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125: OSHA Isn't Driving the Safety Pro's Future
306 Plays10 days ago
Dr. Fran Scott-Diehl, who embarked on her journey in the safety profession in the mid-1990s, initially intended to study architecture but was steered towards occupational safety and health by encouraging female professors. Her career began in claims processing, a role she found emotionally taxing, prompting her to transition to the utility industry and private sector positions, including at Sysco Foods and PODS. Dr. Fran underscores the necessity of establishing a robust safety framework, particularly when integrating new safety professionals lacking traditional backgrounds, emphasizing that effective safety leaders require strong interpersonal skills, curiosity, and a commitment to hard work. As an educator, she encourages upcoming safety professionals to be independent thinkers who challenge authority and innovate, while also highlighting the importance of self-reflection and self-care to prevent burnout. She advises safety professionals to prioritize nurturing themselves to enhance their leadership in the new year.
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Transcript
Introduction to the Podcast
00:00:09
Speaker
This is the Accidental Safety Pro brought to you by HSI. This episode is recorded December 20th, 2024. My name is Jill James, HSI's Chief Safety Officer.
00:00:20
Speaker
And our guest today is Dr.
Meet Dr. Fran Scott-Neal
00:00:22
Speaker
Fran Scott-Neal. Dr. Fran is Vice President of Safety at LCRA in the utility industry. She's also the founder and co-host of the She Unfiltered podcast and author of Franny the Safety Nanny book.
00:00:37
Speaker
Dr. Fran joins us today from Austin, Texas. Welcome to the show. Thanks for having me. I'm excited about this conversation. Thanks so much, Jill. You're welcome. Thank you for being here.
Dr. Fran's Journey into Safety
00:00:50
Speaker
So, Dr. Fran, what is your origin story? Like, how did how did this whole thing happen for you? How did you get into this business? I'll answer safety a pretty traditional way. I and got the degree in safety back in the mid-90s.
00:01:08
Speaker
I graduated in 1995. And so safety was still a pretty new endeavor because when we think about OSHA, OSHA was born and born in the mid-70s. By the time the degree program started to catch up, it was probably about in the eighty s And so although I wasn't one of the pioneers, i actually talked to a pioneer who entered the first degree program.
00:01:30
Speaker
um I was probably in maybe the third or fourth cohort of students who achieved the occupational safety and health degree. But it probably, as you know, Jill,
00:01:41
Speaker
When we did this, safety looked a lot different. You know, it it had transitioned from the engineering to engineering technologist degrees. And that was the degree that I achieved.
00:01:52
Speaker
So, yeah. And where did you go to school? So I went to school at Murray State University, Murray State, the racers. We are still one of the original ABET schools. So I'm really proud of the foundation that they gave us there.
00:02:08
Speaker
Wow. Wow. That's awesome. That's awesome. And yeah, you're right. We both went to, we both graduated right around the same time. i was just a little bit ahead of you, but not by much. Yeah. so you've been at this a long time.
00:02:20
Speaker
So when you, when you decided to earn that degree, like what made you choose it and what did you think it was going to be? So, you know, I'm not going to lie to your listeners.
00:02:33
Speaker
I didn't go, i didn't endeavor in college saying, oh, i I want to be a safety pro. I went into college thinking that I would be an architect. So a lot of the, yeah, a lot of the construction programs were in the engineering and in technology school.
00:02:49
Speaker
And so I had to take courses in the building and it's a really neat building at Murray State. It reminds you of the Epcot ball on the top. That was our roof. And all of the, yeah, all of the STEM graduates from an engineering, you know, basis were in that building. They took courses in that building.
00:03:07
Speaker
And unbelievably, i will always say that safety chose me because I took a course and actually my course in construction safety was taught by Dr. Linda Bach.
00:03:20
Speaker
I don't even know if she's still teaching, but I give her credit, her and Dr. Nancy St. Hilaire, because Nancy St. Hilaire was a visiting instructor.
00:03:32
Speaker
I give both of them credit for my endeavors in safety because the programs were really still pretty male, you know, male orientated. i mean, we went to school in a different time is what I tell people.
00:03:46
Speaker
and they were yeah They were still really male orientated. I took a course. We had to argue a story
Influences and Mentorship in Safety
00:03:52
Speaker
about a chipper. And i don't I hope one day Dr. Bach listens to my podcast or hears it.
00:03:57
Speaker
you know, the story because she'll affirm it that and I argued it and she pulled me after her class and she was like, you should be in safety. And I'm thinking in my mind, like, yeah, no that's not what I came to school for because my dad actually was a general contractor.
00:04:12
Speaker
And so my thought was I was going into the family business and I wanted to do architecture. i love buildings. I love natural things. um I still in that way today. If you see my house, I'm very natural and neutral,
00:04:25
Speaker
um And so to me, because I was so fixated on how things were made and, you know, just the being able to put a little art with that, that's where I thought I would go.
00:04:38
Speaker
But when I took, you know, I kind of gave her a little bit of opposition, like, yeah, I don't think I want to do this. She's like, you know what? You have another class regardless. She was like, take the course, keep an open mind.
00:04:49
Speaker
And I ended up taking like, you know, intro to occupational safety and health with Dr. Nancy St. Hilaire. And Nancy was just wonderful.
00:05:00
Speaker
I mean, she was just very easy to talk to, very easygoing. And that stood out to me because a lot of the guys, when we were in classes, they would be very firm and, you know, you got to do this. But Nancy had a really soft approach.
00:05:15
Speaker
Dr. Bach, I think, was an engineer. So her approach was a little similar to the guys, but Nancy had a lot of soft touch. And so, yeah, at that time, because I'm a really soft hearted person, people don't know that part about me because I think safety toughened me up a lot. But you know working in male-dominated orientated spaces and having to overcome objections with the guys and being around craft because I started my career in construction, it does toughen you up, but I like that she still had that soft touch.
00:05:49
Speaker
And so I was like, maybe there is a way to coexist. So I took her course, I I had A's in both the courses. And then I took my final course and I just changed my major. And that is really the story. It was nothing...
00:06:03
Speaker
No fireworks, no sparks. I will say it just chills me because had I not seen two women, all of my courses were taught by men and most of my courses were full of men.
00:06:16
Speaker
So I probably would have never even envis you know had a vision that I could even survive. So you know if you could see it, you could be it. so i was really that was really what happened.
00:06:28
Speaker
You just made me think about my graduate program in safety. And I didn't realize until you started saying this, that all of my instructors were male.
00:06:40
Speaker
Wow. Wow. Yeah. There wasn't, there wasn't a single woman and there were in my whole program, I think there were maybe, maybe five or four women.
00:06:54
Speaker
Wow. And so in the, in the, you and I, you I graduated in 94. You, you were like 95 or 96. You just said, I think. I was in 95. So I was year later. mean, how fantastic that you were able to have female mentorship and leadership.
