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#88: Human Resources Is Your Partner in Workplace Safety
78 Plays2 years ago
Do you work closely with your Human Resource professional? We sit down with Tiffany Castagno to talk about the benefits of safety and HR professionals collaborating in an effort to improve physical and psychological health and safety.
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Transcript
Introduction and Guest Background
00:00:06
Speaker
This is the Accidental Safety Pro brought to you by HSI. This episode was recorded February 22nd, 2022. My name is Jill James, HSI's Chief Safety Officer. My guest today is Tiffany Castagno. Tiffany is CEO and founder of Suffer, an HR consulting firm in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, supporting small and medium-sized businesses, building out their teams, programs, and cultures.
00:00:33
Speaker
where people want to stay. Tiffany has practiced human resources for 14 years and has a true passion for continuing to cultivate the evolution of human resources. Hence the name of her company, Cephyr, cultivating the evolution of professional HR.
Human-Centered Approaches in HR
00:00:50
Speaker
Tiffany uses human-centered approaches and methodologies such as active listening, diversity, equity, inclusion, and belonging. She believes in creating psychologically and physically safe and equitable spaces for people to work and connect. Tiffany is a mentor and enjoys volunteering her time in the community
00:01:09
Speaker
and is co-author of a children's book titled, Can a Zebra Change Its Stripes? A book in the series, Bruno's Amazing Adventures, with a mission to change the world one child at a time. Tiffany, welcome to the show. Thank you so much, Jill. It's an honor. I appreciate you having me.
00:01:29
Speaker
I appreciate you being here today, especially today, which, if anybody listened to the introduction of what date it is, today is palindrome day 2-22-22 on a Tuesday. And I have read in the internets that all of those twos together represent harmony and serenity.
00:01:58
Speaker
telling us to let go of negative thoughts to achieve peace and equilibrium in our lives.
00:02:05
Speaker
And for our listening audience, recently, Tiffany and I were on a webinar where we were both panelists discussing how HR and health and safety can and must work together, which is one of the things we definitely want to talk about
Career Journey and Empowerment
00:02:20
Speaker
today. So it's perfect that on today, Palindrome Day represents harmony, bringing our professional worlds together on this podcast. So thanks for bringing the synchronicity to the day.
00:02:34
Speaker
So Tiffany, before we get into all things HR and safety and being harmonious together, curious about your progression career-wise. And how did you get into HR? Is this what you always imagined you'd be doing since you were a little kid?
00:02:56
Speaker
Thank you for that open invitation. I am actually I always thought I would be an attorney and that was my lifelong dream. And now I do get to partner with legal very often and advise my clients to do the same. So that that journey has been very winding. It's been a very winding path.
00:03:18
Speaker
And that's because I started out doing medical billing and then I moved into legal billing and I thought, great, this will be an area and a way to launch my legal career. And that's not what happened because along the way, what I discovered is I wasn't really having that human centered approach that I love to bring to my work. I wasn't really getting that from the experiences I was having at work. And I wanted people to have a different employment experience.
00:03:46
Speaker
throughout my career and while I was in my legal billing career I decided to start exploring HR. The law firm that I worked at at the time had a great HR department and I saw our director of HR as a mentor and started to kind of dabble and say okay what is this all about? Got some mentorship and went back to school while I was working full-time and started to try to get some experience.
00:04:17
Speaker
That was, well, you don't have enough experience. You're too green to be doing this. No one wants to give you a chance. And so I kept honing my transferable skills, finally landed a job as an HR assistant, and then moved up from there.
00:04:33
Speaker
from a generalist, or actually before that, even a coordinator, a generalist, then moved to some business partner roles, and then my last stint in leadership as an HR manager at a tech company before I started this kind of accidental pandemic project here two years ago.
Pandemic's Impact on HR and Entrepreneurship
00:04:53
Speaker
Oh my gosh. Yeah, tell us about that. I mean, I think when we hear about success stories,
00:05:02
Speaker
that happened within the pandemic. And I know that there are definitely many of them. But let's raise that up. What did the pandemic do for you, Tiffany, professionally? I really feel like it's elevated me
00:05:20
Speaker
Because I have now this beautiful opportunity to reach across all over the world for support for my business, support for myself, coaching on the personal and professional side. That's been amazing. I've been able to build. I've always been a community builder. And so LinkedIn's been this great space to do that and get the help that I need in the business.
