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New Year Special Episode – 4 Safety Megatrends for 2022 with Dr. Josh Williams, Martin Royal and Eduardo Lan

New Year Special Episode_The Safety Guru

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As you prepare to ring in the new year, tune in to this special episode featuring safety experts Eric Michrowski, Martin Royal, Eduardo Lan, and Dr. Josh Williams from Propulo Consulting. They take the time to discuss important topics such as how to return to the workplace safely, learning organization, investment in safety coaching, and the evolution of Human and Organizational Performance. You are sure to gain beneficial insights as each expert highlights a specific safety megatrend to focus on in 2022.

Happy New Year!

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Real leaders leave a legacy. They capture the hearts and minds of their teams. Their origin story puts the safety and wellbeing of their people first. Great companies ubiquitously have safe yet productive operations. For those companies, safety is an investment, not a cost for the C-suit. It’s a real topic of daily focus. This is the Safety Guru with your host, Eric Michrowski, a globally recognized option safety guru, public speaker, and author. Are you ready to leave a safety legacy? Your legacy success story begins now. 

Hi, and welcome to the Safety Guru today. I’m very excited as we start preparing the countdown for the new year to have a great episode lined up for you. It’s four safety megatrends. Trends for 2022, 22 is the year ahead is two plus two. So, we have four experts with us that are going to share four key megatrends to start looking out for in 2022. 

Wow. Are you ready? Let’s go. Three, two, one together with me. 

I have Dr. Josh Williams, who’s been on our show several times. Josh, do you want to say a quick intro to yourself, everybody? 

Yeah, I’m happy to be here excited for 2022. And I’ve been doing this 20 something years, getting old. But looking forward to our session today. Thanks, Eric. 

Excellent. Well, thank you. And also have with me, Martin Royal. Martin Royal has been with Propulo for well over ten years. He’s been doing a lot of phenomenal work with leaders as part of organizational change. Martin, do you want to do a quick intro to yourself? 

For sure. Thanks, Eric. Glad to be on the show today and looking forward to discussing more about learning cultures today. 

Excellent. Thank you. Eduardo, who is coming back on the show, partners with Propulo Consulting, has been doing phenomenal work or driving organizational change more specifically, last 15-20 years, specifically around safety culture. Eduardo, welcome back. 

Thank you, Eric. Happy to be here with you and the rest of the audience really looking forward to this conversation and to helping leaders create environments where people can work safely and do so because they want to not just because they have to. 

Excellent love that. Okay. So, four topics, as I promised, looking at 2022. First one, we’re going to talk a little bit about the new normal with COVID. What is back to the workplace means how it’s impacting mental health, stress, fatigue and active care and what that means for safety. Then we’re going to talk into Behop with Dr. Josh, leading the conversation around some of the evolution around behavior-based safety integration around human performance. Then we’re going to go jump into Martin, who’s going to talk about learning organization, one of the key themes of a great safety culture and moving on. Really where the rubber hits the road. We’re going to pass it on to Eduardo, who’s going to talk about supervisory skills and how do you Hone those into 2022 to get real impact? 

So first, let me start a little bit on the new normal. So obviously dates have been changing for returning to the workplace. New variants are up in the news as we record this episode getting ready for the new Year hybrid remote work, return to work. Who really knows what’s happening? Some businesses have set on it. 

Some are still migrating. Well, what does that mean? From a safety standpoint? First, from a mental health standpoint, it’s so important. We’ve talked about another episode of The Safety Guru. Mental health is critically important, not just from wellbeing of the workforce, thinking about all the effects that mental health has taken over the last two years or so. But it also has a direct impact when it comes to safety performance. If you’re maybe distracted, there’s things on your mind. You’re not focused full attention on your job that poses a safety risk. 

And so that’s whereas a safety professional, it’s really important to start bridging that divide between mental health, which is often discussed in the HR field with the safety side of the equation. And that’s really where active care matters. If I know who my team members are, I notice that maybe somebody’s off a little bit today. Maybe I need to check in to see how they’re doing. Are they okay? I love there’s this quote in Australia where the way they talk about mental health is simply with the expression, Are you okay? 

So really reflecting connecting with your team members, knowing when something is a little bit different, something’s a little bit off and having the courage to jump in and really check in with them. So mental health, I think, is going to be hugely important as we start getting into 2022. The next one is really around stress and fatigue. We’ve talked about a lot. We’ve done some work internally on our list of the five key drivers of human error. Number one on that list is stress and fatigue. 

Stress is obviously incredibly present. Over the last 18 to 20 months, people have been mostly working harder, longer hours. There are more changes in the workplace that drives stress that also drives fatigue. If I’m not getting a good night rest, then I’m going to be more fatigue, which we know can put me in front of greater risk when I’m not fully there and fully focused, which really gets me into active care. And really that theme around something that most organizations have been talking about for the last 2030 years around safety. 

It really does matter. I talked about it before in terms of mental health. I know my team members; I know how they’re showing up. I’m more likely to be able to notice that something is different. I wrote an article just a few weeks ago. It was published in Forbes magazine. We had done a survey several months back and 80% of businesses that we had surveyed. We had talked to obviously, on the more mature side of safety, cultures reported that they had shown some improvements around how leaders showed up around active care. 

Phenomenally important. What’s important is also how do I embed that into the business? How do I start thinking about those themes, capturing the learnings and really making it real in the day to day? If you haven’t checked it out, that’s on Forbes. Forbes.com (https://www.forbes.com/sites/forbesbusinesscouncil/2021/12/01/beyond-back-to-normal-embedding-positive-changes-into-your-safety-culture/?utm_content=189459539&utm_medium=social&utm_source=linkedin&hss_channel=lcp-27064223&sh=19ea9f7432e9). You can have a quick look and really around active care is really this element of self-leadership. And how as a leader, I’m building in a conversation how I’m being recognized and that has a direct correlation to outcomes. We were doing some work with one of our clients. 

And what was really interesting is we started seeing a strong correlation between outcome indicators of safety performance and whether team members had interacted over the last month around safety. Perhaps with coaching conversations. That element of felt leadership was so directly correlated to outcomes really critically important. Josh is going to talk about it very soon when we start talking about conversations he shared just this morning with me an article that talked about how having good conversations around observations can lead to 47% improvement around Sith’s and a 60% reduction around hazards showing up in the workplace. 

So, on that note, I don’t know if any of you have anything to jump in on this theme of mental health, stress and fatigue and active care. So critical as you start looking at 2022 and really bridging the gap between what’s traditionally the domain of HR and the domain of safety. Yeah. 

I mean, my experience I think we could all in this collection relate to. It is when we’re talking with folks, whether we’re doing assessments, interviews, focus groups, we’re hearing stress more and more. Ever since Kobe hit everybody we talked to; it seems like doing more with less. It’s tough. So, we feel for people out there. Everyone’s kind of in the same boat struggling through it. And the felt leadership is a big part. But we’re going to talk about human performance and how that relates to default leadership. 

And, Eric, if I can let me just jump in for a bit, human performance is all the rage right now. People are talking about hop, or we call it Bee hop. So just a quick. I’m just going to do a quick background on behavioral safety, kind of the evolution and human performance and what that means for the good conversations we need to have with folks and this notion of felt leadership, how we transform a culture. So just back in the old days, when I was coming up, behavioral safety was taken over. 

Before that, there was a lot of emphasis on attitudes and motivation. Those are important things. The challenge was, what do we do with it? Sometimes you get a one and done motivational inspiring presentation or whatever or training. But then that’s it. What do we do? So behavioral safety came in. And of all the research out there, if you want to get nerdy and start looking up statistics and research in the safety field, you’re not going to find more than you will on behavioral safety. It has been studied for decades. 

There’s all kinds of science and research showing the benefits of behavioral safety and what it did was kind of transform the focus, not just in teams of what I’m thinking and feeling, but what am I doing? As we all know, if you minimize risky behaviors on the front end, you minimize the chance of something bad happening on the back end. I mean, I hate to be cold talking about human life, but in many ways it is a math equation. Fewer risky behaviors in the front end equals less chance of something going wrong in the back and doesn’t guarantee it. 

But it makes it a lot less likely. So, focusing on behavior is smart. And so behavioral safety comes along. And there’s science behind it. And one of the biggest benefits is you’ve got checklists that are used to see what’s going on, what’s working? Well, what’s not working? Well, theoretically, we’re getting input from people doing the work, hearing what they have to say and making changes based on it’s a beautiful system. Martin is going to talk about learning culture in a moment, but it’s a beautiful system when done properly to get that input, to create a true learning culture on a regular basis, as opposed to kind of one and done training sessions. 

The challenge is it’s not easy to do so as we transition to talk about Bee hop and human performance. On the behavioral safety side, three big things happened that made it difficult to do. First are implementations being poor. It became a commodity, so people are buying and selling behavior-based safety. So, people are throwing out checklists without the proper training with no discussion on conversations, essentially saying, here’s a checklist and go use it very quickly. When I was in graduate school, we did research with funded by NIOS at a company. 

Half the group was given a card and said, Go use it. The other half created their own checklists and rules for use and other things around it. We call it the participation group. They use their cards seven times more than the people that were simply told here’s a card and go do it. And too often with behavioral safety failures, there was not a proper implementation on the front end. It was here’s a card here’s how you fill it out. Go do it. So not surprisingly, it didn’t work. 

That was the first big. The second big issue was technology, and it’s great to have technology help us whom we’re doing various functions on the job. But these behavioral checklists got increasingly long because it was easy to fill out on technology. So, I’m filling out a 50 or 60 item checklist. That’s crazy. Nobody’s doing that properly or very few people are. It became a problem became all about the cards and the checklists and the quotes you get you one in at the end of the month. 

So now that you got the system of quotas of pencil whipping and a larger problem of this black hole where we’re feeling stuff out and we never hear back. So, employees are not talking to each other first. But second, they’re bringing up issues that are important and no one’s getting back to them. So not surprisingly, behavioral safety. There were some struggles. The third issue was simply it’s hard. It’s hard to maintain something long term. So, we got to acknowledge that, particularly on the behavioral side. So, as I’m trying to go quick on the hop side, on the Behop side, we’re talking about human performance and the two big tenants there one quit blaming people for getting hurt, Demi said this years ago. 

Don’t blame people for problems created by the system. The second part of that is to fix the system. The first response when someone gets hurt is not who screwed up. It’s where the system fails. We’ve got to reorient our thinking to understand that we all operate in a context. And if we improve the system, it influences our behavior. The very quick story. I got to do one sports analogy really quick. Random lost, great receiver, troubled guy problems throughout his career on and off the field goes to the Patriots. 

Not that I’m a Patriots fan, but they’ve got a tight system overnight. He’s a night and day guy. He’s out in the community doing all the stuff for charity. Now he’s on TV doing this stuff. Total transformation. Same guy in a different system behaves very differently. If we improve systems, we’re improving the likelihood of better attitudes and better behaviors out there. So, I just want to kind of point that out really quick. Two more thoughts here before we transition over here to Martin in terms of the Bee hop, what we call it, it’s behavioral and human performance. 