00:07:12
Speaker
And I, and and I, as you were talking, I'm like rolling through my head. Okay. I took this one from, okay, professor, professor, professor. Yep. They were all men. Yep. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And that's so interesting too, because I all am a big proponent of women in safety. I think we're really well suited for it.
00:07:31
Speaker
yeah um And so when I am mentoring, I'm very clear with the associations that I only want to mentor women. And I know we're not, I know we shouldn't be that way. And I've had male menses that were under me, but my, you know,
00:07:48
Speaker
my soft sweet spot is always with women and especially women who sometimes lack the confidence that they actually could do well. yeah And so, yeah.
00:07:59
Speaker
Yeah. Yeah. Oh, that's, that's an interesting story. Thank you for sharing that. So when you finished, when you finished up and graduated, what was your first stop?
Hands-On Safety Experience
00:08:10
Speaker
So my first stop was I went into claims because I graduated in 95. The yeah economy was falling off the cliff.
00:08:18
Speaker
and And somewhat, those were the jobs that actually came for me the quickest. I turned down a job with Tennessee aluminum and it was really because I didn't want to be in Tennessee at that time.
00:08:30
Speaker
And then all the jobs that started to call me at that time were in risk, you know, or in risk and safety. yeah And so I interviewed, I started off in claims. I did that for right about two years.
00:08:43
Speaker
ah after one year in, I was like, yeah, this is not, I don't want to hear, you know, sad stories all day about, you know, i mean, cause it could make you become really callous.
00:08:56
Speaker
And I think a superpower of most safety folks, is that we have a lot of compassion and we're very empathetic. So to hear people say, oh yeah, your vehicle ran into me.
00:09:07
Speaker
um Some of it, you know, was not true, but we had to process the claims nonetheless, open up inquiries. And some of the stuff I would come home and be like, I just can't do this forever. I don't know.
00:09:20
Speaker
You know, God bless people who are, you know, processing claims, who work on the risk side of claims, who do the investigation, open the inquiries, who eventually become adjusters.
00:09:31
Speaker
That really wasn't where I wanted it to be. I wanted to be boots on the ground. So my second stop was at Orange County Utilities in 1997. Yeah. and nineteen ninety seven yeah Oh, you got into utilities right away. Right away.
00:09:47
Speaker
But it was so similar because I worked, you know, I was fortunate because I actually got to work with the craft who did work, but I also got to work on the capital improvement project. So I was back centered in construction a little bit because, know,
00:10:02
Speaker
Just like everybody else, the counties, the cities, they have 30-year use plans. They have 10-year development plans. And we at the county had to build the infrastructure, whether that was putting in water main systems, wastewater systems.
00:10:17
Speaker
All of that was planned between 10 and 30 years out. And so I got to travel with construction crews. And so I felt like I was kind of back to where I started from in my roots because I did my internship in construction.
00:10:33
Speaker
Yeah. And, and did, did the fact that you can't, you, you came up in a household, you said your dad was a contractor. ah here Um, did, did the stories and things that he shared with you growing up, did that, um, inform how you approached your job?
00:10:52
Speaker
you know because youre it the Yeah, go yeah Well, I'm just um just thinking as it as a young person, a female going into construction, like that's a whole that's a whole mess of water to navigate.
00:11:05
Speaker
So I told you you, know, when I went to school, I talked to my dad. My dad is, such you know, he recently passed, but he was such a big personality. yeah And so he, you know, he never met a stranger. So I get a lot of my people skills and my empathy from him. he was always willing to help. But when I went to him and it was time to go to college, he was like, I always knew you were going to college.
00:11:26
Speaker
My dad only had an associate, but he was very supportive. of my sister who's also in safety ended up turning into safety as well. Yeah. He was always very supportive of us getting continuing education. But the only thing my dad told me to me was a standout story. I was 16.
00:11:42
Speaker
I was talking to him about college. I was PS 18, you know, prepping for college to take the entry exams. And he never said you had to follow in the family business. He looked at me one day. He's like, what'd you think about doing?
00:11:54
Speaker
Cause I used to, they used to think I wanted to be an attorney. Cause I would litigate back and forth with the Y, Yeah, you know. And I said, you know, I don't know. I used to want to be an attorney. I think I kind of want to be an architect.
00:12:06
Speaker
I like, you know, houses and buildings. And he knew that. And he looked at me straight in the face and he said, you know, you can be whatever you want to be. And that always sat with me because he repeated it. He said, you can be whatever you want to be.
00:12:21
Speaker
No one had ever told me that, you know. And so i from that, I didn't take, oh, you need to be hugely aspirational. What I took from that was you get a choice and I'm just going to be proud of you for taking your journey.
00:12:37
Speaker
You know, when he said you can be whatever. Basically, what he was saying is you get to choose that. And I'm fully supportive of what you choose versus, you know, the expectation is you need to come and do this. Now, as I've gotten older before he left here and became an ancestor, he wanted me to be, ah you know, to have a side business. He wanted me, he's always like, you are so business minded.
00:13:02
Speaker
He's like, you should just have a side business. And that was his dying, you know, not that I'm aspiring to that. You know, I've considered consultancy, but I like,
00:13:13
Speaker
kind of the nuts and bolts of working with the company. I don't know what the future will hold, but that was his dying wish for me. He's like, you're so talented. This is something you should consider.
00:13:23
Speaker
Yeah. But he never swayed any of us either way. what it what ah What a gift. I mean, and as you, as you call him an ancestor, what an ancestor to have and how, wouldn't it be great if we all had those sort of whispers in our ears?
00:13:40
Speaker
Yeah. I mean, i say that, you know, I wanted my kids to be, no, I didn't, I wasn't as gracious to them. and I told my daughter like, this is your major. And then she changed her major her first year. And I was like, she's like, I changed it. And I'm officially an accounting major, which is following her dad.
00:13:57
Speaker
And I was like, no, change it back. And, you know, now she tells me, I probably should have been an engineer. I should have stayed, but I wanted to drive my kids to certain things because of what I thought I knew. But tell God your plans is always what I say. But I did i wasn't as kind as my dad. I kind of put expectations on my kids, but they graduated now. They've chosen in their path and I'm fully supportive of where they're going.
00:14:21
Speaker
Yeah. So you stayed in the utility industry for how long or what was your next stop for
Government vs. Private Sector Safety
00:14:27
Speaker
him? So, you know, I bounce in and out of utilities. My next stop after Orange County was the city of Castleberry. Same setup, same.gov.
00:14:36
Speaker
And so for the first six, seven years of my career, i felt like being in a.gov space was actually a blessing because we were never going to be cited by OSHA.
00:14:48
Speaker
And in government, you're going to learn bureaucracy, whether you want to know it or not, how things work, how slow they work. But you're also going to get really familiar with the Code of Federal Register, the laws, because everything in government is by code, by law.