00:05:43
Speaker
but also just to have these great champions of my personal brand as well as the professional brand and people who were friends who I befriended during this time as I call them my 2020 gifts. Some of them came in in 2021 but truly people who are aligned with my values, who care about me as a person, who support the business and so there's several of them who've become friends and to the point that we've started doing business together and
00:06:13
Speaker
That's been great, but the resilience and the grit that you need as an entrepreneur, especially as a female entrepreneur and a woman of color, it has been just a whole new territory. And it's been a way to challenge myself out of the fear and to be able to inspire others in their human potential.
00:06:32
Speaker
Nothing like jumping in with both feet to be an entrepreneur for the first time in a pandemic. Right. Well, I mean, why not? Why not? I have always loved a challenge in breaking up the status quo. So there's that. Sounds like you've done it mightily. Congratulations on your business and being an entrepreneur. Thank you. That's fantastic. That's fantastic. So yeah, you know, if you don't mind as we kind of
00:07:00
Speaker
walk into how our worlds connect, what does supporting employers look like to you from your vantage point? You had said that as you were starting your career in medical and legal billing and working at the law firm, you just had that sort of, that ache, that knowing that you really wanted to be more human centered.
00:07:26
Speaker
So how did, how does that inform the way that you decided, you know, to approach your work, you know, because you've built this, you've built your brand, you've built your company on your own. Yeah. What's the, what's the center of the North Star for you? I'm guessing it. I'm guessing I know the answer, but I want to hear. Yeah. And the firm I worked at was,
00:07:51
Speaker
great. I worked there almost seven years and I really saw them do it right and so that was kind of the pinnacle to okay I think I want to I want to try this but what it had me do also was reflect on some of those maybe not so great experiences that I have and go well why couldn't some other people not get it right and
00:08:12
Speaker
wow this is such a stark difference in the employee experience that I've had in the past and so a lot of that has really been built on not having the greatest experiences.
Transformation of HR Practices
00:08:22
Speaker
HR as a profession and its evolution even going from transactional to transformational and I've always had this nagging feeling it was 10 plus years in the making
00:08:33
Speaker
Before starting my business that I felt like I really want to make larger impact I can only do so much at one employer and I've always been a high achiever a high performer and that served me well But I'm like there's so much more to do and being a person of faith I just really you know kind of wanted to lean into that and
00:08:53
Speaker
and to do more. And so with COVID, there was an opportunity to kind of take a step back and to say, okay, I think I want to do some things differently. I know that it's gotta be HR because I love what I do, but it needs to look differently somehow. I'm gonna take two, three months.
00:09:10
Speaker
take a little sabbatical here, figure out what I want to do, and I'll consult for some friends and family in the meantime. And I did that, and it never turned off because of COVID, because people needed lots of guidance. So COVID has been a gift to me in many ways, albeit very challenging, too. Yeah. Well, I mean, you summed that up really nicely, moving from transactional to transformational. And that's what these last two years have been for so many people. You know, we had this.
00:09:39
Speaker
Well, an opportunity to transform, right? Or sometimes force transformation. Yes.
00:09:54
Speaker
But some people were doing this leading kind of cutting edge stuff beforehand and building very deliberate cultures beforehand. And for me, that's the work where I see the most impact when we talk about transformation and the way that I operate the approaches that I bring and co-creating that with my clients. Because they've all been on this journey already and they want to be stronger brands and that's exciting for me.
00:10:22
Speaker
Yeah, so what does it what does it look like when someone engages with you today Tiffany in terms of what you know what you fulfill on your end, but that also brings you fulfillment professionally. Oh, I love that. What a powerful question.
00:10:40
Speaker
For me, it's important that I align with my client's values. And so we are a match for each other when we're able to, one, not ruin people. I don't work with people who desire to ruin their teams or who won't be open to ideas. Every single client
00:10:59
Speaker
across different industries, sectors, states, they're all in different places on their journey and so I have to respect that and not come in and try to put them into the box. Of course I have frameworks but for me and what works best for my clients and what I can deliver is being able to have this co-created process to give them that freedom and flexibility to empower them along the journey and my approach is always very much one of active listening, of
00:11:27
Speaker
being able to take it, take all the things that they're giving me and pull it all together strategically, but also thinking about it from a diversity equity inclusion and belonging lens. Those considerations that they may not see and that process just works beautifully. So you use the term active listening. If that sounds like something new to our listening audience, do you mind talking about what that is? It sounds like
00:11:57
Speaker
you know, something that's useful and important for all of us. Yes. Yes. As humans, I mean, relationships are built on our ability to connect with each other and our ability to have this kind of curiosity. That serves me well too. And when clients are curious, it makes us an even better mix. But so many times people listen to respond. I'm sure, you know, your audience, you have heard that.