There’s a lot more emphasis on people talking to each other. As Eric mentioned earlier, it’s about having good conversations, these cards that we use when we roll it out with clients. We’re talking four or five things. What scares you about the job? What do we need to do differently? What would you do differently? How can we help? These are open ended questions, getting people talking. And if we respond to that and address issues based on those comments, you don’t need incentives and all these other gimmicky things to get people to fill them out. 

They want to because stuff is getting addressed. So, the Behop is all about conversations and being responsive to concerns when they’re being brought up. And again, mistakes are seen as opportunities to learn, as opposed to occasions to punish. It’s all that just culture people are talking about in a nutshell that’s what it is. So, the last point really quick is positive accountability. Some of the concerns that people have with human performance is we’re getting any personal accountability when mistakes happen. It’s not true. We’re just trying to reorient to the first response being address the system factors and supervisors. 

It’s a tough role for supervisors who are trying to keep. They need to set clear expectations and use positive means to maintain those expectations that we’ve all agreed on. That’s positive accountability. It’s doable it’s hard, but it’s doable. So, the end of this is essentially when be hop is done properly, we’re improving Felt leadership. There are various tools like leadership listening to us. Leaders are going up asking questions. They’re not going around saying good, bad or indifferent. They’re out there asking questions, trying to learn that creates an environment of openness, which is part again of that felt leadership saying felt leadership is one thing. 

Using listening tours is actually doing it. So, there are some tools and human performance that help with that felt leadership we mentioned as well as good conversation. So, with that said, I’ll turn it over. Martin, we’re going to talk more about learning culture. 

Yeah. And I think before I go there, I just want to emphasize I think your point around Behop is really key. A lot of people have implemented some form of observation program, many of them it’s not working anymore. People aren’t using it. They’re mailing it in, don’t throw it out with a bad water. It’s time to start thinking about how do you re energize? How do you get better conversations? And I love your approach, Brad. Deeper questions to ask people to reflect on what’s dangerous, about what you’re going to do today and really start deepening those relationships, but always keeping those elements from the behavioral base safety side that does work. 

So, thank you, Josh. Martin. So, you’re going to talk to us a little bit about learning organization. Probably one of the key themes of a great safety culture. 

This episode of the Safety Guru podcast is brought to you by Propulo Consulting, the leading safety and safety culture advisory firm. Whether you are looking to assess your safety culture, develop strategies to level up your safety performance, introduce human performance capabilities, re energize your BBS program, enhance supervisory safety capabilities, or introduce unique safety, leadership training and talent solutions. Propulo has you covered! Visit us at propulo.com. 

For sure. Thanks, Eric. And I’d like to share a bit more today about my prediction for the future of learning organization, but also to combine that with our focus on discretionary effort, the employee experience and safety. Because for our listeners probably are aware that at Propulo, we focus on discretionary effort as a way for our clients to gain a competitive advantage when it comes to safety and safe production. And what we know is that when it comes to workplace behaviors that drive safety, there are those that are we call our compliance behaviors completing hazard assessment form following safe work procedures, wearing the right PPE. 

But what we found it’s not sufficient for the workforce to engage in compliance behaviors to drive exemplary safety performance. These, beyond the minimum behaviors, are more difficult to measure, and they often involve positive safety behaviors that are targeted toward achieving your safety goals, like staying vigilant in the face of changing conditions, supporting the team, sharing safety information. And of course, we won’t see any of these behaviors listed on any employee job description. But a lot of our organizations that are doing extremely well safety wise will have employees or greater proportion of employees that demonstrate this behavior. 

And what’s interesting about this Krishna effort is that it only emerges when there’s a high level of workforce engagement and commitment so that discretionary effort is the behavioral manifestation of engagement. I wanted to share some insight today around the concept of worker experience, how an organization that focuses on learning and how can we increase that discretionary effort in our workforce? Now, why is the worker experience? What does it matter? I would say the employee experience is the hallmark of learning organization because the emphasis is on developing the mindset, the behaviors and systems that are conducive to have an optimal employee experience that will encourage high safety performance and discretionary effort. 

Now for the listeners that are maybe familiar within the Its industry. So, software companies have talked about the user experience for quite some time. It’s to describe the experience of app users how they engage with the app. It’s a concept that focuses on the emotional response of users and how they interact with the features and functions Facebook, Google, Twitter, or Masters of this to create engaging users’ experience. Now, the same ideas we can take four employees in the organization. So, employee or the worker experience just simply describe how employees think and feel through every touch point during their time with the organization could be recruitment, onboarding development, performance to things like long absences of work, remote working on boarding or things like incident investigation, injury, radiation, disciplinary action. 

Why we want to look at this employee experience is simply that the employee experience underlies the commitment and engagement that we need to drive discretionary effort. And you could think about it that your employees experience with safety management system will determine at the end the extent to which they will adopt, use and improve on the system. I wanted to share an example that remind me of our clients of ours, a European zinc and silver mine that I happened to visit. I think five, six years ago and their agency team would share with us their concerns that the miners were not reporting near misses, not anything that surprising. 

We’ve heard of these kinds of concerns before now, putting the mindset aside around reporting names when you look at the process of reporting narratives at that point, it was quite cumbersome and at first we have to understand the workers operated at 500ft below ground, and there was no way for them to fill out any form whatsoever. If any incident or near misses were happening. These near miss forms were in a building adjacent to where the miners would meet before taking off. At the end of the day, the form itself was convoluted. 

Workers would drop it off in a box to preserve anonymity, which is good. But then no one would hear back from these reports or if any, corrective actions were taking place. And so, while many leaders are often tempted to blame workers for poor attitudes towards incident reporting or lack of motivation, when you look at these workers experience of the near miss reporting system, you can see it’s quite easy how someone might just feel frustrated, disempowered to submit these kinds of reports, let alone even appreciating the value of doing so. 

If we want to build on more positive employee experience around safety system, a couple of things that we can look into. One is looking at the factors. The main factor that may drive that positive experience could be the safe work procedures, safety policies, tools and equipment learning and reporting system safety communication teams, the reward and recognition system field oversight. I would even go to look at the coworkers and peer relationship, and the goal would be to determine how workers experience the system and whether the system is supporting their intended goal, which we’ll presume. 

It is about encouraging error identification, prevention and mitigation. Now, what if I’m a manager and I’d like to improve my employees experience? All right. So, a couple of things for me, I would say as a leader, I would say, start with yourself, how are your employees experiencing you? Do they feel they are treated fairly? Do they feel that you value their opinion and contribution? Do they feel they’re encouraged and supported? Do they feel that you provide them with opportunities for development? Do they feel that you hold them accountable for high safety standards, or even do they feel that you should have the concern for them as individual? 

I say that’s the first and as Josh mentioned earlier, basically, it is about going and talking to our people, talking to workers and getting that sort of feedback. But here’s the thing as a second step. So, I would say that you start with yourself as a leader. Second, is you could do the same with your front-line supervisors and also try to get that feedback is how are the workers experiencing your front-line supervisors? Same kind of question to start to get a sense of how or why are they doing the things they do? 

And are there elements around the leadership that could be improved now? Third, might be around the system that you want to gather feedback on, which often requires to get out in the field. Get the feedback. Seek to understand the experience of this system what works and what doesn’t work. My experience is we need to ask all the right questions, especially if the workers have not been accustomed to providing any input, especially to senior leaders. So, questions might be things like what gets in the way for you to work safely? 

How can we improve our approach to report safety incident or name another safety system that we want to look into? What do you think we could improve? What are the things you think about our recognition program? So, I’ll recommend you pick just a different list of systems that are more critical that you want to get feedback on and just go out there to get that feedback. Now, one thing I’ll say, though, you might need for in certain workspaces might need to build a trust first. If trust is in there. 

One of the reasons is if people have had some mistress or senior management, they may not open up. And so, we’re going to need to start building that trust, building a bit of the commitment that if the feedback is provided that’s something will be done about it. And so, as a leader, I would say the goal is not to make commitments to make massive critical infrastructure improvement, but more small improvements that demonstrate that. Hey, we listen to you, and we are going to take action to make things better. 

So, we’ll see later on a note that my colleague will Home in on the supervisor’s experience. But I wanted to share that as a learning organization at the end of the day, it’s really about looking, how are we operating and what’s the impact on our workforce? And if we want to give them a better experience, what are some of the changes we can take on? 

Thank you. Thank you, Martin. I think this whole theme of learning organization so key to safety and definitely should be an area of focus going into 2020. Eduardo, you’ve talked last time you were on the show, you talked a little bit about supervisory skills, couldn’t agree more. It’s really where the rubber hits the road. This is where safety culture really manifests itself and how you have impact is going to be how the supervisor interacts with team members. And too often I’ve heard team members saying they’ll trust a supervisor. 

They’ll do what their supervisor does. They’re more important to them day to day than the CEO even is. So, Eduardo over to you. 

Yeah, absolutely. Eric. And thank you, Martin and Josh as well. Yeah, it is really where the rubber meets the road. And I understand what you’re saying about what workers comment in teams of their relationship to their supervisor. And he or she is being more important than the CEO. Now, this is logical, because oftentimes they don’t even know the CEO. They’ve seen them on a pamphlet on a brochure. They’ve heard him speak, maybe, but they don’t know him or her personally. And they do know the supervisor. And so that person, really the supervisor is where the rubber meets the road. 

I would say for two reasons, one because they are in direct contact with the worker, and thus they are able to influence that person and they do for good or for bad constantly. And second, because supervisors are really between a rock and a hard place. And Josh was mentioning that we feel for people, and we feel for supervisors because we understand the challenges that they face between producing and keeping people safe. And it is a challenge. It’s not easy to handle that challenge, but it can be done. 

And we know from experience and from working with many, many organizations that when organizations and supervisors and other more senior leaders focus on safety, people work better. They produce more they produce with higher quality. But if supervisors are really where the rubber meets the road, we need to invest in them, and we need to train them, and we need to develop them. And unfortunately, that is usually not the case. Supervisors are usually promoted through the ranks in organizations because of what they know because of the type of worker they are and the level of performance they have. 

Which one? In one sense, it’s important that they know the job, that they know the technical aspects of the job, because they’ll be supervising people directly. But oftentimes many of the things that made them stand out as individual workers get in the way of them being effective leaders, because being an effective worker is really about getting stuff done by yourself, being assertive and as a leader, you really need to get stuff done to other people, and that requires leadership skills and leadership skills are very different from technical skills. 

We’re talking here about your capacity to create relationship, your capacity to interact with people, your capacity to listen to people, to get people thinking, to get people speaking to get people. And that discretionary effort that Josh and Martin were talking about is key. And there is no one in the organization that has more power to really generate that container, that environment where people are willing to go that extra mile, to be creative, to think about things, to stop and pause before they do the work, then supervisors, so really investing in them and developing them as leaders is key. 

Now to do that, we need to give them all these skills that I talked about. And one key skill that I think is crucial is helping them to become better coaches, because, in essence, and with the type of work that people do nowadays in industry essential, that their direct leader, that is their supervisor and be able to coach people so that they themselves can become more self aware, become better at managing themselves, really coaching people to think about the work that they’re doing and to consider what are the risks, what are the hazards that they will be facing and how they will be mitigating those risks. 