00:15:04
Speaker
So I feel like that was a blessing for me because I just didn't learn the law. I learned the intentions behind the laws and the whys of the laws.
00:15:15
Speaker
And sometimes I think that may be a missing piece. Because when you talk to new safety pros and you're like, why do you think they put that law into place? They can quickly associate the deaths and say, okay, people must have died.
00:15:27
Speaker
But then you kind of have to tell them the backstory of how we actually got there. And that to me sits better with them when they understand the why we have the reg in the first place. It wasn't just some flippant regulator writing something and that they're all signed in blood. So I feel like government was really a safe space for,
00:15:47
Speaker
And I even would encourage that for insecure or like news safety pros that lack confidence, being in an environment that's a.org or.gov where they are not subject to shareholders. They are not subject to a lot of the pressures to perform that come with profit-driven companies.
00:16:08
Speaker
I agree with that. I started in the government as well um with OSHA for the first dozen years of my career. And i think it allowed me to figure out my North Star, if that makes sense, because of what you just said. you know, like there weren't any pressures from the ah other organizations, the for-profit organizations. So by the time I started working for for-profit, I already knew who I was.
00:16:37
Speaker
And I knew what my line in the sand would be professionally, but I wouldn't have known that as a young, as a 23 year old. Yeah. And I think that that is the challenge, um you know, because plus government taught you a lot of things.
00:16:57
Speaker
I mean, we should take away the art of teaching, you know, it taught you protocol. It taught you Robert's rules of order, whether you wanted them or not. ah um It taught you how to be diplomatic, how to approach things, not just with diplomacy, but with tact, not being able to be so impulsive, like general industry, sometimes it flies by the seat of its pants and people become...
00:17:25
Speaker
very compulsive, you know, impulsive and they take some risk versus in government. It's a very calibrated way of being. Nothing is really rushed. Now the curse of it all is that it moves slow, like an elephant or like a big ship, right? Moving towards dock.
00:17:41
Speaker
Everything is slow, calibrated. um Everything is methodical. It's not just, Oh, we're going to do this today. And Oh, tomorrow. No, we're going to change course. It wasn't that way. If you budgeted for it, you did it. If you didn't spend the money, they took it back. You had to get it reallocated.
00:17:58
Speaker
So it taught you just a lot of protocol things that I think sometimes as we move into the nature of how business zits by today, professionals can get into the mindset of constantly changing course, not allowing things to work towards maturation, changing the safety strategy every year or every quarter. And it's like, you didn't give a lot of things time to mature. So those are some of the things when I'm talking to newer professionals, like we try some things, we take some small risks, but
00:18:32
Speaker
We understand the cost of the risk. And then we start to move pieces one at a time. We don't change 16 variables at the same time because then we'll never know what works.
00:18:43
Speaker
So I didn't despise government. I thought it was perfect. I had internal mentors, people that I could go to who knew the ropes would say, hey I've been here 20 years.
00:18:55
Speaker
They're never going to let you do that. But here's a way you can do it. And yeah, it taught you to build relationships. It taught you how to curve things too, to say, you know what, there's a way to go around it.
00:19:07
Speaker
And to still get to the desired outcome versus sometimes, you know, what you're seeing in the private sector and in the dot-com world is people shove things through and then you lose everybody along the way. So I thought it was a blessing as as much as sometimes I wanted to get out of there because your pay was slow. It was a set amount every year.
00:19:29
Speaker
There were no big financial incentives. Yeah. And if you want it to do more, it's just, you got to wait to the next fiscal year to do more. And yeah. So that was the challenge there.
00:19:42
Speaker
i agree with you. I don't regret any of my time with the government for every, all the reasons, all the reasons that you said and had really great mentors along the way. And when, when people, oh gosh, so often, i don't know if you've heard this in your career, but I sure have like,
00:20:00
Speaker
oh i can't keep up with all this regulation stuff government everything all the time i'm like oh no um no they do not no oh yeah no no no everything is slow everything yeah yeah that's not true that's an urban myth anyway yes so what was the what was the jump when you went into private sector when did that happen and what was that experience like for you So I went into private sector in 2003 and I went into private sector into Cisco foods.
00:20:38
Speaker
yeah And so it was straight into motor carrier. It was no, um it was no breaks. You know, it was a for-profit company, pennies on the dollar.
00:20:51
Speaker
That was their slogan. They had the Hey Girl Base Safety, you know, from the standpoint of we do observations, we have our PWMs, preferred work methods.
00:21:02
Speaker
You know, we do our OVSs, our observations. We have goals, the numbers that we have to do. Um, we have to spend so much time out on the floor in the warehouse. And so I went directly into that and then you had to do ride alongs.
00:21:16
Speaker
And so I went directly into a transportation company and actually I started to like that, but I started to make, you know, some really early deductions about transportation early on that we, although they were not You know, in the crosshairs of OSHA, transportation was killing a lot of people.
Strategic Safety Improvements
00:21:38
Speaker
A lot of that settled with insurance carriers and it never made it in front of a regulator unless it became a Department of Transportation violation, which, as you know, back in the day.
00:21:51
Speaker
A lot of their compliance now has been perfected, but they had their list, but it wasn't as, ah i want i don't even like to use the word aggressive. It wasn't as calibrated where you have your ISS scores. Now you have your clearing houses.
00:22:06
Speaker
You have a lot of the technology that they put behind the department of transportation to improve just overall road safety to include the carriers. But I learned about that and it was a fast paced environment. I really did like transportation.
00:22:25
Speaker
And so much so that when I did my dissertation, that's what I did it in. But the reason why I liked it, they probably didn't understand because I felt like it was raw, unfarmed terrain. And even till some, even till today,
00:22:41
Speaker
you can still make a lot of headways in transportation because it's not mainline. I just had this conversation with someone about, um an attorney was calling me about depositioning and he had it all wrong about safety people should do this. I'm like, no, sir, those are compliance people.
00:22:58
Speaker
And I said, how do I know this? Because I teach at two universities and we teach, yes, I'm in courses. We teach in transportation safety. And he was like, you got to teach one. I said, zero.
00:23:09
Speaker
Zero. You leave the university as a safety pro with zero experience in Department of Transportation, Fed Motor Carrier, which is interesting because up until this past year, for like the past five to seven years, transportation fatalities, road work fatalities were the number one cause of death under OSHA's categorization of deaths at work.
00:23:31
Speaker
Yeah, yeah. yeah Yeah. So yeah. Interesting. um i'm I'm listening to you and I'm thinking about, um, the insurance carriers driving the risk management, particularly in transportation, you know, like you pointed out until the DOT kind of got things dialed in, you know, people are often so, um, I guess, singularly focused on OSHA.