00:12:27
Speaker
and we're so hardwired to drive results because that's how we've been socially conditioned versus to really understand and you miss those those moments of impact and potential empathy when you're not listening uh not to respond but really taking in what the person is saying listening to you know the inflection of their voice watching their body language
00:12:51
Speaker
understanding how they're expressing themselves and the words they use our language matters and so for me that that's always how I get the depth of a relationship because I will remember things or I'll know to write something down that was significant to that person if they're mentioning it it probably was significant whether that's on the personal side or the work side and that really allows us to
00:13:15
Speaker
to expand our horizons when we're working with people or as a friend, as a family member. So I just encourage people to really tune into what people are saying, just like you would, you know, a news show or your favorite music. And we forget that sometimes. Yeah, yeah. And so sometimes are you teaching people active listening skills in your work?
00:13:38
Speaker
I actually sometimes am. Sometimes I don't approach it. I don't directly come out and say that, but it's the same as my DIB work where we don't necessarily have to talk about it, but it's there. And that's, it's a part, it's baked right into my approach and my methodology. So I was actually out, actually did my first in-person sales visit since I've had the business today earlier. Wow. Yeah. That was something I'm like,
00:14:03
Speaker
I can watch somebody like tapping their hands. You don't usually get on their lap. You don't usually get to see that. And the energy that's there, right? Like when you're actively listening, you're just fully engaged and immersed. And I am such a person of energy. So I draw on that.
00:14:20
Speaker
And so they were asking me, you know, as part of these, this training that we're talking about, you know, is this part of something, you know, can you teach people like the people at the workplace are trained to listen, but there's a different level of that. And so I'm listening to the owner talk to me about what it means to him and what his vision is and his directors underneath him.
00:14:46
Speaker
And, you know, asking me like, well, how does this kind of work in practice? They know what they think they want, but how do you actually say to someone, you know, teach them to be empathetic or to listen for these things? And I'm like, there are ways, there are ways. And you connect a process into the mission, vision, and values. What's important to those employees? What's important to the customers? And it becomes this whole kind of pillar of success, if you will.
00:15:17
Speaker
What you're framing up right now resonates with me as a health and safety professional and I'm guessing that it's resonating with our audience too.
Aligning HR and Safety
00:15:27
Speaker
This is a connection point for definitely our professional practices. Health and safety professionals who are successful, many of us will talk about the connections we've made with human beings, how much time we spend
00:15:43
Speaker
connecting with employees to build trust so that people can feel psychologically safe knowing that you know their lives are on the line every day at work regardless of regardless of where we work we all have risks and exposures but in terms of you know the the work that health and safety people do in order for us to be successful our employees need to know that
00:16:08
Speaker
they're cared for that they belong that they can they can have they can have trust and so having those skills that you're talking about with active listening and the other things that i know you want to talk about as well with diversity equity inclusion and belonging it all ties together and these just seem like such a great way for our two professions to work together because we're both looking for the same thing
00:16:34
Speaker
Absolutely, absolutely. It's one of the things that I loved about being on the panel with you and our conversation since. It's great when you see that people don't put these professions into a silo and when they really leverage all of these great alignments that you're describing.
00:16:51
Speaker
Yeah, yeah, you know, I've, I think you and I may have talked about this on the panel that we that we did together. But you know, a big catch phrase in in my health and safety world is safety culture. And I just don't like that term at all. Because it's so siloing. It's like
00:17:14
Speaker
Ooh, the safety people have their own separate culture. And what you were just talking about with your conversation with your client today was, you know, building that culture into their mission, vision, and values. And so, you know, why would you build separate cultures, right? It doesn't make any sense.
00:17:32
Speaker
Tiffany, can you talk more about how you incorporate and work with employers, particularly on the diversity, equity, inclusion, and belonging piece? What does that look like in practice? How do you help people who maybe not considered that before?