Now again, unfortunately, because these are not necessarily skills that we have. Naturally, some supervisors develop them naturally, and we’ve seen Rockstar supervisors, but many don’t. They’ve never developed them, and they’ve never been taught. But these are really skills that are essential because it’s in those coaching conversations that supervisors have with workers that you will get workers to really look at how they work, look at their behavior and really get them to think about what they’re doing so that they don’t get hurt on the job. In this regard, we’ve come up with very specific skills that we teach supervisors, and we do so both in a classroom setting. 

And this is not your typical classroom with lots of PowerPoint slides and lots of concepts. No, these are about supervisors having conversations about what challenges they’re having with people, what it is that they want workers to do that they’re currently not doing and what they can do to get workers to do this. And these classes are full of role plays where they act out that relationship between worker and supervisor and how to have those conversations. And ultimately, we even develop supervisors through field coaching, having them practice these skills in real life situations. 

And some of these skills have to do. We come up with an acronym called Dare, and we call it Dare because it really takes courage to lead in this way. First off, because we’re not used to leaving in this way, and it’s going to be uncomfortable starting out. Second of all, because we’re asking supervisors to step away from this traditionally authoritative role of I’m the boss. I’m the supervisor. I’m going to tell you what to do when you’re going to do it to more collaborative relationship. 

And so that takes certain things. It takes the ability, as I said before, to create relationship. As you’ve all mentioned during this conversation, it really takes an ability to not just care for people which most supervisors do. We don’t doubt that, but to actively show that care and to delegate work in a manner that promotes safety. Now, what do I mean by this? Telling people what to do and how to do it does not work. First off, you don’t know whether the other person heard you, and you certainly don’t know whether the other person understood you and so telling someone what to do and how to do it. 

And then we tend to ask people or supervisors tend to ask people, did you understand? And of course, people are going to say yes, I should, of course. But that doesn’t mean they understood. It just means they’re saying that because they don’t want to look foolish. So, delegating work effectively means telling people what to do, but asking them how they’re going to do it, and furthermore, asking them what risks they will be facing and how they will mitigate those risks. Second, and this again takes courage because it’s not something we’re used to the A in there is about acknowledging safe work, and this is really key. 

We know from years and years of studies in various fields that people really thrive in an environment where they are recognized, they are appreciated. They’re acknowledged for the things that they do. And yet traditionally, we don’t do that. We just focus on what’s wrong. Now, here’s the problem with focusing on what’s wrong. Many people will say, well, that’s where I need to focus. That’s where the gap is. I need to talk about what’s wrong. The problem is it’s unfair and it’s counterproductive, and it’s unfair because people do more right things. 

They do more safe work than they do dangerous work. And thus, speaking to them always about what they do wrong. What they do unsafely is unfair. And second, it’s unproductive, because if I Eric, I’m your supervisor and I come to you and I correct you, and then I come again and I correct you again, and then I come back and I correct you again. What’s going to happen? The fourth time I come around, are you going to be all happy to see? 

I’m sure I’m going to be thrilled to see you. 

Exactly. You’re going to hate me. So, it’s really important to do that. The next aspect is redirecting at risk work, and that, of course, is important. We need to redirect unsafe behaviors. We need to redirect unsafe conditions, but it takes skill to do that such that you can redirect without offending the other person in a way that not just maintains but actually strengthens their relationship and really has the other person take the message to heart. And finally, the E in the Dare acronym is engaged. And its really what Martin was talking about of generating this learning culture, where there’s this back and forth with the organization and with the people that are really the experts of the work itself, which are the workers. 

So really teaching supervisors to create environments to create conversations where people are willing to engage are willing to speak up. And that’s really what this is all about. So yeah, really passionate about helping organizations upskill their supervisors, because as I said at the beginning, this is really where the rubber meets the road. And if we get this piece right, a lot of good can be done. 

I agree. I think you tied everything together. Edward. I think the element of how a supervisor starts interacting create a safe environment, how they’re coaching links to some of the themes that Martin was talking about earlier in terms of creating a learning organization where people want to put in more discretionary effort towards safety, where we’re constantly learning from what could go wrong, which ties us back to Josh was also talking about conversations and really those coaching interactions. And really the element of how do we start looking at things from a just culture standpoint? 

How do we start removing a lot of the risk and the blaming of the employees, but still continuing to do some of the good stuff around behavioral observations, driving better conversations? And then at the front end when I was talking about really the key element around mental health, wellbeing, really bridging that divide between safety and HR, really addressing some of the impacts around stress and fatigue, and then really the active care and self-leadership. All those key pieces, I think, are really the four core mega trends to focus on in 2022. 

So really appreciate all four of you. Joining me today. Eduardo, Martin, and Dr. Josh great conversation. Great topics to explore and wish you a happy New Year! 

Happy and Safe New Year. 

Happy and safe New Year to everybody. 

Happy New Year everyone, I would say Bonne et année!  

Let’s count down together. 10 – 3, 2, 1 

Fireworks, Champagne, and Happy New Year! 

Thank you for listening to the safety guru on c-suit radio. Leave a legacy. Distinguish yourself from the pack. Grow your success, capture the hearts and minds of your teams. Fuel your future. Come back in two weeks for the next episode or listen to our sister show with the Ops Guru. Eric Michrowski. 

The Safety Guru with Eric Michrowski

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ABOUT THE GUESTS

Dr. Josh Williams, Martin Royal and Eduardo Lan are Partners with Propulo Consulting, the leading Safety and Operations Strategy Advisory & training firm. Tapping into insights from brain science and psychology, Propulo helps organizations improve their Safety, Operational performance and Culture.

Dr. Josh Williams: For more than 20 years, Josh has partnered with clients around the world to deliver customized, sustainable solutions to improve safety culture and prevent SIFs. Dr. Williams earned his Ph.D. in Industrial/Organizational Psychology at Virginia Tech and is a behavioral safety, human performance, and safety culture improvement expert. Josh is the author of Keeping People Safe: The Human Dynamics of Injury Prevention and co-editor of Keys to Behavior Based Safety. He has published more than 150 book chapters, government reports, white papers, blogs and articles in leading journals. Josh has also delivered hundreds of presentations at leading national conferences and is a highly regarded public speaker. He received the Cambridge Center National First Prize for his research on behavioral safety feedback.

Martin Royal: Martin is an expert in Human Performance & Business Transformation, coach and facilitator who helps clients create a committed and mobilized workforce to achieve their operational excellence, safety and wellbeing outcomes. Since joining Propulo Consulting in 2011, he has delivered well over 400+ safety culture change workshops and training programs centered on the development of employee empowerment, difficult conversations and leadership skills for global clients in North America and Europe. Martin supports Propulo Consulting’s contractor facilitator workforce and internal consultant team to enable them to deliver exceptional safety engagement training programs. He also supports the development and client-customization of Propulo Consulting’s various leadership and employee training offerings. Over the years, he has been involved in leading safety culture improvement engagements with various clients in industries such as aquaculture, construction, manufacturing, mining, oil and gas, and utilities.

Eduardo Lan: As an accomplished organizational consultant and safety leadership coach, Eduardo has extensive experience in safety culture transformation, leadership development, and high-performance projects and operations across the United States, Europe, Canada and Latin America. With over 20 years of experience in Leadership and Organizational Transformation, Eduardo is truly an expert in Organizational Development and Change, specifically safety culture and leadership. He has designed and led seminars, workshops, coaching sessions, and entire programs on personal and organizational transformation for hundreds of organizations and thousands of people and works with leaders and teams on identifying limiting behaviors that thwart high performance, assisting them in producing breakthrough bottom-line results. He holds a master’s degree in Organization Development and Change from Pennsylvania State University and multiple certifications in consulting, coaching, safety, ontology, MBTI, integral theory, appreciative inquiry, adaptive leadership, and mindfulness. He is a frequent columnist for multiple business and industry publications.

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Holiday Special Episode – The Top 10 themes and ideas from 2021

Holiday Special Episode_The Top 10 themes and ideas from 2021

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ABOUT THE EPISODE

A year in review. The Safety Guru’s Top 10 themes and ideas from our 2021 season! Get caught up with the ideas that will help you leave a legacy in 2022! Happy Holidays!

Special thanks to our 2021 season guests: Nick Marks, Michelle Brown, Donald G. James, Kina Hart, Tricia Kagerer, Curtis Weber, Brandon Williams, Candace Carnahan, Dr. Tim Ludwig, Alfred Ricci, Dr. Josh Williams, Dr. Mark Fleming, Gardner Tabon, Steve Spear, Spencer Beach, Eduardo Lan, Dr. Keita Franklin, Jason Anker, John Westhaver, Dr. Tim Marsh, Glen Cook (Cookie), Dr. Suzanne Kearns, Dr. Robert Sinclair and Russ & Laurel Youngstrom.

READ THIS EPISODE

Real leaders leave a legacy. They capture the hearts and minds of their teams. Their origin story puts the safety and wellbeing of their people. First, great companies ubiquitously have safe yet productive operations. For those companies, safety is an investment, not a cost for the C-suite. It’s a real topic of daily focus. This is the Safety Guru with your host, Eric Michrowski, a globally recognized option safety guru, public speaker, and author. Are you ready to leave a safety legacy? Your legacy success story begins now. 

Hi and welcome to the Safety Guru. I’m your host, Eric Michrowski. It’s hard to believe it, but 2021 is almost coming to a close and we’re about to wrap up our second year producing the show for all the leaders and executives out there like you that are seeking to leave a legacy by making the workplace safer. More than any other time of the year. The holiday brings loved ones together to celebrate with those that matter the most of them. This time of the year symbolizes why my team and I do the work that we do to partner with exceptional leaders and companies that endlessly focus on ensuring that their team members come home to their loved ones every day. For that, we thank you. We extend our sincere appreciation to you for your gift of safety for each and every one of your team members. 2021 has been a year full of exceptional ideas on this show. Ideas from a diverse set of thought leaders from academia and from real world practical applications. I have two awesome episodes to cap off this year. Today I will share a reflection of the top ten ideas I heard from my guests on this podcast. The next episode first will ring in the new year 2022 with four experts sharing their top four ideas for 2022. Well, you must be wondering why four guests and four ideas whether you’re 22 is two squared.  

So now on to our top ten lists for 2021. Best episodes that I’ve heard here from our guests. Let’s start with number ten. This year we had a great lineup of safety motivational speakers from Russ and Laurel Youngstrom that talked about moving safety from the head to the heart to Jason Anker that really talked about making safety part of your life and the impact of mental health on safety. We’ll get to that soon. Kina Hart and Candace Carnahan that talked about making safety personal. Curtis Webber that touched on the importance of leadership and onboarding for safety. Spencer Beach about putting safety first, listening to yourself, John Westhaver about road safety and wide matters, and finally cookie around power line safety, his episode around looking up and living. All of these motivational speakers do some exceptional work and sharing the importance of staying safe and help influence the mindsets and ultimately the behaviors of others. For that, I thank them. 