00:24:03
Speaker
that they forget about the impact these risk carriers, these insurance carriers um can have on a work environment and people just sort of forget about how to leverage um them for their help. But also like, you've got to get your stuff to, if you think you're not going to be audited by OSHA,
00:24:21
Speaker
watch out your insurance carriers around the corner and they may have a bigger financial impact on you, you know? And it's so funny because do you know right now, and I know you can attest to this, um ah safety pros still struggle with changing things.
00:24:39
Speaker
you know, with improving their employees' behaviors on the road, no matter what they throw at it, because they don't all the time use a full w risk-based approach. they We understand safety well. We are practitioners. We learned how to, you know, implement programs, how to diagnose.
00:24:56
Speaker
We've learned how to review, diagnose, and provide you a solution for safety. But we have not been as successful. And that's, I'm only speaking of my little, because I'm a sample of one. So I will preface that for your listeners.
00:25:10
Speaker
But every single company that I have worked at, they have struggled with driver compliance. um And utilities actually has DOT drivers, you know, CDL holders, because we drive the big line trucks.
00:25:24
Speaker
And guess what our number one target is at my current company, my last company, it is on the road behavior. And so no matter what here, you know, we're.org and we're new in our safety journey and we're eventually going to have all the tools.
00:25:38
Speaker
and tech to drive us to that. But, you know, I can just divert back to my time at pods and I was only there for 14 months, but I fixed their motor carrier in 13 months, which they thought was unheard of.
00:25:51
Speaker
And we didn't do anything magic. They were on the mandatory inspection. They were over in three categories for their CSA scores. And it was nothing magic. It was just putting in checks and balances and utilizing a risk-based approach.
00:26:05
Speaker
And so that's why I say that, Transportation safety is still untapped land.
Educational Pursuits in Safety
00:26:11
Speaker
It's unfarmed. ah I mean, it's just growing wild. And we're going to have to build transportation safety leaders to address, to meet the moment, basically.
00:26:22
Speaker
And we're way behind. i mean, we are so behind that moment. I mean, Gosh, yes, a lot to be done. So I want to make sure that I i i circle back to ah three nuggets that you dropped a minute ago, one, your dissertation, and then the two and three that you teach at two different universities.
00:26:44
Speaker
um When did you in your career, did you decide to seek out your PhD and work for that? So I got to about, I started my PhD at 42. I got to about 40 because I applied to the 13 cohort.
00:27:00
Speaker
So I wanted to do it at 40, exactly 40 years old. Cause with me, I'm very put it on the board. um I don't have an audience of the board. Not even I discuss it with my husband is something I will do. I put it on the board.
00:27:14
Speaker
I keep it under wraps and I move towards it. But the reason that I endeavor was one only. And that was because I wanted to leave safety in a better place than I found it.
00:27:27
Speaker
When I got into safety, they were not really, and you probably can attest to this too, We were just whack-a-mole trying to, you know, we weren't building. We had great foundations of education. Please don't get me wrong.
00:27:40
Speaker
But a lot of companies did not have a stratagem to say, okay, you got a safety person. Now let's build a full foundation. If you even talk about safety management systems, we teach that now.
00:27:54
Speaker
We didn't learn that when we went to college. That is about a 15 to 20 year old phenomenon. You know, since we have been in the business, we saw the rise of, you know, plan, do, check out, dimming was always there.
00:28:06
Speaker
The association of continuous improvement and including safety in that conversation, it was not there. And so that is a fifth. I'm going to say we perfected that probably within the past 15 years, whether it was the international standards, which started off as OSAS and now it's ISO. So,
00:28:23
Speaker
or whether you were even talking about ANCZ-10, you're talking about the early 2000s. You're talking about we had been in safety for a minute. you These things were introduced, but they were not matured until probably we had been in safety for probably the first 10 years of our career easily.
00:28:42
Speaker
And so it was just, we whack-a-mole, we responded to the things that were the, the, the flavor of the hour. And I wanted us to look at safety holistically. This is just my friend as them because not every company is going to and implement a safety management system, but if you don't have these nuts and bolts, what do you do?
00:29:02
Speaker
And so my goal was to go back because I started to see a lot of safety leaders come out of college and One, you know, the art of safety, because there is an art, there is a way we do this, even though it is science based.
00:29:15
Speaker
There is a way we do this, whether it is, you know, us starting to first get proximate to the people, the craft, you know, building trust with them, ah whether, you know, now you're having these big fancy words like psychological safety. And basically what they're saying is we don't know you.
00:29:30
Speaker
It would be no different if you took. an animal in the wild who was injured and you tried to help it, it would kill you because it doesn't know you. And so you got these YouTube university environments where people learn things. They see safety as a lucrative profession.
00:29:46
Speaker
some of Some of the folks like people, some of them don't like people. And you're having to say, hey, stop. These are real people's lives. And a lot of what we do, it is the art of finessing grown people to make them ah part of that journey because we can't force you to be safe.
00:30:06
Speaker
We can't make you do anything we want you to do because you're full will, fully grown. Our job is to compel you. we would say motivation, but it is to compel you, to give you the wise, to tell you this is what's going to happen if you don't do.
00:30:21
Speaker
But here are the options that you have because for a year, safety was the master of no, you know, instead of the master of how. yeah And so I just wanted to give back to make the world safer, to make sure that we're bridging these conversations with the new school of safety folks.
00:30:39
Speaker
so that we're doing a pass on got the degree and you know, I taught while getting the degree. So i I received a fellowship from IUP while getting the degree in a piece of that was to teach.
00:30:52
Speaker
So I taught intro and that kind of sealed it because same thing, a lot of people go in into safety. They know that it will pay them. They don't really know where to map and go.
00:31:02
Speaker
you start talking to them about things they like and you're like, safety is such a broad net. You don't have to Fran, put on your hard hat. You can really do the studying side of safety because it is a science.
00:31:14
Speaker
You can do the IH, the medical side. You can do, you know, ergonomics there. That is still the medical side and just opening the door to say, you see all these green initiatives, these carbon initiatives, these sustainability things, save the planet.
Mentoring Future Safety Leaders
00:31:28
Speaker
That's the E in E H and S. And so, It's such a wide net that I feel like we were not bridging those conversations with the new generation. And I ended up mentoring more at IUP students. Dr. Frank, cause you hang on?
00:31:44
Speaker
Sure. And they're like, this is not about the homework. I just wanted to ask your advice. And so I'm like, something is missing. You know, it reaffirmed in me, not just for me supervising, but I'm like, something is missing. And it's our job, not just to grow the profession, but to ensure that the profession lives, you know, when we leave and that it is still centering the worker.
00:32:08
Speaker
That's right. That's right. And I think i think if ah if your dad is was listening right now and he wanted you to have a side hustle, it would be to go and um evangelize at every university possible the things you just said so everybody gets into this degree, into this profession. it was just beautiful. I loved how you framed that.