00:17:53
Speaker
Yeah, I feel, thank you for that question. I definitely feel that with my clients, they're all, they're on the different parts of their journey. Some are farther along than others, and they each have different needs in that respect. And that in and of itself is diversity. And so helping them understand how you shape your policies, how you collect information from your employees,
00:18:21
Speaker
what you do with that information and what action comes of that how self-aware you are as a leader all makes a difference how your team you know connects with each other are your suppliers diverse do you have an open mind as a sub how do your customers describe you and for me as a business owner that is very very important so i love hearing my customers describe and being attuned to how their own clients perceive them
00:18:46
Speaker
that to me is so important because it tells you something. It paints a picture even if there's a struggle with an employee where maybe there's a performance issue and it's now gotten to the point of the client and there's some performance that needs to be managed. How you do that in a respectful way? Do you discover where maybe there were some errors? Was it a process error? Because as humans we're so quick to
00:19:12
Speaker
The way that we look at failure and to project failure onto people versus saying, let's take some moments of curiosity here. Let's understand what maybe went wrong, how maybe this person wasn't supported. Did we clarify the role, the process, the procedure? And just even looking at policies and handbooks and things of that nature and change management,
00:19:36
Speaker
I'm always trying to explore with my clients, do you feel this is equitable? Are there pieces you feel are missing? And their insight and input is very important to me in the process because I may have more experience than some of them do in that area, but it doesn't mean that they don't have the business experience that I need to pull along in the process.
00:19:57
Speaker
it's a very very fluid process but it works well when they're engaged in the process and when they're open to some suggestions that may not be popular sometimes. Right I mean and what you're what you're bringing up particularly around policies you know those of us in the health and safety seats my gosh we have
00:20:19
Speaker
tons of policies that we work with. From just a compliance perspective, policies, programs, standard operating procedures, all of that stuff, the HR profession has the same thing. And so why not partner with your HR professional where you work to do the things that Tiffany's talking about? To really examine some of those processes and are they inclusive? What other lens can we be looking
00:20:48
Speaker
at this through other than the standard way we've always done things. Oh, the way we've always done things. Don't you really? I'm nervous. Yeah, it is. It is. It's like kryptonite. It's terrible.
00:21:09
Speaker
Yes, yes. And onboarding is another one. That's another opportunity. Really, when you look at your recruitment, your attraction, engagement, retention, and under those pillars, really, you know, don't just hire someone for what they look like. Hire them for how you think they can perform. What's their potential? What are their capabilities? How, you know, how do they stack against
00:21:35
Speaker
other people with, you know, similar or maybe even dissimilar being open to those qualities, those skills, those experiences and backgrounds that people bring and people forget that in the onboarding process that you can really do some damage in that if you're not deliberate.
00:21:55
Speaker
Yeah, that's a great point. I mean, and it's definitely one of the places where our professions cross over. Like, I think it's an easy place for people to think about that. Like, oh, yeah, onboarding. We do safety training. We do our HR training. But how can the two professionals work together to support that employee and get them off on the right start? Yeah. Do you have suggestions in that particular area, Tiffany?
00:22:25
Speaker
things that I love the most is talking about creating an onboarding plan. So many times it's like, okay, check the box. We got the person. We feel like they're the good person. We maybe did our comp study. We maybe looked at the role and responsibilities before we put it out and did a full job analysis. By the way, those are all pro tips. Do that before you post it. So you make sure that it's a realistic preview and that it's aligned. Then, you know,
00:22:55
Speaker
Thinking about okay, what is the experience versus people love checklist. I love them, too However, people are not We're not robots. We don't you know, there's so much more depth to us and so we require conversation and nurturing versus we like experiences versus to be like I
00:23:16
Speaker
All right. Okay. We talked about your benefits. We've shown you where the bathroom is. This is your boss. You have some weekly meetings. Okay. Here's your training that you're going to do. Now go sit in this corner. You really want to be touching base with folks before they start.
00:23:32
Speaker
to say, you know, hey, here's a little bit of extra parking information. Oh, look, here's some here's some swag we've sent you. Your manager is going to connect with you. Here is your your first, you know, week or two weeks of an outline of what that looks like. And
00:23:49
Speaker
Whether or not that's done before they come into the door, I always recommend that people have, my favorite is a 30, 60, 90 plan. What's gonna happen? Because if you're hiring for someone, I hope that you know what's expected of them for the first 90 days.
00:24:04
Speaker
You can easily say in the first two weeks, here's what you can kind of expect. That way they're understanding it and they feel like you've been prepared for them. They don't feel like it's been hasty. I once had where I didn't have like a desk for like three weeks. They're like, oh, sorry. And it can happen, right? But you don't have all your tools or equipment. Sometimes I didn't have all the passwords or the computers.