Well, it is essential for every team member to choose to work safely because they recognize that safety is an investment into the experiences that they want to have with their loved ones. Sometimes we also need to step into the shoes of somebody who had an experience to understand that this could happen to us as well. Of this great lineup, two episodes really caught my attention. First one was around Russ and Laurel Youngstrom. This dynamic duo had a really authentic story around safety. What caught my attention was the story about a close friend of Russ who was there the day of the event who witnessed him getting seriously injured, falling from heights and yet a short period afterwards was also caught not wearing his safety harness while working at Heights. The other part is, Russ was very authentic. When I asked him about what would have prevented him from making this at the time, he essentially said that nothing could have stopped him. It was already in his mindset at the time. Cookie, you got to love somebody who goes by that name. Well, he had a fantastic story about powerline, safety and really that people were getting more easily injured when you could see the power line versus when you were digging, and you couldn’t see it really important story about situational awareness and a great app that gets people to reflect and think about the hazards of power line. 

And now on to number nine, the Happiness Index with Nick Marks, A Statistician with A Soul. What really caught my attention about this episode was the element on the focus on a pulse, a regular pulse of your business. The work he had done had identified how pulse of the workforce is a very fluid scenario, and he brought some examples from the first few months of the coveted pandemic and how a month over month and week over week, people’s perception around the workplace were shifting. So, what really that brings forward is the importance of measuring a safety pulse on a more regular basis, not even just doing it annually or quarterly, but maybe even thinking about their workforce and their perceptions in a small sample on a weekly basis so that we get a great leading indicator and may be able to impact and drive action earlier. He also touched on the importance of psychological safety and some ideas on how to measure it really key topics for 2021 and beyond, and now on to number eight safety culture. What would a year on the safety group be without conversation on safety culture? But this year we had two great professors come and join us. Dr. Mark Fleming, as well as Dr. Bob Sinclair. Dr. Mark Fleming’s episode is interesting. He touches on the topic of signal theory, which was Nobel Prize research. Essentially, he’s trying to understand what are the signals that executives can send to truly send the message that safety matters here. Point he brings forward is that sometimes when an executive will walk around, they’ll say that safety is the number one priority, and the team members are really trying to understand. Is that signal true or not? A couple of the key items is about how can executives present more powerful impactful messages when they do spend time and field because that time and feel is going to be limited. A great episode for senior leaders to think about their messaging and sending the right signals across the organization. 

The other thing he touches on is really the importance of fixing things, but also of helping people solve their own issues around safety and how that sends some very reinforcing positive signals. Dr. Bob Sinclair also came on our show later in the year, and he was talking about some of the links between safety, climate and ultimately behaviors, which is the whole reason why we’re focused on safety climate and safety culture, but also touched on the importance of complexity of rewards too easily. You can drive the wrong impact by having the wrong metrics, but at senior levels, if you don’t have the right indicators, then you may not be prioritizing safety the right way. So great episode. Very complex theme touches on it. The other element he touches on, which I’ll get to very soon and more details is around supervisory skills and how that’s a critical, critical place to begin a journey around safety culture. Really making sure that your supervisors are maximizing every single interaction to drive meaningful impact because ultimately that’s who find my teams members speak to the most and are probably the most influential in the day to day. Of course, number seven goes to Human Factors with two great guests this year. 

Let’s start with Dr. Suzanne Kearns. She teaches aviation safety, and one of the things she touched on is really around how in the 70s and 80s, the culture was really around finding the air within the pilot. Post an investigation. There were a series of very high-profile aviation accidents that were primarily caused by pilot error during the 70s and 80s and really start challenging the industry to think about. Is it really about challenging the error of the pilot, or is there more to play with? One of the most interesting examples she brought forward was around Eastern Airlines. 

If you remember the crash where there was a faulty light bulb that changed the attention of the crew, and they didn’t realize that they disengaged the autopilot and flew their aircraft straight into the ground, something that should never have happened. So, she really talks about how you need to lurk look at the environment and the situation touches on human performance, really as a scientific discipline of why people make mistakes. One thing I really loved about her conversation was around the Swiss cheese model. She touched about how we have multiple layers of protection, but each one of them has holes in it. 

And if those holes line up, that’s where an accident can happen. So, the concept is an accident itself is actually quite rare, but those leading conditions that could allow it to happen are more frequent. So, she really focuses on how you start looking for those leading conditions and driving real impact. And then there was Brandon Williams, from fighter pilot to airline captain, who recently just got promoted as a captain. He touched on four critical themes in my mind. One, he touched on the concept of just culture learned, touching on some of the items that Suzanne Kearns also discussed. 

But he also talks how that drives in your misreporting and creates a learning environment and the critical importance of it. He touched on the importance of situational awareness and tools and tactics that can help increase worker situational awareness, which is often why things go horribly wrong. I loved as well how he touched on the concept of accountability as peer accountability, as opposed to sometimes the negative view of accountability, which is where we start blaming people. I love this concept of peer accountability from his episode, and now we go to number six, where we go to Steve Spear, who teaches operations management at MIT. What I loved about this episode is he touches on the importance of really creating a learning organization if you want to drive safety. He touches on the concept of seeing problems, how that becomes a capability where people are constantly obsessed with finding opportunities to drive improvements, and then, Secondly, how they start solving them nonstop, trying to find even little things, really touches on the theme that we touched on before around human factors and human performance, really trying to solve those leading conditions. And finally, really about how do we share and disseminate that knowledge. 

He touches on three stories that are incredibly powerful. First one, he has first-hand experience around Paul O’Neill’s work at Alcoa and really how Paul O’Neill did some phenomenal things around safety, truly, by driving the importance and the focus and within the organization. From his initial meetings where he talked about how we’re going to fix everything through a focus on safety, to try to make sure that he knew about every single incident within 24 hours in days prior to even a Fax machine, and how that drove really this sense of ownership, accountability across line leaders. 

And finally, that if somebody wasn’t on board, how he took an action. Second one was really around US Navy, and he talked about some great examples of how you make sure a new team member comes on board and can be anywhere in the world and yet make the right call right decision. That was a great story. And finally, I would touch on Toyota, which was another example he brought on, which is really around the onboarding of a leader and really how it’s really about coaching great episode, lots of great insights about creating a learning organization, which is really the crux of driving safety performance. 

This episode of the Safety Guru podcast is brought to you by Propulo Consulting, the leading safety and safety culture advisory firm. Whether you are looking to assess your safety culture, develop strategies to level up your safety performance, introduce human performance capabilities, re-energize your BBS program, enhance supervisory safety capabilities, or introduce unique safety leadership training and talent solutions. Propulo has you covered visit us at propulo.com 

Now on to number five. We had Professor Dr. Tim Ludwig who joined us. The safety Doc meets the safety guru. His book, Dysfunctional Practices That Kill Your Safety Culture, has amazing resources and ideas on things that you could do and probably are doing that are making things worse around your safety culture. First thing you touched on is really stop blaming your employees. And he brings a lot of really good examples of leaders that think that our employees aren’t doing the right things and blaming them. 

Again. Linked to the earlier topic around human performance. He talks about some of the theory around behavioral change and how do you make that tangible and real in the business? And does it really change from day to day through coaching interactions? And how do you actually make a change and then really the importance of the environment in which you’re operating in great book, but also great episode and now on to number four Mental health. We had four experts bring up the topic over the year, but two really caught my attention. 

The duo of Jason Anker and Dr. Tim Marsh that worked together Jason Anker from more of a motivational standpoint in terms of his experience. And then Dr. Tim Marsh from some of his work and his research around safety culture. And really the key theme and what I loved about those two episodes is how they were able to directly link the impact of mental health and safety. Often people touch on the topic. They were able to connect the dots and essentially unfortunately, a lot of organizations the mental health side is being handled by HR and the safety side by the safety professionals, and what he’s advocating, what they’re talking about is really these things are often interconnected talks about the importance of active care and how active care is an incredibly important theme to start surfacing that maybe somebody is not as okay as you think today and that could be a precursor to an injury really driving that link. 

Such an important theme really important for safety leaders to start thinking about the impact and how they can collaborate with HR around driving mental health within their business and now on to number three. Safety supervision. Such an important topic I mentioned before, Bob Sinclair mentioned the importance and why it’s so critical for your supervisors to really have the right skills. Eduardo talks about how often supervisors are the ones that got the least investment in teams of leadership skills often get promoted from the craft because they were really good at the job but weren’t given the tools around influence, particularly around safety. 

And if you want to make a real difference for safety, that’s probably where you need to start around upgrading the skills of your supervisor. What I love about Eduardo talks about the four core critical behaviors that you need to drive in the core skills you want to bring forward, which is around how you delegate work safely, how you acknowledge safe work. So really the element of recognition and how that plays an impact in terms of ultimately in terms of the outcomes, how do you redirect unsafe work, which is probably the most challenging one? 

How do you get difficult conversations nailed? How do you help coach a team member so that you get real lasting impact and behavioral change? And finally, around engaging your team around safety to get more participation, more involvement? Great episode, tangible ideas around safety supervision and how do you make it happen within your business? Definitely has to be an area of focus going in 2022. Now on to number two safety leadership. What topic could be more important than safety leadership if you want to drive meaningful impact? 

Well, this episode was around with Michelle Brown, who dedicated her career to helping leaders. She speaks a lot on the impact and the key elements of transformational leadership and some of the experiences she’s had with some of those transformational leaders. Really about how do you leave a legacy? The power of questions and really, ultimately, the impact of what interests my boss will fascinate me. And how do you use that as a positive to drive safety culture change within your business? Incredibly important topic around leadership as well connects with some of the topics we heard earlier around Mark Fleming and his conversations around signal theory. 

Two episodes that really touch on the impact and the importance of safety leadership, and now moving to the number one idea from my episode in 2021, we had Dr. Josh Williams introduce the concept he calls Be Hop. He brings ideas to help take your behavior-based safety to the next level. We all know that BBS has probably had the biggest impact around safety performance, but unfortunately, a lot of organization it plateaus, and often it plateaus because BBS doesn’t address themes such as safety ownership. The human performance items I talked about doesn’t go deep enough around coaching doesn’t focus sufficiently on critical observable actions. 

Basically, the higher risk items that people should be observing. Key performance indicators tend to drive the wrong impact, so too much focus on mailing it in by driving up the number of observation cards. Often BBS programs lack in terms of organizational change. Don’t touch organizational systems don’t drive safety participation, and there’s still blame. As we heard from Dr. Tim Ludwig. So, Josh proposes a couple of key ideas to help introduce and integrate behavior-based safety with some of the human performance tools we talked about before to drive real, tangible impact and push. 

Plus, a Plateau and performance Bee hop a great tactic, very different from traditional observation programs. If you’re looking to make a difference, listen to that episode. There you have it, folks. Those are my top ten for 2021. Listen in on December 30 as we look forward to the top four safety megatrends for 2022, the top four safety megatrends to move and power your safety performance into 2022 and then join us in 2022, as have another phenomenal line up of guests and ideas for you.  

