you would do if something were to happen. And I think with COVID, safety people are busier than ever, but imagine if it was some major crisis where all of a sudden they didn't need us anymore.
00:45:24
Speaker
Right? What else would you do to have some kind of other stream of income? And not just for the income, also for the resume gap as well. If you're out of work for six months and you create some product or do something different on your own, create some webinars, you can use that to fill in those holes also.
00:45:39
Speaker
Yeah and you know for people who are listening are thinking gosh oh my gosh another thing like is there another thing to do but one of the one of the nuggets that I that I heard you say Linda is the importance of making connections with other people.
00:45:55
Speaker
you know i mean it really is important in in our field so many of us are single operators it's important to create to you know create our own board of directors our own tribe of people our own trusted advisory group call it what you will within our professional practice that are outside of where we're currently drawing a paycheck for lots of reasons and one of them is for
00:46:20
Speaker
you know, if the bottom falls out tomorrow, you've got some friends. That's why the volunteering part, right, is so important. That's, you know, I call them my water cooler people, but that's it. I've been working by myself for so long. I know who I can go to to bounce off ideas or, you know, is this a crazy something? I shouldn't be doing like a cheesecake again. You know, there's people that I can go to and just really get a check. So when you work by yourself, especially all that volunteering is building your network and your relationships, which are really key.
Creative Process and Writing
00:46:49
Speaker
Yeah, yeah. So, Linda, you mentioned pivoting back to being an author and creating a content, a product creation person. Talk about writing. What do you love about it and what gets you inspired or how do you get inspired? You know, I just, I really, I always love to write and I think the training books I do aren't as much writing as you would think like a fiction writer would do. It's more me developing these activities
00:47:18
Speaker
and trying to explain them in a normal way to people. I just enjoy it. It's something that I've always done. I write some stuff that's not safety, but it doesn't ever get shared anywhere. I just enjoy writing. What inspires you when you're going to hatch a new idea?
00:47:42
Speaker
You know, people ask me all the time, like, where do you get your ideas? I'm a pretty creative person. I do a lot of stuff outside the safety world. I read so much stuff that's not safety related. And usually when I see something, my mind is just thinking, all right, how does this apply to safety? You know, how does this apply back to training or how can I use this in, in training? And that's where it really all comes from. Like you mentioned, you know, before we started, we're talking about scavenger hunts and
00:48:06
Speaker
Along the same lines. It's like, okay, scavenger hunt can be used for safety and house is going to work. So it's always me just trying to spin stuff. I think that I read or see and how it could have worked for us because you really have to look outside of our field to get new ideas and safety has been, you know, doing a lot of things the same way for a while. There's a lot of new stuff out there, but there's so much outside of
00:48:26
Speaker
health and safety that we can borrow from. And it's just looking at it and just curating. I spend a lot of time on Sundays, honestly, going through dozens and dozens of publications, newsletters, everything you can imagine to really look for those ideas.
00:48:43
Speaker
I do the same thing. When I'm needing to be creative, which is my favorite thing to do, it's a lot of daydreaming. You mentioned taking a three-hour break during the middle of the day to hike. That's when the daydreaming and the creativity happens for me, but I bet it's similar for you.
00:49:05
Speaker
you know, like you're processing like maybe all of those publications you just looked at. I do. And I think I was telling somebody else that I have more ideas than I could possibly ever do in my lifetime. So the key is trying to figure out what I'm not going to do, which is a little tough sometimes. But you know, if I was living another hundred years, that might work. But in reality, if you look at my list, it's like, nope, this isn't going to happen.
Volunteering and Mentoring in Safety
00:49:30
Speaker
yeah i recently started a file like an actual paper file called a million good ideas and so when these things spring to my mind i'm writing the idea down and they're like i'm putting it somewhere yeah no it's the hardest part yeah right and hopefully pull pull them out from time to time and develop them oh well linda um
00:49:56
Speaker
What else would you like to share with our audience today from any perspective? Let's see, what else would I want to share? I think if we just went back to the part I said about, you know, stepping up, I just really want to encourage people to to volunteer. You know, it's a lot easier to not let somebody else do it, you know, and complain about things and just say people should do things a different way. But we need volunteers for, you know, for everything or
00:50:25
Speaker
nothing's gonna happen or change won't get made and we won't improve. And that's for every organization. So I just really wanna encourage people to just stand in and do something. It could be short-term volunteering, it could be long-term, it could be something that takes you a couple hours a year. It doesn't have to be a three-year commitment like a board position for many people. Just really push that and just so people can be involved because you learn so much more than your day-to-day job.
00:50:51
Speaker
by volunteering things that you might never like as my as a foundation trustee i learned so much about foundations that i never would have ran into otherwise you know in my in my life so and you know you think how you can meet people and just really benefit from relationships as well as helping other people and do you volunteer outside of safety and health more short-term stuff outside my big time commitments are the
00:51:16
Speaker
and then BCPE now, but just the neighborhood stuff that's like, all right, we need people to come clean this for a couple hours, I'll do that. We need some people to do this. Those are great because it's not a long-term commitment at all. I did volunteer with another organization, Not Safety, last year, and it was kind of amazing how different they are than safety organizations. Safety people are a certain breed, I think, and working with some other groups of people and just how they think.
00:51:43
Speaker
It was very difficult, but it was a learning experience that not everyone thinks like safety people think, you know? So got that side of it and it was really uncomfortable. Like, wow, they just don't operate. This is not a linear process. What is?
00:51:58
Speaker
I just did last week I did a talk for a SSP leadership conference was titled three boards many lessons and I didn't say which boards they were but they were 10 different lessons from different boards I've served on and about half of them were good lessons and half weren't good lessons and
00:52:14
Speaker
just the way things are done in some places just blows my mind still you know just just no forethought no planning it's like let's do this okay we'll do it you know like we have no money let's do this but that's not assp assp is a highly functioning you know well-run board but just the experiences other groups have it's just it was really eye-opening to see that not everyone operates at that level yeah
00:52:37
Speaker
That sounds like an interesting talk. But yeah, before we close things out today, anything you want to talk about with regard to mentoring?
00:52:47
Speaker
Yeah, mentoring is, you know, people always say, who's your mentor? I wouldn't say I've ever had one particular mentor. I more have, like you mentioned, the team of people that I need something in a certain area of a question with a particular problem. I know who I can go to in those areas. I don't have a group I meet with all the time or somebody I've worked with for years. And I do think it's good to have that opportunity to have a mentor. I've just never had that myself. I do talk to a lot of people now.
00:53:15
Speaker
And they'd say, oh, I'm your mentee. I'm like, really? I'm old enough to mentor people now, which is kind of always surprising. But same thing, I mentor people and I do think sometimes the topic-based mentoring is better. I've talked to the consultant's practice specialty about maybe structuring their mentor mentee program that way where instead of having one person do monthly, okay, well, I can talk to this new consultant about marketing. So if you have marketing, then call me.
00:53:41
Speaker
because I may not know every single area and it's less of a time commitment as well. So I do like to approach mentoring and menting, being a mentee in that way or more need-based or specific need-based than like an overall person you go to for everything.
00:53:57
Speaker
What a great idea. Yeah, I love that, I love that. Linda, thank you so much for sharing your story today. It's been fun. As your company name suggests, it has been fun and I learned something and I'm excited to continue seeing the content that you put out to the world for the health and safety of people. Thank you so much for what you do. Thanks, thanks for having me here.
00:54:28
Speaker
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.
00:54:40
Speaker
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. 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 Linda and I. Special thanks to Naeem Jarisi, our podcast producer. And until next time, thanks for listening.