00:24:28
Speaker
that's not a great experience for someone who's driven and ready to hit the ground running because that's what you told me you wanted in the interview process but you weren't ready for me when i stepped through the door yeah i mean what a what a great way to frame that up the 30 60 90 plan
00:24:45
Speaker
Those are definitely places that our professions can come together to really, like you said, do more than like, okay, well, on this date, we're going to check the box and we're going to slip this training or this thing in, but really working together to provide that comprehensive welcoming and onboarding to that employee so that they stick around.
Retention and Organizational Values
00:25:09
Speaker
That is the goal. Retention. No one's hiring people and doing engagement surveys and spending all this money to bring someone in just to lose them. But that piece doesn't connect always for people. They don't see
00:25:24
Speaker
always the connection. So if I'm pushing with my clients to say, are you sure you want to do that? Here's something else you might want to consider. I always tell them my interest is pure. It is to make sure that you're doing the right things and that we're mitigating risk and that you engage and keep your people. So that is the purpose, but people don't always make those connections.
00:25:44
Speaker
Yeah, let's talk about that retention piece, particularly in our market right now, where people are really scrambling to be that employer of choice or be the employer of choice in their community or their state or their industry, wherever their struggles are. You had mentioned that you really talk with employers about their retention strategies and
00:26:13
Speaker
I think you alluded to even maybe data and what the cost is and what that turnover looks like. Is that sometimes a place where you start?
00:26:24
Speaker
Sometimes it is. And so they're within the strategic planning that I do with clients. That is one of the questions I ask and actually came up. This prospect was amazing today. They just were doing all the homework. They were like, we don't have we don't have high turnover. And they're they're telling me the state. Right. I'm always assessing what's your current state? What's ideal? Meaning what's your vision?
00:26:46
Speaker
And let's talk about, you know, what comes in between. And so that's the piece that becomes co-created is the middle or what I often refer to as the messy middle. That's what we're going to do all the work. And so data is our friend. It's there. You'll know if you assess someone and you did the engagement survey.
00:27:06
Speaker
Well, what is that data telling you? It's going to tell you a story. How many people have you promoted? What is the representation of the people you've promoted? How many people have left? What's the information you're hearing from that? And what are the strides that you've made along the way in order to retain people or to engage them? And so many times we think of engagement as, well, yeah.
00:27:29
Speaker
We give a pizza party. We, you know, we have Taco Day. Great. Yes, it is wonderful you observe all those those cultural holidays too. Absolutely fantastic. Continue doing that, but anchor it to a strategy because what we're finding with COVID is people's needs have shifted tremendously. What you were doing yesterday is not going to get you there and that's why we're seeing this these mass exodus.
00:27:54
Speaker
from these organizations because people want flexibility people have lost loved ones people are struggling really hard with their mental health and they're not going to just work for any company that You talked about psychological safety earlier that doesn't value me that doesn't allow
00:28:11
Speaker
with my personal values, why would I do that when I don't have to? So there's all this data if you're listening, if you're in your one-on-ones and you're having team meetings, you're designing these metrics, there are so many ways that we could do that to be more equitable than sometimes how it's done.
00:28:31
Speaker
Right, right. You had mentioned talking with employees and what you're hearing when people are leaving. One of the pieces that your profession holds so closely is confidentiality. That's baked in to HR professionals. And so you are on the front lines of hearing
00:29:00
Speaker
you know, people's reasons for leaving. And when safety might be a piece of that, you know, those are places where our professions can come together as well. Like what does that look like? That doesn't mean that the HR professional in your organization is going to, you know, cross a confidentiality line, but you can have conversations in general about here's what I've heard, or here's what I'm hearing from current employees, or we might have a risk here,
00:29:31
Speaker
that has to do with health and safety. So it behooves the health and safety professional to work with your HR professional and say, you know, like, what are you hearing in the ether? How can we work together to be supportive to our employees so that we can be the employer of choice or remain the employer of choice so we're not experiencing these mass exodus?
00:29:55
Speaker
right that there's such an element of in so much potential for employer branding done right and I've seen that across the internet and stuff and it's it's really cool too and it's represented across
00:30:13
Speaker
My clients across my network when you really see it done right and you see people celebrating those things because we also forget to celebrate sometimes our wins and there's so many opportunities to have low-hanging fruit when you partner as HR and safety whether it's on the onboarding side or someone has left and I saw this through an exit that I did maybe three four months ago
00:30:37
Speaker
where someone identified that there were some training opportunities and we're having this conversation on the safety side, where had there been a little bit more intervention, had there been some more SOP in place, they felt like they could have done their job safer. They felt like they could have been set up better for success. So what a rich data point to get that answer.