Once again, thank you for the work that you do helping workers come home safe to their loved ones for the holidays. Hey, and if you know somebody that should be on the show, let me know. Let’s make safety fun, simple and useful for executive and leaders. Let’s make a real difference. Happy Holidays from the safety guru. Thank you. 

Thank you for listening to the safety Guru on Csuite radio. Leave a legacy. Distinguish yourself from the pack. Grow your success, capture the hearts and minds of your team’s. Fuel your future. Come back in two weeks for the next episode or listen to our sister show with the Ops guru. Eric Michrowski. 

The Safety Guru with Eric Michrowski

More Episodes: https://thesafetyculture.guru/

C-Suite Radio: https://c-suitenetwork.com/radio/shows/the-safety-guru/

Powered By Propulo Consulting: https://propulo.com/

Eric Michrowski: https://ericmichrowski.com

ABOUT THE HOST

Eric Michrowski is a globally recognized thought leader and guru in Operations and Safety Culture Transformations. A highly sought-after Executive speaker on the global stage, he has led executive training programs, coached the C-Suite, and connected with thousands of Fortune 500 senior leaders. He has been featured on TV, in articles, and Podcasts, hosts syndicated show on the premiere business podcast C-Suite Radio and has an upcoming ForbesBooks book to be published next year. His approach is anchored in evidence-based research and practical applications in Human Performance, Process Excellence, and Organizational Change. He brings over 25-years hands-on experience in Operations Management, Culture & Business Transformations, and Safety having worked across a broad range of industries. Across his work, he has achieved substantial improvements in Safety, Operational and Financial Performance, and Employee Engagement, always by incorporating Epic Cultures to maximize results and sustainability.

Connect with Eric at https://www.ericmichrowski.com

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RELATED EPISODE

Moving Safety from the Head to the Heart with Russ and Laurel Youngstrom

The Safety Guru_Russ & Laurel Yongstrom_Moving Safety from the Head to the Heart

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ABOUT THE EPISODE

A special episode in honor of December Family Month features an excellent conversation with Russ and his wife Laurel. Their message is a strong warning that one split-second decision can change many lives forever. Russ is a work-related paraplegic, and he touches on the dangers of an “it won’t happen to me” attitude in the workplace. He reminds the listeners that accidents can happen to any of us, especially when carelessly ignoring safety precautions. Laurel discusses how one careless act has affected every aspect of their lives. Listen to a truly inspirational story about the importance of safety ownership from Russ and Laurel.

READ THIS EPISODE

Real leaders leave a legacy. They capture the hearts and minds of their teams. Their origin story puts the safety and wellbeing of their people first. Great companies ubiquitously have safe yet productive operations. For those companies, safety is an investment, not a cost for the C-suite. It’s a real topic of daily focus. This is the Safety Guru with your host, Eric Michrowski, a globally recognized option safety guru, public speaker and author. Are you ready to leave a safety legacy? Your legacy success story begins now. 

Hi and welcome to the Safety Guru today. I’m very excited to have with me Russ and Laurel Youngstrom, both are safety advocates and keynote speakers. They do a phenomenal job at sharing their journey as a couple and really speaking to move safety from the head to the heart. I love that quote. So maybe if you can start a little bit about telling me about your journey and what happened on that day and then we’ll take it from there. 

Yeah. I used to be a commercial painter. I woke up that morning, gave Laura Let his goodbye, looked in on our son, Spencer. He was sound asleep in his little bed. He was two and went to work, stopped off, got my four shots of Espresso and a Maple bar, and I was the first one to work that day. But I saw the clipboard. I signed it immediately, and then we had a quick safety meeting. I don’t remember. And then our goal was to power wash the outside of the paper mill. 

And I always work with a really good friend of mine. We had a new guy with this, so we got all our rigging set up for a swing staging scaffolding. We started off at 180ft supervisors, Foreman. They all came up and inspected everything. So, we started power washing, and I unlocked my arms almost immediately. That’s just me. 

Okay. Next thing, somebody got our attention and it was time for lunch. The weather was really bad, really terrible. So, we wouldn’t have lunch. We got ready to go back to work. And the paper mill stopped nine of us and said, you have to come to our safety meeting. It’s like, okay. So, I walked up a flight of stairs, got a Snickers, bark up a coffee, turned the chair in front of me around and put my feet on it and listened to some guy with a laser pointer and completely ignored it. 

We went back to work, started power washing, and I had that funny idea. We’re being watched. I looked and our safety guy drove a little too far on the back side of the building where we can see the front of his truck. So immediately I hooked up and we never got caught. He was there for about 20 minutes and finally left. And then we started hard watching again. And it was time for the end of the day. And I took it up on myself to say let’s put it on a 30-foot platform and try it off overnight to the handrail. 

Okay. A friend of mine agreed. So, we came up with my little plan. I did have my harness on at the time, and my safety line was in a bad angle that I didn’t like. Sure, my safety line went right by the friend of mine. He put his hands up and said, no, I told him to F off. So, we both climbed up on the handrail. 

And right. When I climbed up, I looked down. I could catch myself. I wasn’t worried at all. And then I got a signal from somebody. The chills, the goosebumps down the back of my neck. Like, don’t do this. And by the time we picked up the scaffolding and by the time I get even blank, swung back and hit me in the chest and threw me back about 10ft. 

Oh, my goodness. 

Our hat comes off. Safety glasses come off, and it does go in slow motion. And my first instinct immediately from the gentleman that hired me years ago. He said, never land on your feet. You’ll blow your feet, your knees, your hips. That’s the first thing that came to mind. It’s like, okay, what just happened? I couldn’t find my legs at first, and then finally, I can see my legs. Okay, I’m going to land on my right side, hit roll and walk it off. Okay. I got this. 

And right before I was going to hit all of a sudden, my right leg got stuck in some Airlines and then stopped me, then budgeted me back up. And that point, I was completely lost. And the first thing I felt has young kids, watermelons, pumpkins that would never take off porches. It drove on the ground, and you hear that explosion noise? That’s what I felt in my head. The first thing that hit and then a snap. It’s like, okay, walk this off. Okay, walk it off. 

It couldn’t get up. And I tried breathing. It’s like, I can’t breathe. I tried to breathe in again. I took one last try to breathe and kept my eyes were closed and I just got warm. The pain went away. I don’t know what you call that transition, but it was okay. I was just there. Then all of a sudden, I felt someone grabbed my hands and I looked up. And it was a friend of mine. And the first thing I asked him was, how come my feet are touching my head? 

He’s like, what are you talking about? I go, my feet are touching the back of my head. He goes, your legs are straight. And then he said, I’ll be right back. I’ll get help. And so, I could hear in the background, fire trucks, ambulances people started to show up and Foreman and supervisor walked up to me, looked down on the ground and said, there goes your F and safety record or hard. 

Great way to show compassion. 

And then the paramedics were getting me stabilized. One of them said to call Airvac, and then the whole mood changed. But I didn’t realize that I landed less than 2ft from my safety line. It wasn’t at a bad angle. I didn’t care. It won’t happen to me. 

Right? 

So, it took me to the nearest hospital. I started puncturing the lungs, so I came out the other side of this machine, and this female Ninja trauma nurse lady leaned over, gets about two inches from my face and says, you broke your back in three places, served your spawn cord. You’re confined to a wheelchair. No, it doesn’t happen to a person like me. It happens to the other person. One doctor was saying how many fingers he could put in the back of my head. One was working on the punctured lungs, and the other one was doing a catheter, which is convenient now. 

And the other one was drying my blood. They don’t give you anything for discomfort in Washington until they dry your blood. And so, my blood came back fine. I made a comment. My blood came back stupid. They took me to my little private room, and then it happened. Laura walks into the room. I don’t know what to say. So, I told her what the female doctor said, and she thought I was joking because I’m a jokester you can’t tell. But Laurel didn’t believe me when I told her what happened. 

So, she pulled over. A friend of mine just never left. He’s been with me the whole time. And so, he pulled her aside in the room, and they started to cry. I started to cry. I was so thankful I didn’t hurt anybody else. But I found out later people had to go to counseling that saw the fall, right? 

Yeah. I don’t want to get too involved in certain things, but the one thing I have to admit to is that last safety meeting they made us go to where I had my Snickers bar, walked up to the fly of stairs. It was a full protection safety meeting an hour and a half before I fell. And you didn’t even pay attention to that one? 

No. I signed the clipboard. Right. 

And Laurel, tell me about your journey through this, because it must be shocking when you get the phone call. Yeah. 

Something that you never want to happen to anyone you care about. I was at a nursing home where I was working, and my supervisor came to me, and she said, you have a phone call. I thought that’s weird because I don’t get phone calls at work. And all they could tell me on the other end of the phone was that Russ had been in a serious accident, and then I had to get to the hospital right away, rehearse for things like that just react. And so, I drove. 

But I don’t know how I made it I didn’t even really know if I was already a widow by the time I got there. 

So, Russ, you knew that you should wear the harness. You knew you need to tie it in. You tied it when somebody was there. 

Right. So, when somebody was watching, you knew that you had to put it in. How come you took it out as soon as somebody leaves? Was it just for show for that supervisor? Because that happens often, right? Somebody’s watching. There’s an observation. Everything looks good. And then the person walks away and it’s a different scenario. 

I didn’t care. One of my problems is it won’t happen to me. I’m 30 years old, Mr. Tough guy. I don’t need to follow the rules. It’s going to slow me down. I would come up with excuses all the time. It’s like we’re in a seat belt. I always came up with the excuse that it’s more dangerous to unhook a hook all the time, but it was just an excuse. Yeah, I can’t say anything, except it was just my mentality. 

When we talked about it. This before you talked about risk-taking and comfort risk-taking. So, supervisor is there sees everything looks good. How do you recognize somebody like that who’s more likely to be comfortable taking more risks? Who might be more comfortable taking something off when nobody’s watching? 

I think Dyslexia has one thing to do with it being criticized by your dad or family members that you’re not smart enough or tough enough to go to college. And so, it’s almost a program to work extra hard as much as you can to make yourself feel better, that you are somebody. 

And so, what can a supervisor do when they see somebody who’s more of a risk-taker? What would be some of the guidance you’d give them to? Make sure something like this doesn’t happen to make sure that more of a risk-taker pays attention in a safety meeting. 

To spot a person like me. Always early to work. Anger issues doesn’t work well with others, except for a certain group and a person who likes to go out after work and drink. And this is just my opinion. Sure, that’s one way I look in the audience when I’m talking and I can see me after the talk, the management come up. How did you know it was him? Because I can see me in these people. And then they ask me, what can you do? What can we do to help them and you have to fire them? 

You have to let them go. You can’t fix broken extreme sports these days. Peer pressure is much worse now than it was back in my day, right. 

I think the safety programs have improved quite a bit, though, but I think that making sure that your employees know that you care. They’re not going to care about how much you know until they know how much you care and be genuine about it. Get to know people and create relationships between yourself and your employees and between your employees and each other. Encourage them to get to know each other and so that they feel comfortable telling someone if they feel like something is unsafe and the other person feels comfortable accepting that, too. That’s a big thing. 