00:32:28
Speaker
Thank you. But you know what, Jill? It's so funny what you just said. Why can't we grow this profession? We are still. Yes. It is so interesting yeah me that our universities are not spilling out of the, you know, busting at the seams because what we do is noble.
00:32:48
Speaker
Like I say this every day, like I get to help save people even when they don't even know you're saving their tails. Well, and it's saving companies money. i mean, it's it's both and, right? I mean, it is a noble profession and that's why I do it. That's why I still do it because I i know, ah you know, always, you're always looking at your why, right? Every job, you're like, okay, what's my why?
00:33:12
Speaker
It's always for the human being um and different iterations of your work impact human beings in different ways. Um, and, and yeah, we do have to frame it around. We're also going to help profit centers.
00:33:26
Speaker
Yeah. Oh, well, save money is made money. That's my number one phrase. I got that from my husband. He's like, they love to tell you safety is not a P on the P and L. And I could thank some of my early compadres when I was in the dot dot com sector.
00:33:41
Speaker
You don't, you're not a profit driver. And my husband said, when you go back to work, you tell them save money is made money. Cause he asked the accountant, He said, and me every day at two o'clock, they get to make money on the money that they're not paying out.
00:33:53
Speaker
I was like, that's a good one. with Good. So um tell, tell our listeners, where are you teaching? Cause if people are listening, they're like, dang, I want to go wherever Dr. Fran is teaching. Where are you teaching? so I teach at Texas A&M and then recently I accepted a role at Columbia Southern as full-time faculty.
00:34:13
Speaker
And at first I was unsure about, because I'm such a nuts and bolts and conservative. And you know, you hear people say things get her bad, but I know that in order to change something, you have to be a part of that conversation.
00:34:30
Speaker
So yes, I could have gone back to IUP, but I chose CSU because they need Dr. Friends. They need people with some rigor, people who were raised in safety the old way to bring a lot of that. And actually, I love the staff that i'm working with there. And so, I mean,
00:34:46
Speaker
It's sad because the person who was over the program passed away, but I, you know, and and that was very sad because he hired me and I never even got to meet him. He passed away shortly after like a month after I was getting ready to start.
00:34:59
Speaker
um So much so they lost track of me and then they're like, no, you're supposed to be teaching a class. And once I started and, you know, we, start they built a team because when Dr. Dan Corcoran passed away, they built a team of new people and I'm actually encouraged, you know, and so I'm kind of excited to see where this goes.
00:35:20
Speaker
And actually see our our enrollment is way up. But full-time faculty, it sounds more, I guess, iffy than what it is. It just means I'm committed to teaching at least two courses. And it's not that bad because right now that's the way my little life is set up.
00:35:34
Speaker
I'm kind of in this boring space, but I'm happy. I'm able to give back and I'm able to help the next generation of safety leaders. Fantastic. Fantastic. So as ah as an educator yourself and someone who is educated, I'd like to talk about what you believe the baseline knowledge should be coming into this profession and, and that, you know, right now there isn't a bar for us to pass.
00:36:04
Speaker
It's so interesting that you say that because we are getting a lot of leaders from a non-traditional path. That is exciting. You know, it is exciting because I am a believer, especially people who work craft, who now get educated or not educated They, you know, they learn safety on the job because they know the process, the people, the places, and they know the piece, right?
00:36:28
Speaker
I always, you know, when I'm selecting people, cause I actually selected at my last utility, a couple of people who came straight from the craft. um One was a supervisor. One just was damn good at what he did. I'm looking for initially a couple of things.
00:36:43
Speaker
I'm looking at their people skills because we are still in the people business yeah and I can't shove ideas and concepts down your throat. I have to inspire you, you know, but how can I inspire you? i can use education, you know, safety has their ease, you know, the engineering, the education, the engagement, but People have to believe in who you are. So you have to be an ambassador first about who you are.
00:37:09
Speaker
And so I'm always going to look at the soft skills, the empathy, the, you know, how are you with people? How are your soft skills? What is your bedside manner? What is your neutral, natural?
00:37:20
Speaker
and And but I love curiosity because the most curious people solve the best problems, right? We should always continue to ask questions. We learned in safety to keep asking why, even if you're not asking why you should have questions.
00:37:35
Speaker
you know And so the best leaders to me are the most curious. And then I want people who are willing to do the work. I, you know, I talked to you earlier about there are ways to center these folks um and get them with the right people. You're going to have to do a lot of modeling and a lot of mentoring and modeling is how do we conduct our business?
00:37:56
Speaker
Your team needs to be strong, not saying that everybody needs to be an expert or a subject matter expert in everything, but it needs to have a strong way of operating, a strong operational culture.
00:38:08
Speaker
Now, that sounds like operations, but inside your core of your safety team, the way we normally do things needs to be somewhat systematic. That's right. can't Yeah. i can't be fought by the seat of your pants because now you're putting someone in there who doesn't, who is a non-traditional person who doesn't have the framework, so to speak.
00:38:27
Speaker
And that could be catastrophic in and of itself because they're dispensing advice because that's really what we do. We dispense the bodies. Yeah. yeah And then it perpetuates the whack-a-mole thing. Yes.
00:38:38
Speaker
Yeah. Or the cutting corners. Oh, you don't got to do that. When I was in that, I didn't have to do that. So right we have to have a lot of modeling and people would say, why do we do it this way? It's like, nobody cares. And I'm like, no, you know, and when you're explaining it to them, you're like, yeah, on the surface, it seems like nobody cares whether we do this inspection this way.
00:38:58
Speaker
Although it's supposed to give the public and the shareholders and the employees assurances, nobody cares. But when something goes wrong, you're going to be glad we did it this way.
00:39:10
Speaker
Because now not only can we answer the questions of what went wrong, what was the deviation outside of the system, we can know what to do differently the next time. When you're doing stuff all over the place, sometimes you don't even know really, it becomes a blame game because you don't have a system and a framework to say what went wrong.
00:39:29
Speaker
um And so I would always say we're doing this to protect ourselves. Because if there is ever a question about why we did something, it's according to our playbook and our framework. This was the next step.
00:39:42
Speaker
And so, no, nothing is ever perfect, but we need a playbook. We need a playbook of rules with how we conduct, whether it's an investigation, whether it's an interview, whether it is a mitigation after an incident. We need a playbook so that you check off the list.
00:39:56
Speaker
Yep, we did that. We asked that question. We had the triage call right away. And this is what we did because not only are you defending when somebody dies, you know, your processes, you're defending your framework, your policies, your procedures, how you do things, why you did it.
00:40:14
Speaker
and So i would say it's protecting us. Yeah, 100%. And being able to have a system, especially when you're new to the profession, um it gives you security.