00:30:59
Speaker
you have to do something with it once you get it. So that's where HR and, I'm not a safety professional, I know enough to be dangerous, but I'm gonna pull in my partner and say, hey, how do you see us working together to make this a safer workplace, to engage people and have them stay? Yeah, yeah. I believe that I've heard you frame that up as bringing our lanes together. Can you describe that process or what that means to you, bringing our lanes together?
00:31:29
Speaker
Yeah, so for me, it's really making sure that those silos we described are not present. There's so much crossover between the two, and we all have, you know, you talked about safety culture, for instance, and I talk about culture in general as, you know, employer branding and as engagement, retention, and just overall fabric, mission, vision, values of the organization.
00:31:53
Speaker
In both cases, we all own that because if I'm not nice to my coworker, they're not going to want to stay on this team. That's going to have a negative impact to my leadership, to the organization, to the organization's brand, because bad news travels fast. And so if I'm doing that as an employee or if as a leader, I'm not spending the time with my employees,
00:32:19
Speaker
And I'm making safety someone else's responsibility, or I'm saying, no, we're HR. We don't need to worry about that. Let safety worry about it. When there are implications to the other side, to the people within the organization, that's not a good look. And so there's this convergence of where, of course, we all have our own professional specific pieces that we're subject matter experts in.
00:32:47
Speaker
But where, you know, where is there this overlap that becomes a point of, let's listen to what we're hearing from, you know, out on the floor. What are employees saying? What do they need to be able to safely and effectively do their job to be productive? How can HR support with that with resources? How can that person's leader support, whether that's the HR and the safety leader coming together?
00:33:10
Speaker
whether it's looking at even the organizational structure of where we place HR and or safety. So I worked in organizations where they're part of the same org and where they're not. But looking at where those synergies are is how you really bring those lanes together.
00:33:27
Speaker
Yeah, and like you said, it doesn't have to be where you're trying to teach one another your subject matter expertise. It's more about the human being. And how can we work together to support the human beings in our organizations? Wanted to ask Tiffany, what do you feel gets in the way with HR and safety?
00:33:56
Speaker
In terms of coming together? Yeah.
00:34:03
Speaker
Honestly, across my experience, what I've observed is the biggest barrier is either organizational structure because we don't have the right people in the right roles. We haven't set people up for success. We haven't established what that culture is going to look like and what's important. Or we stick it up on the wall or on our website and we call it that.
00:34:29
Speaker
but we're not living it out in our practice and our values. That's a huge barrier. Sometimes that leadership support or lack of leadership support or the.
00:34:40
Speaker
That's not our job. That's HR's job or that's safety's job. We're not going to get involved. We're not going to sit in the same meetings or have an interest in each other's initiatives or how we can help partner. I need to know what's going on in your world and vice versa so that we can say, hey, let me raise my hand here. I see an opportunity.
00:35:04
Speaker
for us to collaborate. I see this being a win on both sides, which means it's a win for the employer grant. It's mitigating risk and it's keeping people safe. Not only physically, but emotionally from, you know, a psychological safety. There's so much low hanging fruit that gets missed when we just keep everything separate in a vacuum.
00:35:29
Speaker
Yeah, yeah, I had a couple of jobs ago, I had the great opportunity to work at in health and safety within an HR department.
Empathy, Belonging, and Leadership
00:35:40
Speaker
And when I took the position and was told I'd be reporting to the HR director, I thought that's weird.
00:35:48
Speaker
I mean, that was my first instinct. I'm like, that's weird. Never. I'm like, is this gonna work? And so I was like, I thought like I was the zebra in the HR department with all these other people who were in charge of onboarding and benefits and change management and all these great things that HR professionals do. And I'm like, is this really gonna work?
00:36:15
Speaker
And honestly, it was my favorite. I just loved it because it felt like we were all working in support of one another for the betterment of human beings, for the common good of all the employees in the organization. We would have conversations about promotions.
00:36:35
Speaker
you know, like who are we noticing that's really performing well? And I would be able to bring the lens of health and safety. Like I'm seeing leadership in this person in these ways within the, through the lens of health and safety, that no one else was going to bring that to the conversation, you know, or, or the other way around. You know, like we think this person would be a really great leader because of blah, blah, blah. And I'd be like, yeah, but I've seen this.
00:37:03
Speaker
You know, and it was really a great way for us to come together professionally and just, yeah, you were talking about where people sit in an organization within their org charts and I really found that one to be fun.