Respond even maybe. How do you give the feedback in that particular? How does peer-to-peer feedback happen? Russ, would you mentioned before that it won’t happen to me. I’ve heard so many times. I’ve heard so many times that somebody says, you know what? I know how to do my job. It’s somebody else. The person who got injured is the one who didn’t know how to do it. They weren’t as tough. They weren’t as whatever. And these rules, whatever, don’t apply to me. How can you shift somebody’s mindset around it to say, yeah, I should do this? It matters. 

This episode of the Safety Guru podcast is brought to you by Propulo Consulting, the leading safety and safety culture advisory firm. Whether you are looking to assess your safety culture, develop strategies to level up your safety performance, introduce human performance capabilities, re-energize your BDS program, enhance supervisory safety capabilities, or introduce unique safety leadership training and talent solutions. Propulo has you covered. Visit us at propulo.com. 

I don’t have the answer. I got the consequence, but try to bring family into it if they have kids, but you can’t fix them. I feel bad for saying that, but most people need to be let go and make an example. And the tough part about all this was a friend of mine who witnessed this whole entire thing. He got fired four years later for not using proper fall protection. But he witnessed this whole entire thing and he still went back to old behavior. I don’t have the answer. I really don’t. 

The more you can make safety relationship. If they trust you, and if they trust each other, then they’re going to be more comfortable taking advice and following the safety rules. And if they’re thinking about why they’re there, they’re thinking about the reason that they’re at work because they want to make a better life for their family. Well, they’re not going to have a better life if something happens to them. I mean, create a positive safety program, maybe some mentorship with the new guys and the veterans and create an open-door policy, make the meetings engaging and maybe let them know what it’s going to be like if they get hurt. 

What were you talking about? 

Put like, an eye patch on somebody for a half a day, making these crutches tie an arm behind their back. 

Sure, they know what it’s going to be like if they would lose a limb or lose their sight or something like that. And it’s really tough love. If you care about your employees, then you do everything you can to make sure that they want to be safe because they’re not going to be safe if they don’t want to rest is a plain example of that. 

No, go ahead. One of the tough things for me is Spencer asked me. He was about seven years old. He asked me, what do you do at these meetings? And I told Spence I go, I just tell him my story, how I got hurt. If you don’t think of yourself, think of your family. He said, how come you didn’t think of me? 

Wow. 

You just blamed up on my lap. And I held him and said, Sorry, that’s all I could come up with. But haven’t put pictures of their family, their dog, something that means a lot in their hard hat or a family board. But something that another thing, too, that we’ve been hearing that works well is sending a letter home to the family member, to the wife or to the husband. Hey, your husband been working unsafely. This is his last warning. If he gets caught again, working unsafely, he will be fired. 

And we’re all afraid of our wives. Something really simple like that. I think it’s a good idea, right? 

I think these are cool ideas. Cool messages. Really making safety personal. I love that when you talk, you often talk together, share your story from the two sides, the perspective, because I think that element, like you said in teams of your journey, but also your journey together in teams of what it means for loved ones. I think it’s a very important message for people to hear as well, right? 

Yeah. 

With all the 32 surgeries who was in the waiting room and you took care of them after they got home, you don’t think about those kinds of things until it’s too late. 

When you are on board. When you started the work, what was the experience that you got from onboarding, from setting the tone, from addressing kind of some of the expectations of how you work here and what could have been better? 

Had a really good safety program, actually. 

Yeah. One of the people I hurt the most was our safety guy. He did everything possible. We had forklift training, respirator, fall protection. We went through all the safety. There wasn’t anything that they could have done unless I got caught and fired me. And they fired me. 

He just never got caught. 

People ask me, did your fault protection fail? I go, no, I did. Our safety guy was there that day. I had two safety meetings that day. I don’t know what to say, but I feel really bad for the safety guru. After I got hurt, he snuck under the caution tape the next day and grabbed all my clothes that was cut off, and he grabbed my safety harness buckle that the fireman cut off. He put that on his desk for 21 years. 

Oh, my goodness. 

And it’s like, get rid of it, and we still argue he thinks it’s his fault. It’s like, no, it’s my fault. But there’s nothing they could have done except fire me. 

They actually had a very advanced safety program for that year for 19, 95, 25 years ago. It was comparable to the ones that they have. Now, there was a lot less safety back then, but that particular company did that comment about there goes our effort safety record. That was one individual that was the only person that was negative during that time. The company was very supportive and the owners were supportive. And the safety guru, we still meet with him, but he teams up every time he sees it. 

And I had to ask, was it cool or neat watching me fall? No, the fall wasn’t bad, but the sound of your body hitting the concrete is what got to him. 

Your friend tried to stop you. Is there anything that he could have done to convince you to wear the harness? 

No. You are not going to wear it no matter what. Even if he says, get off this job or wear the harness. 

Yeah, I had all my fault protection on me. I had buckled everything, but I just chose not to use it, right? I didn’t get scared too often, but a couple of times I didn’t feel like close to an edge and gave me a little queasy, and I would hook up. But besides that, I wouldn’t. 

You put your harness on. Why would you put your harness on? Because I’ve heard these many times as well. Somebody has it on but won’t clip it in. 

I think, probably just because it’s required and they have to get it inspected at the beginning of the job. 

Sure. 

So, at the end of the day, but also, I think if I’m hearing correctly when the supervisor was there, it’s easier to show I’ve gotten tied in. I’m okay. 

Yeah. 

I wish I could help you more or say something that would fix people. But I do believe if I would have been in that last safety meeting and had a crippled person like me come up, talk about messing his pants, peanuts, pants falling out of beds, falling out of the wheelchair in your face type person. I do believe that that would have made me think a little bit more that I don’t want to go through this. Sure, because I thought if you break your back, the one thing that happens is you can’t walk and you save money on shoes. 

That’s all I thought was. But I didn’t realize about the bladder infections, yeast infection, shoulder joints, wrist, back surgeries. I’m going to die ten to 15 years earlier than most. At the rate I’m going, I have not owned a left shoulder for almost two years. Three years. But I’m still functioning in a wheelchair. Only one person has that answer. How can I function without a shoulder? But that day everything was just right for me to fall. Everything lined up. 

I really appreciate you sharing a story. I think sharing that message just like you said, Russ, in teams of getting people to reflect it could happen to me. The same could happen to me, hopefully makes more people rethink pause and choose to take that extra step to stay safe. So, I really appreciate all that you do in this space. Russell. Laurel, if somebody is interested in hearing your story, sharing that story with their teams, how can they get in touch with you? 

YoungstromSafety.Com. Also. We have a Youngstrom Safety Facebook page and Laurel Youngstrom on LinkedIn. Also, Youngstrom Safety on LinkedIn. 

Excellent. 

Well, it’s easy. Actually, you can probably just Google us. I think we’re the only. 

And there’s videos and so forth. So, I really appreciate you sharing your story. I know it’s a tough story to share. It’s a very hard, wrenching story to listen to hear, but I appreciate what you’re doing to try to make a difference in other people’s lives as well. So, thank you. 

The day before yesterday is getting tailgated and I’m like so I pulled over and let the truck go around me and started driving. And then I got cut off by a lady. And then it was my breaking point until I saw a sign that said Baby on board and I backed off immediately. 

Sometimes thinking about somebody else’s family can help you too, to maybe be safer driving or otherwise. 

Absolutely. 

Thank you. I really appreciate you sharing your story and really sharing from the heart in teams of what happened, what transpired? Because the story you shared. I’ve heard so many times in teams of it’s not going to happen to me. I can do it. I’ll be okay. And we’re in the hardness, but not tying down all things I’ve heard unless the supervisor shows up and then magically, it’s all tied in. So, appreciate you sharing that story. It’s unfortunately not the first time I’ve heard it something similar like that, but working at heights is really dangerous. 

I really appreciate you sharing your story and it’s a very heart-wrenching story to listen. Really appreciate it. Thank you. 

Thank you. And also, too is you doing a really good job interviewing this just to let you know. Seriously good. 

I appreciate it. 

Thank you so much for having me here. 

Thank you for listening to the safety guru on C-suite radio. Leave a legacy. Distinguish yourself from the pack, grow your success, capture the hearts and minds of your teams. Fuel your future. Come back in two weeks for the next episode. 

The Safety Guru with Eric Michrowski

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ABOUT THE GUEST

Laurel and Russ are the husband-and-wife founders of Youngstrom Safety. For over twenty years they have been reaching out to audiences of all industries, moving safety from their heads to their hearts. They do this by encouraging listeners to think about how an accident would impact their loved ones. Russ (a work-related paraplegic) and Laurel are safety advocates and keynote speakers. They are available to share their powerful story (two different perspectives) about personal accountability in safety at meetings, conferences, trainings, and job sites throughout the country (in-person and virtually). They have spoken to tens of thousands of workers in 29 states. From onsite, in the back of a pickup truck, to huge conference centers, their message is always the same – being unsafe is selfish! You can find them at www.youngstromsafety.com

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Linking Safety Climate and Behaviors with Dr. Robert Sinclair

The Safety Guru_Dr. Robert Sinclair_Linking Safety Climate and Behaviors

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ABOUT THE EPISODE

Positive safety climate has an impact on safety performance and safety outcomes. In this episode, Dr. Robert Sinclair, a Professor of Industrial/Organizational Psychology at Clemson University and Editor in Chief at Occupational Health Science, explains the link between safety climate and behavior and how to prioritize safety in the workplace with a reward system. He also touches on the importance of safety training and the critical role of supervisory and safety leadership. Learn how to increase employee engagement and improve safety performance!

READ THIS EPISODE

Real leaders leave a legacy. They capture the hearts and minds of their teams. Their origin story puts the safety and wellbeing of their people first. Great companies ubiquitously have safe yet productive operations. For those companies, safety is an investment, not a cost for the C-suite. It’s a real topic of daily focus. This is the safety guru with your host, Eric Michrowski, a globally recognized option safety guru, public speaker and author. Are you ready to leave a safety legacy? Your legacy success story begins now. 

Hi, and welcome to The Safety Guru today. I’m very excited to have with me, Bob Sinclair. He’s a professor in industrial organizational psychology at Clemson College of Behavioral, Social and Health Sciences, where they have a huge emphasis around occupational health and safety and the links to psychology. He’s a founding member and past President of the Society for Occupational Health Psychology, founding editor in chief for the Occupational Health Science publication, as well as that contributed to many other publications. Bob, welcome to the show. Really excited to have you with me. 

Well, thank you very much for having me. This is a great opportunity to talk about what’s going on in my field and connected to the important work that you’re doing with this podcast. 

Excellent. So maybe why don’t we get started with a little bit about your background and how you got interested and passionate about this topic from an industrial organizational psychology and applying it to safety? 

Yeah, sure. So, I went into the Marine Corps straight out of high school at age 17 because I was in no academic shape to go to college at that time. But I think during that time, I became interested in just this whole kind of experience of working conditions. Right. And so that how employers make decisions that affect their employees work lives. And when I went to college, my last year of school is majoring in psychology at a small school called the University of Maine Farmington. And my department chair basically said, hey, I think you can write you have to think about going to grad school. 