00:40:28
Speaker
think about, listening to you and I'm thinking about one of my first mentors when I was new 23-year-old OSHA. three-year- old at osha And my um my mentor, Dale, um he had been with the agency for, you know, since I was born essentially, and then I got this job. And he's he said, when you're an OSHA investigator, you they give you a checklist of not like the things to look for, but the legal things that you have to say, you have to share, you have to do and gather and all that stuff. So there's this long checklist that you go through.
00:41:05
Speaker
And Dale told me, he said, kid, they all called me kid because I was also. so They didn't quite know well like even how to address me, but so they all called me kid. um Kid, you know, whatever you do, always follow the checklist.
00:41:20
Speaker
Don't ever deviate from the checklist. Make sure you take it out even after you memorize it. Take it out and actively check those things off. Do it every single time.
00:41:31
Speaker
And he said, because you know what? One of these times you're going to get thrown some real weird curve balls in this job and you're going to go back to that checklist and the checklist is what's going to keep you centered.
00:41:44
Speaker
And he was so right. You know, I, you go into a place and someone's volatile or, you know, they're yelling at you because the regulators in the house, or there's been a death and everybody's just ah ball of emotion.
00:41:58
Speaker
Um, you know, whatever it was, or, or you're, you walk in and you're not having the best day and maybe you're distracted in your mind by something. You always go back to that process and procedure and it keeps you consistent.
00:42:11
Speaker
and I agree. I agree with that. I agree. And it was it was for your protection too. It was. Yes. Because when we do stuff, you know, it's something simple as the AED. When we train on that, we say, listen, you listen to the prompts from my AED.
00:42:26
Speaker
Why? Because if the person dies, if the person expires, yeah a medical director is going to read the tape. They're going to know whether you followed what the machine told you.
00:42:39
Speaker
And when you don't follow that, what you're saying is one, you're smarter than the machine and you're smarter than the medical director. And so, no, we know the machine has more technology in it than us.
00:42:52
Speaker
So we follow the prompts. And so it's just that. And I mean, even when I told you either you're going to have when you have nontraditional people, you're going to have a Cadillac system to wrap around them where they are. They were the Cadillac candidate and you give them Pinto instructions.
00:43:09
Speaker
or they came with a long arc and background, or you're going to have the Cadillac program to train them and to get them. And you can take, I know that's a bad way of being. You can take the person with little knowledge and you can allow them to conform to your system.
00:43:25
Speaker
And that really was the great proverb of when you build it, they will come. You know, if you build it, they'll follow it. You know, it's, If it's built right.
00:43:35
Speaker
Also, you gotta, yeah, you gotta knock down all the mess because people will say these are just too many steps. And that's why I do love the new generation and on every one of my teams, you know, even when I'm talking to students after class, during class, always tell them they're the problem solvers of today and tomorrow.
00:43:53
Speaker
I save space for new people. My current job, we had no new people. You got to have new people, young, fresh blood, you know, lower ranking people straight out of the gate so that you train them so that they can grow into the bigger roles. And then you give them a path to promotion.
00:44:12
Speaker
And that was something that I'm fortunate at my current organization. When I got here, I want to write everybody a path to promotion so that they feel they don't feel like someone has to die for them to move up, that they can move up by following steps.
00:44:25
Speaker
And they gave me that here. So I was, I'm really blessed here. And i think that I think that having new people coming in with fresh eyes and less experience keeps you as an um mature professional evolving.
00:44:44
Speaker
Because it makes you it makes you go back and think about, like, how am I going to present this? How am I going to tell, you know, like, always having to deal you know, like, and in my professional practice, and because of the places that I've worked and the the whack-a-mole things that I've done in my career and and where I am now, i i just start at a baseline knowledge of zero with every single person I meet.
00:45:10
Speaker
I make the assumption they don't know anything. They don't, they don't have a baseline. And then as, and, and, you know, you can calibrate that really quickly, but my starting line is always, they're not going to know any acronym I'm going to talk about, you know, whatever, whatever, whatever. And then the second I discover that, oh, okay, they know a little bit about this or they know about that, or they know more than I do about, then you can take it a different way. But my baseline is zero and it keeps me sharp.
00:45:40
Speaker
Yeah. And also I think it keeps us humble because they know technology. They're digital natives. ah no Yes. Yes. you They come. Oh, give it to me. I can fix it. And literally the first time I ever cast it from my phone, cast it from my phone many years ago to a computer. Cause I didn't even know that was possible.
00:46:00
Speaker
ah we I was like, we don't have this. They were like, no, no, no. You can cast from your phone. um I was like, what do you mean? a kid i call di i don't like to say kid because he was a 20 something he was like give your phone you got to trust me friend dr brain give me your phone casted it right from the phone i said well i'll be you know and so yeah that started for me too when i took a parks excursion every time i work you know i break up utilities i normally go into something transportation orientated but i did do a short stint to broker back town with my kids at a park in Orlando before I moved to Texas.
00:46:33
Speaker
And I was surrounded every summer, every everything by 7,000 16 to 21 year olds. And that is who the biggest audience of our safety programs were for. And we did a lot of fun things, um whether it was college interns, brokering some of those conversations, because we had a lot of interns.
00:46:55
Speaker
I'm brokering those in safety, brokering those conversations with the workforce, the front lines. But we did a lot of neat things because the kids are the future. You know, people say stuff like, if you control the kids, you control the future. That is true.
00:47:10
Speaker
They are the future and they actually know lots of things. um I tell people every day, learned more from my 20 somethings, especially my daughter, than I probably learned from some of my peers that Because I mean, some of our, you know, although we have great plasticity in our brain, we can learn at any age.
00:47:29
Speaker
As long as we're alive, they are so naturally curious, right? And if they have parents who have been kind of smothering, because I'm a smothered mother, sometimes they learn stuff that you don't want them to learn.
00:47:41
Speaker
But then it turns out to be helpful because my daughter would say, mom, you told me not to do this and I did it anyway, but hold on, no judgment. This is a better way of doing it. And sometimes I've had to apologize and say, you are a hundred percent right.
00:47:53
Speaker
This is the best way to do that. And not I'm not talking about with just little things in life. I'm talking about with big things, you know, they teach me. So it is a humility to say, i know a lot of things, but so do you. So do you.
00:48:07
Speaker
100%. And, you know, I think you and I are both Gen Xers. yeah And, and mean, we both have time left in our careers, for sure.
00:48:18
Speaker
But we are also setting up what you talked about before legacy, and who we're going to attract to this profession. And i you're right, we, as we start and continue to bring people into our profession, my gosh, we have so much to learn from them. And the thing that, I guess the thing that's been um most interesting to me, curiosity wise, when I, when I first started working with younger people, I'm like, eh, was a little bit full of my own ego wondering like, what could they teach me?