00:37:21
Speaker
I love that. Thank you for sharing that story. I had a similar experience and reaction like, that doesn't make sense. The first time that I was like, why are they a part of our work, right? Like, that's vulnerability. But that is where I got my first foray into, wow, is this a powerful
00:37:40
Speaker
partnership. Wow, am I learning so much? Wow, look how we've come together to help keep people safe, to help change the mindset of leaders and of employees. And what a good look for them to see, by the way, their their two teams and the leaders of those teams come together and that alignment because also what you'll see is sometimes that triangulation and you don't want that either. So thank you for sharing that story.
00:38:07
Speaker
Yeah, you're welcome. You've articulated before that HR is the pulse of the people. And I think a lot of health and safety professionals would resonate with that and think that, gosh, we are too. And I think that's just a great connection point for us professionally.
00:38:28
Speaker
You had mentioned there was a couple of other things that you talked about Tiffany with belonging and senses of belonging and also empathy and how to embrace and practice that. Do you think those two things go together and when you meet with employers how do you talk about those things?
00:38:53
Speaker
I like that. I absolutely do think they go together and I practice them together. There's a reason that they're both listed as values right out front in my own business and how I help leaders to understand. So through me actively listening and helping them to understand
00:39:15
Speaker
what maybe some of those barriers are using my experience to say you know I had something similar with another client and they look to me for that or how are your other clients approaching this it helps them it helps them belong so they don't feel like the outlier like oh we're the only company going through this and I'm like oh why sure you're you're not um but let's talk about what it means for you because you do have
00:39:38
Speaker
different environment. What you and your employees need is different. And so it's helping leaders in having tough conversations where it needs to be like, I don't really think that. Or if they're asking me to do something for their employees and to be kind of the liaison, there are times when I do that, there are times when I've kind of
00:40:02
Speaker
Shared with my clients. I really think that would take away an opportunity for you to shine as a leader Part of my job is to empower you and so I'd love for you to have this opportunity. I'm absolutely happy to do it However, part of my job is to build you up as a leader to build your leadership capabilities to be you know a support system to you and to the employees and what what gets
00:40:27
Speaker
blurred sometimes is that people don't understand the importance of visibility at an executive level, at a senior level, a middle manager, a frontline manager. People look up to those folks and they want that representation. They want and need that person to help them feel like they belong. They want to know that if I have even, you know, if I have my pet
00:40:51
Speaker
something happens with my pet that you care about that and you're not gonna be you know you're gonna be people first versus well not sure what you're gonna do about that but your project is you know that has to get done so it all does really flow together because you can have a great addition to your team but if you don't nurture them they will leave
00:41:14
Speaker
Absolutely. Absolutely. Yeah, great example on the on the visibility piece. I like that. So when you know, the things that that you've been talking about, you know, specifically empathy, belonging, active listening, do you get people who are like, that sounds mushy, gushy. And I'm I really gonna pay somebody to tell me about feelings? Like, give me the checklist.
00:41:43
Speaker
You know? What would you have to say about the importance of the things that people might call mushy, gushy, or whatever other, you know, terms like, I'm not spending money on that.
00:42:02
Speaker
Yeah, people think it's fluffy. And it's, you know, you even we've been talking about psychological safety, and people are like, Oh, here comes another bus where there must be something HR made up, you probably, you know, safety folks probably get the eye roll to look like, Oh, here we go with another term in our safety culture. And so it's what you do with those terms. And it's, it's helping people understand the language.
00:42:30
Speaker
in creating a shared understanding and a shared language around it and what it really means, especially when it comes to change management. You have to be able to articulate that to people so that it makes sense to them, that it relates to their world and that they understand
00:42:45
Speaker
how their role and what their role is, how do they contribute to and impact that? And that's the piece where when you say, you know, this is tangible, let me break it down for you into what empathy looks like when you're in a one-on-one. It's not blowing off the meetings every single week and making people feel like they're not important to you.
00:43:08
Speaker
So helping them understand that, and checklists are great, but they only tell a part of the story. Where's the human side of that? That's really what we're talking about here, is bringing in the human element into these conversations, into a checklist, and into our cultures. Yeah, and I mean, on the health and safety side, when those of us who do this work are tasked with doing something such as
00:43:37
Speaker
an evaluation or what many of us call an investigation, like something has happened, you know, some adverse thing has happened, maybe there was something that almost happened to someone in terms of a near miss, or maybe there is some kind of accident that happened that resulted in an injury or an illness, and then you tend to get out the checklist.