And he said, what are you thinking about doing? I said, I don’t really know. I want to do something maybe with work. And he said, well, that’s called industrial psychology. So, I applied to industrial psychology programs, and I wound up getting accepted to one at Wayne State University in Detroit, where there’s a heavy emphasis on labor and the role of unions in protecting worker safety, health and wellbeing. And a lot of the people I knew there were doing research with unions. And so, it naturally bled into kind of an emphasis on working conditions as an important topic. 

Right. And particularly with the fact that really, we spend sizable chunk of our lives working and sleeping most activity. So, it has this great potential to impact what people are doing. And so around that time, the field of occupation, whole psychology was starting to emerge and I really got interested in it in graduate school because of the professors I was working with. And so, one slice of that research was just looking at safety issues, right? And so that safety is behavior at work. And so, behaviors with psychologists are interested in studying. 

So, we got interested in this research and just over time and did more and more of it and had some opportunities to work with people up at Liberty Mutual and others looking at safety issues and from this kind of psychological perspective, and really looking at what qualities of people and what qualities of work situations affect their safety behavior. Our topic that safety climate is one of the most heavily studied concepts in that literature, something that we’ve been working on. 

So, tell me a great segue. Tell me a little bit about your work around safety climate and the linkage between safety, climate and behaviors ultimately. 

Sure. So, there’s a standard idea in psychology that’s not that far from common sense. What people believe they’re going to get rewarded for is what gets done. That’s the behavior they’re going to engage in. And people talk about safety climate. It’s really the organization’s, their sense of the organization’s priority for safety at work. One way that people talk about that is, do you feel like you’re going to get rewarded for engaging in safe behavior, or do you feel like it’s something that’s discouraged in favor of productivity at all costs? 

So, people talk about safety climate as a person’s perception that the organization prioritizes safety. And then it’s a little academic. But some people talk about that as a shared perception. So, it has to be something that there’s consensus on in the organization, and that’s what makes a climate. Other people talk about it as just your own individual sense of what you feel like is important. And so, the idea is that when people feel like that’s a priority, it signals to them that they’re valued by the organization and they should be prioritizing safety. 

So, a lot of the research looks at how safety climate links to people’s motivation to work safely, to whether they feel like safety is important to them. And it’s part of how they identify with their work. And as you might expect, then there’s a good deal of research to suggest that we see higher levels of safety performance and fewer accidents and injuries in organizations that have this strong, positive safety climate where it’s something that people believe is important. And it’s something where there’s a lot of consensuses in the organization. 

So that when you feel like everyone around you all have a sense that this is something that is who we are and what we do that people are going to engage in the safe behaviors. Yeah. 

I think it’s a great way to summarize it. You touched on the topic of how people prioritize it. You touched on the element of rewards. Rewards is ultimately an incredibly complex topic to look at when it comes to safety. What are some of the guiding principles that organizations should look at in teams of what they should reward and maybe what they shouldn’t be rewarding? 

Yes. It’s a great question. And I think was just lecturing about this in my class the other day. The whole idea is I think if you’re trying to reward a challenge with reward systems, I think is when you’re trying to set up a reward system to incentivize one small part of the job rather than the whole job, so that if you’re incentivizing just a particular set of safe behavior, a former student might email me the other day and saying that her organization tried to incentivize safety by creating these reward cards where the gimmick was that you need to nudge other people to be safe, like wear your mask is health care. 

So, every time you did that, you made a check on the reward card, and when you got to ten of them, you get three Starbucks. And this person then said she kind of took this to heart and really tried to go around nudging everybody to the point that when the nurses saw her coming, they go in the opposite direction. And then she said the other part of it was that it kind of fell apart because the employees perceived it as the company sort of encouraging them to kind of snitch on each other. 

It’s good example. And there are lots of others about problems with trying to just specifically set up financial incentives for safety through bonuses. And that kind of thing. The classic one that people talk about is that they try to do it at the group level and say that we’re going to reward the group with a bonus if you go 30 days or how many days about an accident, and the problem becomes that may incentivize people for not reporting a small injury or a small accident. That then becomes something worse over time because they don’t want to threaten the bonus of the whole group. 

Yeah. We had this conversation. I think it’s the basic notion, I think, is to proceed cautiously with those kinds of incentives. And I think to really talk to employees about how those reward systems are designed and to try to get a sense of by talking to people that are there some unintended consequences that we’re going to be rewarding if we do this? Yeah. I think that two pieces of it. One is I think the reward systems, as I said, I think it’s challenging to pull out one small part of a larger job and just reward that because that’s what people will focus on. 

The other thing, I think I don’t have evidence to say this, but I think my sense of what you can reward that’s not going to be counterproductive is safety skill development, participation, safety training, learning, knowledge about safety on the job, those sorts of behaviors. But I think it’s a really challenging issue, and I think that the way people talk about it is you can have spectacular successes when it works well and spectacular failures when it doesn’t. From my perspective, that whole idea of employee participation in the system design is really essential, and it’s frequently not used. 

Organizations have these consequences because they don’t talk to the people and say, hey, how would this kind of system work for you in this particular site? 

I think your point around really what could be the counterproductive impact, I think, is a really important one. Is there something as well in teams of what level in the organizations? Some of those rewards may be. What I mean by this is we’ve probably all heard of the examples where somebody rewards observations at the supervisory level as an example, and then you end up with people mailing it and just doing a quota system. But if that quota was at a higher level within the organization, say, at the VP level, could they perhaps drive the VP to talk about it reinforce I want quality observations without creating that undue pressure if it’s properly characterized and explained at other levels. 

Is there any research on that side? 

Not that I’m familiar with, but I think certainly I think you speak to an important issue about if safety is not incentivized at a higher level, if the top leadership in an organization doesn’t have that as a priority, if they’re concerned about what’s on the return sheet at the end of the quarter, in teams of fiscal performance, that’s what they’re going to lead to. Right. And those are the messages that they may say. You can look in all sorts of company mission statements about the importance of safety. 

I like to show my students the British Petroleum’s mission statement before the Deep Horizon accident in the Gulf, about how important safety and all that is. And then you can actually go and look at what was actually happening on the ground and that’s I think failure of leadership in a lot of ways. And I think it does go to I think if there’s a genuine incentive for top leadership in teams of safety outcomes, that’s certainly going to benefit your improve safety. But I think it’s not just in teams of the reward system. 

But I think you got to really have this as kind of deeper values that are important to the company, because that’s what’s going to be communicated. And supervisors are going to get messages from top leadership about what really is truly important here, irrespective of what we say. And I really do think we do have some research. I should say that looks at top down, where you look at perceptions of safety climate at the very broadest level of the organization that influences supervisor’s behavior and supervisor’s sense of what the priorities are and then that affects subsequently employee’s behavior. 

So, I think it is definitely kind of information flowing from the top of the organization down to the front lines. So yeah, I think absolutely anything an organization can do to prioritize safety among top leadership is, I think, going to be valuable. Yeah. 

And I’ve seen definitely both sides of the equation from leadership teams that very clearly speak about it as it’s the number one value that we have, and then priorities will never overcome it. They talk about it on a very regular basis. They bring all their senior executives across the organizations together to talk about how we’re going to drive improvements versus the other ones where it’s a priority. And maybe they’ll say it’s a top priority, but priorities can be changed, and sometimes that message will get mixed in. 

You touched on supervisory, and I think in my opinion, it’s probably one of the most critical parts around safety is really how the supervisor reinforces, because a lot of front-line team’s members. When you ask them, who are you listening to, they interact with the most with a supervisor. In some cases, supervisor is more important than the CEO in teams of their day-to-day choices and decisions. Tell me a little bit more about what you’ve seen around the importance of that supervisory role and how you can shape it to be more impactful in an organization. 

Well, certainly, I think the research is consistent with the idea that the supervisor is kind of the first line of defense and really the most important influence on safety. You can have all the wonderful value statements and missions and visions and all that. You can have all the policies and practices in place that you should have. But supervisors are going to be the ones that determine whether those actually get implemented, whether they get communicated to employees, so that I think they really are vital to building climate, and they have to believe that this truly is something that’s important here. 

And that’s where a lot of the intervention research, where people do studies where they try to make changes in organizations and see if it affects safety. Most of those interventions target supervisors, and it’s through things like communication training, through getting supervisors to monitor and set goals around safety behaviors, to seek out feedback from employees. Leadership development around safety issues. Some interventions will actually use coaching. We’ll kind of do more one on one kinds of things with leaders. But yeah, I think that really that’s been the main focus of the intervention literature is to really try to change what supervisors are doing, and if you don’t do that, you’re probably not going to have much of an effect. 

So, I think it really is a critical piece. 

And I think that it’s also one of the groups that often has a lease investment day in and day out because you see a lot of the leaders will typically have budgets around leadership development. But I’ve seen too often the supervisor gets promoted, and here’s a checklist. This is what you need to do. Or here is a handbook. Good luck with it. 

Yet. 

That’s probably the place that needs the most investment in teams of what does it mean to lead around safety? Love your comments around how you monitor how you set goals, how you coach all really critical components. Thank you for sharing some of those ideas. We’re in the midst of the covert pandemic that has brought up a lot of new challenges to organizations around safety. Can you maybe tell me about some of the challenges that you’ve seen and what organizations can do, particularly now that we’re definitely into the pandemic, but not yet.

At the end of it. 

This episode of the Safety Guru podcast is brought to you by Propulo Consulting, the leading safety and safety culture advisory firm. Whether you are looking to assess your safety culture, develop strategies to level up your safety performance, introduce human performance capabilities, re-energize your BDS program, enhance supervisory safety capabilities, or introduce unique safety leadership training and talent solutions, Propulo has you covered? Visit us at propulo.com 

Sure. So, yeah. I’ve been just really troubled by what I see in the news or kind of flipping through on the Internet about all the safety issues. Right. So, I think maybe it’s a good outcome. At least, I think that safety is a little bit more at the forefront of people’s minds now. Sure, whether it will be once the pan damage is over is a different question. But we’re thinking about safety in jobs where we never thought about it before. If it’s like at a Home Depot or it’s a cashier or the grocery store, there are many more safety issues now around personal protective equipment, and all of that. 

What I’ve been fascinated by is kind of the opposite side of this of where you see employers that are going out of their way to discourage people from being safe. Right. I’ve seen examples of companies that actively discourage or even will threaten fire employees for wearing masks. We were talking before the recording, but there’s an incident I was reading about just the other day where a couple were asked to leave a restaurant because they were wearing masks, they refused to be served. So, there’s that I’ve also seen with flying that just really troubling numbers of stories of violence toward flight attendants around safety issues now. 

And it’s kind of created kind of a disturbing environment for people, I think. But again, I think it’s an organizational leadership question, right. I think there’s always going to be small businesses that have sort of odd ideas about the causes and solutions to the pandemic. But I think the large corporations are really going to be important safety leaders here, and in a way that the government can’t really, I’m a big basketball fans of interest tracking the National Basketball Association’s efforts to mandate vaccines and some of the pushback they’re getting from players. 