00:48:52
Speaker
And then immediately I figured it out and it was collaboration. Mm-hmm. Because as Gen Xers, we were just, we kind of came up doing a lot of things on our own. Did.
00:49:03
Speaker
Like Kiki. Yeah. You know, sorry yeah. Solo, solo work, solo work. And then all of a sudden they're like, oh, we could do this together. my gosh. My favorite thing now is collaborating with people. I love it, but that's not how I started. Um, but that's what I learned from younger generations.
00:49:21
Speaker
They also taught me that a couple of things. One, you could be different. um I think that there was such a school of safety that when we got into safety, you had to be the same. You got to do it the way Bob showed you. You got to do it the way Dan and showed you.
00:49:35
Speaker
yeah um and And these folks come in and they do it their way. And it teaches us that there are a lot of ways to get to the same desired outcome.
00:49:46
Speaker
And it teaches us that there is still independence in safety. We teach a lot of collaboration. We teach a lot of, um we teach a lot of less consensus, build consensus, and you still have to be a leader of consensus and you have to collaborate.
00:50:01
Speaker
But there is still independence where you there is space for you to have independent thought and to do things singular because we have the science in our background.
00:50:11
Speaker
Many scientists are independent thinkers. They go into their labs. They come out. I got it And a lot of times in big larger organizations, they don't like that. They want to tear it apart.
00:50:24
Speaker
and And sometimes I'm just saying, I'm a listen to that. Tell me, walk me front to back your whole thought process. And I get quiet and sometimes I smile and I'm like, that shit works. It's going work.
00:50:35
Speaker
and And, as you know, I tell, and I affirm it right there. And I'm like, so when did you think of this? And it has forced me to start going more into the lab. um Because we have to be on stage all the time, right? You're the safety leader. You're the head piece of safety. You have to shake hands, kiss babies, give the speeches, motivate, inspire. you know You're the accountability. You're who they see, regardless that you've got 100 people that work for you.
00:51:04
Speaker
But and so you're always on stage. When do you have that time to tinker, you know, to be creative, to really get into critical thinking? And that was something, even when I wrote my dissertation that I relished, I don't want to say it too loud.
00:51:21
Speaker
That it was my research. And despite my academy saying, you can't do this, you can't do that, I just kept endeavoring. So finally, it worked. And then even my advisor, who's semi-famous, Dr. Christiana, he's retired now, had to say it worked.
00:51:37
Speaker
You got a big sample size, you know, but there were times where I was believing him. It wasn't going to work, but I just kept moving forward. So I do think there is independence. We're going to have to have people who can go in the lab and come up with ideas and bring it back to the masses.
00:51:55
Speaker
You still have to collaborate. You still got to build consensus and make us believe in your idea. But the fact that you believe so much in it, that you did the work, I applaud that because we tend to want to take the science out of safety.
00:52:07
Speaker
fight We are safety scientists. We are trying a lot of things that have been proven, whether it's our threshold limit values, whether it's our permissible exposure limit values. A lot of that stuff is steeped in science and math and it's proven.
00:52:21
Speaker
But imagine the people who came up with that. They had to be in the labs, right? So.
00:52:29
Speaker
Yeah. I mean, that's the fun part of hearing about where, you know, you began this conversation talking about the regulations and and where did they come from and being written in blood. And those are, that's the science. That stuff had to be proven in order to pass those laws with the exception of a couple of goofy ones, you know, like.
00:52:48
Speaker
split rim toilet seats. and And I still don't know what the science was behind that law. I mean, thankfully they threw that out a long time ago, but yeah, if we dissect them, it all is science-based.
00:52:59
Speaker
And they thought, you then they probably thought the the scientists who said, this is the limit value. This is the amount of, you know, rads you can be exposed to whatever. Probably like, how do you know?
00:53:10
Speaker
And you know, it all sounded crazy till it wasn't so crazy. Right. yeah Right. right Right. Yeah. How funny. um Oh, gosh, I lost my train of thought on something I wanted to ask you. We were talking about what makes a good leader and and um you were talking about empathy and and science. Was there anything else that you wanted to talk about? I love curiosity.
00:53:32
Speaker
Yeah, curiosity. Yes, yes. Curious. Yes. ah answer the biggest questions you know we could we could always say that we're out of questions but I think in safety we all i have questions until today I have questions oh oh yeah I'll look at something and say okay now I know what the reg says on this but ah well I'll give you one So I called Department of Transportation because they have their wonderful clearinghouse.
00:53:58
Speaker
And, you know, they wrote the cm they wrote the regulations to include CMVs of 10,001 pounds or greater. So that means you are driving a commercial motor vehicle when you tow your boat,
00:54:09
Speaker
When you told anything that exceeds 10,001 pounds, 10,000 pounds. And so, but you wrote all the regulations, everything is centered around CMVs. But when you created the clearinghouse, you delineated it only to CDL holders.
00:54:24
Speaker
So I worked at a company where we pull things that were right up to the 26, but it didn't exceed the 26. So the drivers didn't have to have a CDL. Well, we had people because we had a random program. We treated all of our CMV drivers the same.
00:54:40
Speaker
We put them in a random program, but the CDL holders were in the federal random, but the non-CDL, the non-CDL were in the company random. Long story short, we had people popping positive in the non-CDL random. So I contacted DOT, I wrote them an email, said, listen, I think this is a gap because the intent of the reg was to deal with things that were bigger, that could cause catastrophic loss on the nation's roadways.
00:55:05
Speaker
But we are to we are firing people from one company to the next. And because you have this space for last mile carriers, you really should have clearing house for anyone that operates a CMV since all the code of federal register is centered around CMVs.
00:55:22
Speaker
They wrote that, we don't have jurisdiction. So I wrote him back with a specific scenario. What would you have to do? This guy's driving now. Gave him a specific set of information.
00:55:35
Speaker
The person now is driving for this company And they are pulling vehicles up to this. They wrote back, thank you so much for your passion, but we don't have jurisdiction. So it's like, why when why were people not questioning that you wrote a whole set of codes for CMVs, 10,001 pounds or greater? That is your federal definition of a CMV, but all of the harshest regs, the mandatory drug testing, the mandatory application and reporting is only isolated to drivers with a CDL.
00:56:08
Speaker
Interesting, right? So I wrote that them, wrote that to them. And then finally, they probably was like, girl, quit writing us. We're not going to do
Challenging Safety Norms
00:56:15
Speaker
this. And this was recent. This was in 2021 and early 2022. So I always have questions about why we're doing some of the things we do. And is there a better way, you know, with the introduction of tech, why do we still have this in the regs?
00:56:30
Speaker
We know technology is doing this manual task. but sorry So remove it. Right. But yeah they don't. So. and quite Yeah. I mean, questioning authority that has got to be our job.