Human Element in Safety Investigations
00:44:01
Speaker
you know and you look at a process and you look at you know like oh they didn't wear that personal protective equipment properly or they didn't use it at all or someone took a guard off of something or or or or or or all these like tangible things that are important but what doesn't always land on these lists is the human element was their mind on the job.
00:44:27
Speaker
what was going on with them you know and bringing in that curiosity that you talked about before and getting curious about you know what are it's not always it's never a one thing that happened it's accumulation of things which can include
00:44:48
Speaker
maybe something's going on in their personal life, maybe something's going on in their work life, or a reason that they're feeling one way or another, or that their mind wasn't on their job for various reasons, and that needs to be part of it.
00:45:04
Speaker
It does. I love, I love how you describe that because that's, you know, the checklist and our processes are great. They help us, you know, for continuous improvement, process improvement. We need those things at work. That's how we chop up the side of school, as I love to do. But it's also, you know, that human element that you describe, why did it happen? How did it happen? What input do they have as to how it could have been better? Do we even know if they had a clear understanding of
00:45:32
Speaker
of how or why it happened or why it shouldn't have happened. So it's like the or, or, or, right? Yeah. I love that. And that's another piece where HR and safety can really partner to say, okay, you know, maybe maybe they didn't have the guard up, but
00:45:50
Speaker
you know, why did that happen? Do we have the right policies in place to prevent that? How do we move forward to mitigate it? That's a strong piece of where I've been in strong partnership with safety for sure. Yeah, I mean, scratching the surfaces during those times of trial, I guess, is really taking the time to get curious, you know, in the
00:46:15
Speaker
Well, 28 years I've been doing this work in the many, many investigations, which is a really hard word for me to say, because it sounds punitive, but getting really curious and finding out things like, why did that, what was going on that day? And sometimes it's because it was
00:46:36
Speaker
you know close to a holiday and somebody was rushing to get home to something something was waiting on the other side or you know I you know that many many times I'd find out like people have been doing something a certain way for 30 years and they're getting really close to retirement and they were looking forward you know to something else and their mind wasn't on their job or hey I've done it this way for the longest time or
00:47:04
Speaker
If I'm going to ask somebody for help and I know I probably could have used it, but maybe there is like a not healthy work environment to be able to ask my co-workers for help because of something else that's going on. So I'm just going to do it on my own because it's not safe to ask for help.
00:47:22
Speaker
Anyway, so I guess I would just encourage people to get curious and ask questions that are deeper than just the things that are on the surface of health and safety. And if that seems like a hard thing to do for you, engage with your HR professional and have them help you with those. Maybe have them help you frame up questions or just be thoughtful about it and maybe meet with your HR person and say,
00:47:49
Speaker
What else could I be asking here? Or maybe you even want to involve them in the process, if that feels like something that's herky-jerky and not your wheelhouse. I love those tips. Definitely love that.
00:48:08
Speaker
Well, Tiffany, what else would you like to share with us about bringing our professions together or things you think that health and safety professionals just need to know about the way people like you work? I think we've covered most of them and I think
00:48:30
Speaker
both HR and safety approaching it with a partnership and a thought partnership. You just asked tons of great questions in ways that HR people like to partner with safety, with employees, with leaders, to really understand and get curious about the process. How does it work? How do we improve it? And what might be missing? We can sit there and role play or have conversations around
00:48:57
Speaker
you know, how you may approach this person when you talk to them. Maybe it's your first time and it's intimidating to you. Maybe you just moved into a leadership role from a peer role. So really helping to be partners. I think keeping your mind open and being curious is a huge part of that. And certainly doing the investigation. And yes, I have, you know, my own HR kind of qualms about that word at times because it sparks certain imagery for folks.
00:49:23
Speaker
But making sure that we do the good due diligence and that we pull in all the important stakeholders during the process and remember that there's a human element to it. Those would be, you know, if I could have my ideal state for our world's blending, that would definitely be it.
00:49:41
Speaker
I love that. That's great. That's great. You set up the magic wand moment. That's perfect. That's perfect. Thank you so much. And congratulations on being an entrepreneur and a successful one in the midst of all that's going on in our worlds. And I wish you the best of luck going forward. And thank you so much for sharing your wisdom today.
00:50:08
Speaker
Thank you. I appreciate this opportunity on this wonderful podcast, and I'm sure your listeners will get much value from all these tips. I'm hoping so. Well, 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.
00:50:31
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 people like Tiffany and I. Special thanks to Naeem Jourisi, our podcast producer. And until next time, thanks for listening.