00:56:43
Speaker
You know, I mean, we, that's part of what we have to continue doing. Yeah. I hear you. It's not our jurisdiction. It's their definition. They use definition 26,001 gross volume weight.
00:56:57
Speaker
Or if you're going to do 10,001 gross volume weight, then everybody who drives 10,001 for business purposes should be included in the pool.
00:57:08
Speaker
That's right. That's right.
00:57:11
Speaker
That's good. Yeah. This is why there's public comment periods on things. ah Except for, I feel like, I feel like we should take bunches of regulations, you know, together and go, Hey, let's have a public comment period about this one.
00:57:24
Speaker
um Yeah. What's happening. Well, I mean, so long, right? And that's how we know that OSHA is not driving. yeah The safety pros future, because I got a lot of people, you know, with different administrations coming in and out saying, oh, my God, we're not going to have an OSHA.
00:57:43
Speaker
And I actually questioned them, like, do you really believe that and that safety is going to go away? You're not going to have a profession. Well, I had an A-State tell me that one day you're not going have a job because they're gonna get rid of OSHA.
00:57:54
Speaker
And I said, oh, you think that? And they were like, yeah, I said, no, we'll have jobs. And I said, in matter fact, we'll have more jobs because risk will be so abundantly, ah ah so abundant and it will need to be managed. And they were like, how can you be so sure?
00:58:07
Speaker
I'm like, because OSHA was never our fate anyways. It was always the insurance carriers. I'm not going to write you something and have to pay out 10 times the value of what I wrote it for. That's not good business practices. And I'm not going to let you kill people that I'm on the hook for settling with.
00:58:24
Speaker
because you have no risk mitigation strategies in your, in your house to prevent a lot of this stuff. So that's the beauty of us, Jill, being able to teach.
00:58:35
Speaker
yes yeah Yes, it is. and i and I think that anyone who's, who's fretting over the future of our career, I hope you just heard what Fran said. You know, I, I do.
00:58:46
Speaker
I do. We, I mean, I hope it's not the case that we have a more target rich environment than we currently have. um I hope that's not the case, but I agree with you.
00:58:58
Speaker
I agree with you. Yeah. Yeah. That's a good thing. Hey, before we, the cost of risk, the exponential cost, I mean, yeah the cost of risk, when I got into safety, we didn't have things called nuclear claims.
00:59:11
Speaker
got be Let's just put that on the table. ah Nuclear, meaning we could put you out of business. We could put you out of business into austerity forever. We could put your kids out of business. ah ah Nobody's going to tether themselves to all these uninsured losses, right?
00:59:28
Speaker
So, and the insurance companies are not going to write an open checkbook for companies. I mean, even the excess carriers over the past five years have asked for more safety efforts.
00:59:38
Speaker
So, and this is an excess carrier, meaning you have to just deplete your first layer of coverage. Meaning it's risk beyond a certain amount for the excess carriers to even think about paying.
00:59:49
Speaker
And they're even making sure that your safety is buttoned up. And so I talked in some companies to excess carriers, my past two companies that were.com, more so my prior utility that was.com.
01:00:02
Speaker
I talked to their excess carriers more than I talked to our current carriers about our safety efforts, what we're doing, how do we, you know, perceive risk? What are we doing to block and tackle? And I went to my ah CEO at the time. I'm like, this is like troubling that the excess carriers and they were like, that's becoming the insurance market right now, they, they really want to mitigate risk.
01:00:23
Speaker
So fantastic. So if everyone listening to this podcast would go out and recruit at least one person to be a future safety leader, um now's the time.
01:00:36
Speaker
Now's the time. It is. it is So Fran, as we wrap our time up today, realizing that it's December 20th, we are just coming in at the end of
Self-Care for Safety Professionals
01:00:50
Speaker
2024.
01:00:50
Speaker
I believe this will be our our last released episode for 2024. um Any final thoughts and words about closing out this year? You know, I want to talk directly to safety pros because a lot of times we spend our time caring for others.
01:01:09
Speaker
So this has been my year of 2024 to start caring for myself. um And God, I'm healthy, you know, um but having lost someone, you know, I realized that we run to trauma.
01:01:23
Speaker
Anytime somebody gets hurt seriously or not so seriously or, If you've had to witness a fatality, we run to that, you know, and never do we ever nurture ourselves back to normalcy.
01:01:37
Speaker
We move on. You know, EAP is for the frontline and for the people who work up close in most cases to the injured worker or the worker that died. And so I want to leave all of us, the safety community as a whole, to say start nurturing yourself.
01:01:54
Speaker
um I'm not going to use the word self-care. um Because I think, you know, I spoke on this on my podcast that I think safety is a nurture science. You don't even hear that unless you're talking about mothers, but it is a part of how we nurture people. We are preventative, you know, element, but when things go wrong, we don't.
01:02:13
Speaker
move the organization back to their state of normal. you know And a lot of that is us nurturing that thing, checking on it, looking over it, making sure that everything is back to normal and making sure that the employees are okay.
01:02:26
Speaker
I want us to do our own self-checkup and say, are we okay? you know Many of us work in a high hazard footprint and and you got to take that time for yourself. So as you close out 24, think about yourself moving into the next year and You know, how are you going to nurture yourself so that you are a better leader for next year? Because that is what I'm closing my year with a lot of quiet, reflective time yeah um and just outdoor time because it's good for the soul, you know, to give back something to myself, because when you take a loss.
Conclusion and Reflection
01:03:00
Speaker
That's when you really stop and say life is really that fragile. Right. So that's what I'll leave you with. Oh, that's, that's beautiful. That's beautiful. It's done. I don't, I'm with you. I'm not into the word self-care because that just brings up like, you know, smelly candles and bubble baths.
01:03:18
Speaker
And and that's not self care. It might that be might be nice, but taking stock of who you are and whose you are. And um and yeah, having your touch. What's your touch tree? Is it nature? Is it your family? Is it, you know, reading? Is it reflection? Is it writing? Is it.
01:03:36
Speaker
quiet and being okay in the quiet. That's, some that's fantastic. That's fantastic. So thank you for that. And thank you so much for being on the show and taking the time to do this today.
01:03:49
Speaker
I have really enjoyed this. And I'm thankful that you invited me to your platform. And Happy New Year. And happy new year to you. Thank you, Dr. Fran. And thank you all for spending your time listening today. And more importantly, thank you for your contribution toward the common good.
01:04:05
Speaker
May our employees and those we influence know that our profession cares deeply about human well-being, which is the core of our practice. If you aren't subscribed and want to hear past and future episodes, you can subscribe in iTunes, the Apple podcast app, or any other podcast player you'd like.
01:04:20
Speaker
Or if you prefer to read the transcript and listen, you can go and find the podcast at hsi.com. 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 Dr. Fran and And special thanks to Emily Gould, our podcast producer.
01:04:39
Speaker
And until next time, thanks for listening.