But it’s an organizational leadership thing. And I think that those organizations are going to play a really critical role in helping us get out of this pandemic. Absolutely. 

It also brings the entire question if you start saying don’t do certain things around PPE, could there be a lasting effect prior to the pandemic? If a supervisor would ignore somebody wearing a piece of PP, like a hard hat or gloves or whatever was required to do the job? We knew that the effect was going to be a spin off. Where is it? I draw the line in teams of what’s acceptable, what’s not acceptable. And when you start putting a messaging that safety isn’t the number one priority focus, then that’s not where I’m going to start investing. 

I would imagine that would have long-term effect, although we probably don’t know yet. 

Yeah. One general thing with safety with accidents and injuries. I think one of the big management challenges is that accidents are relatively low base rate phenomena. Right. So that even in very dangerous environments, they’re not happening on a daily basis for the most part. And then if you talk about moderately safe environments like hospitals, it’s just you’re trying to manage in a way to avoid something that has a low likelihood of happening. But when it does happen, it could have potentially severe consequences. And I think it’s hard for people to Orient their behavior around things that don’t seem very likely to happen. 

A lot of the whole conversation around phobia is that some people say, well, I have no chance of getting this or a very low chance. And even if I do get it as a pretty high survival rate. So why should I be talking about the whole transmitting to other people all the stuff, right? Yeah. I think that. 

As you said. 

Then you add in an environment where people haven’t been really closely attending to the stuff in the past, it’s going to take a lot of effort to make a transition, I think, to get people to behave safely. And I don’t think from a scientific perspective, we have great evidence to say these are the five things that you need to do. But I think we can say that supervisors are going to play a critical role. Top leadership is going to drive that certainly the dynamics of employees in a group. 

If you look at how groups change, it’s, probably if you can get a couple of people to start wearing masks and environment, maybe that will be the catalyst that gets other people to behave more safely, too. So, I just think it’s one of these problems that you have to attack from lots of different directions in a lasting way. I think that one of the challenges with safety, as an example is that it’s conceptualized as in some cases, as the mandatory 1 hour of training you need to do each year for my own organization, we do fire extinguisher safety training right. 

And it’s 20 minutes Internet thing each year on the different types of fire extinguishers, and within ten minutes of completing it, I’ve forgotten what was in the training, and then I have to do it again the next year. So, I think that the true commitment to safety is something that’s more of a daily week to week, month to month kind of focus. 

It almost becomes a lifestyle choice in teams of recognizing how do I remove risks out of my day? And the more like I’m sure you’ve talked to I’ve talked to a lot of people who’ve had serious injuries and how it was life changing. You realize that you may have never thought it was going to happen to you because you thought you were safe, but it doesn’t take much for one thing to go horribly wrong and to have a catastrophic impact. And that can wake some people up to say, I need to live my life where I factor that in because of those I love. 

Yeah. I think you hit on really important point is that people have this kind of invulnerability thing. This isn’t going to happen to me. It’s the kind of thing that happens to other people, right? Unfortunately, with safety is kind of classic examples. Kovit is another classic example that by the time it happens and you wake up and realize it’s too late in a lot of cases so that it’s definitely I think an interesting area psychologically to try to shift people’s sense of priorities around safety. That’s why I think this whole area of climate is so important is it’s got to become something that kind of filters through the whole organization. 

The other thing I say about it is that there are secondary benefits, too, that now we’re beginning to look at research on climate and as it relates to issues like employee engagement. I think signaling that safety is a priority signals to employees that they are valued by the organization. And we have tons of research on retention and job performance and job engagement and job stress. The sense that the company values you and cares about you as a person is a pretty critical factor in lots of positive outcomes that organizations want, right? 

I think it’s not just about preventing accidents, but it’s about really building. We now talk about total worker health is kind of a term we refer to. And that idea of total worker health is something that doesn’t just benefit the employee. It benefits the organization in the long run as well. Yeah. Absolutely. 

There was actually a gentleman I was talking to a while back and he was running a construction project at a refinery site, and they had done some amazing things around safety leadership, really creating an incredibly caring culture. And the part that’s astronomical. It was not just the injury rate that was different. Absenteeism rates were totally different by I think it was like 2030 points difference between this side versus other sites. Turnover was basically almost nonexistent. It was people who chose to go somewhere else because they had a family emergency to go back in a different state. 

So very different experience would also reduce some of the operating costs because turnover is expensive, absenteeism is expensive and so forth. So really showing the linkage between creating that great climate that you want to stay safe and other outcomes. 

Yeah, you touched on. I think one of the challenges with safety is and I’m certainly not an expert in this part, but I just read a little bit about organizational accounting around safety issues, and so the safety of the cost is accounted for kind of separately from business units. So, I can’t say in my Department of Psychology that we spend X amount of safety issues, accidents cost X amount in our budget. It’s a separate budget item so that it becomes harder to link it. I think fiscally to become hard to manage around the fiscal side. 

I think that’s a big factor in why often doesn’t get as much priority as it maybe should. 

Really appreciate upcoming on the show. Sharing some Thoughts we’ve covered a great number of really important topics, from linking safety climate to behaviors. Talking about some of the elements around safety rewards, the importance of supervisory skills, and really some of the themes that are prevalent now in teams of some of the new challenges that exist around the Kova case. But I can certainly see I’ve talked to organizations that have done magically in this. They’ve really done a huge step forward for the organizations because they demonstrate that safety came first and they use it as a catalyst to move probably one person shared, they move six years’ worth of progress around safety climate in six weeks just because of the perception, the emphasis. 

So, if you do the right things, the impact, I believe, will be lasting because you’ve demonstrated active care to level that nobody else had been able to proceed before. So really appreciate you coming on the show and sharing some of your thoughts. 

Yeah. Well, I really appreciate the opportunity to talk to you about this. It’s a really important topic. And anybody out there that’s looking to talk about safety research and shoot me a note at Clemson. My email address is Sinclair at Clemson.edu and happy to chat about this or point you to an expert that can help you with a problem or anything else. And again, thank you for having me on and I hope you have a great rest of your day. 

Thank you, Bob. 

Thank you for listening to the safety guru on C-suite radio. Leave a legacy. Distinguish yourself from the pack, grow your success, capture the hearts and minds of your teams, fuel your future. Come back in two weeks for the next episode or listen to our sister show with the Ops guru Eric Michrowski. 

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Bob Sinclair is a Professor of Industrial/Organizational Psychology, having previously held faculty positions at Portland State University (2000-2008) and the University of Tulsa (1995-1999). He currently serves as the graduate program coordinator for the Department of Psychology’s Ph.D. and MS programs. Dr. Sinclair is a founding member and past-president of the Society for Occupational Health Psychology and a Fellow of the Society for Industrial-Organizational Psychology and American Psychological Association. He is the founding Editor-in-Chief for Occupational Health Science as well as an Associate Editor of the Journal of Business and Psychology and an editorial board member of the Journal of Applied Psychology, Journal of Occupational Health Psychology, and Group and Organization Management. His published work includes over 80 book chapters and peer reviewed journals such as the Journal of Occupational Health Psychology, Journal of Occupational and Organizational Psychology, Journal of Applied Psychology, and Journal of Organizational Behavior. He also is the editor of four volumes including Building Psychological Resilience in Military Personnel: Theory and Practice (2013, with Tom Britt), Research Methods in Occupational Health Psychology: Measurement, Design, and Data Analysis (2012, with Mo Wang and Lois Tetrick), Contemporary Occupational Health Psychology: Global Perspectives on Research and Practice, Vol. 2 (2012 with Jonathan Houdmont and Stavroula Leka) and Vol. 3 (2014 with Stavroula Leka). His research interests focus on Occupational Health Psychology – the application of theories and methods of psychology to the study of worker safety, health, and well-being. His current research focuses on (1) economic stressors (such as job insecurity and perceived income inadequacy) and health, (2) building organizational climates that enhance worker safety, health, and well-being, and (3) occupational health risks in special populations such as healthcare (physicians/nurses) and military personnel.

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Lessons from Aviation Safety: Human Factors with Dr. Suzanne Kearns

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To err is human… but to learn and identify organizational ‘accidents waiting to happen’ is more critical than to lay blame. In this episode, we’re TAKING OFF with Dr. Suzanne Kearns, Associate Professor of Aviation at the University of Waterloo and Founding Director at the Waterloo Institute for Sustainable Aeronautics. Suzanne shares critical insights in Human Factors and Aviation Safety to help listeners explore how aviation has been able to make substantial improvements in safety and, more importantly, how it can help every organization improve safety performance.

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Real leaders leave a legacy. They capture the hearts and minds of their teams. Their origin story puts the safety and well-being of their people. First, great companies ubiquitously have safe yet productive operations. For those companies, safety is an investment, not a cost for the C-suite. It’s a real topic of daily focus. This is the safety Guru with your host, Eric Michrowski, a globally recognized Ops on safety guru, public speaker and author Are you ready to leave a safety legacy? Your legacy success story begins now.  

Hi, and welcome to the Safety Guru today. I’m very excited to have with me, Dr. Suzanne Kearns. She’s a professor of aviation, safety training, methodologies and human factors of the University of Waterloo, where she explores a lot of topics around human limitations and how they contribute to accidents and incidents. Former airplane and helicopter pilot, she’s also the founding director of the Waterloo Institute for Sustainable Aeronautics, which we’ll talk about shortly. So first, Suzanne, tell me a little bit about your story, a background and your passion for safety. 

Thank you, Eric. Well, it’s a pleasure, first of all, to be here. And I can tell you that I didn’t have dreams or aspirations when I was young of being a professor. I just loved aviation. I think I was fascinated by flight in general. I sort of still do think it’s magical, even though I do understand the science behind it. It’s just something captivating about it. And so, I grew up flying airplanes and helicopters. Starting when I was 15. I with helicopters North Bay, Ontario, doing some really fun flying in the Bush, where he actually used chainsaws and build your own landing pads and quite rugged. 

And then at that time, because in Canada, piloting hasn’t always been a university level discipline. It’s more so a college level discipline. And I just finished a college diploma. I was looking for University education. So, I actually went down to Ambria Aeronautical University in Daytona Beach, Florida, and finished my bachelor’s degree. And then at the end of that, two really big, life altering things happened. A colleague on campus was really tragically killed in a training accident and simultaneously, within a matter of months, 911 happened really shook the foundation of who I was and my dreams and the idea that the industry that you love and that you find inspiration and excitement and passion and is used to cause so much pain and devastation and widespread hurt around the world. 

It really did cause me to rethink what my path would be. And so, I went back and I earned my master’s degree in human factors, which is kind of like the science of why people make mistakes. I came back to Canada, and so that’s when I started as a professor and earned my PhD in education. 

Excellent. Well, thank you for coming here to share a little bit about your story and some of the backgrounds. And I think one of the pieces I’d like to touch on first is really the linkage between some of the principles of safety that we talk about in the aviation world versus what happens on the ground, because I think in many ways the aviation space is probably the most advanced when it comes to safety and really understanding the human and natural limitations that we have, for sure. 

Yeah. Well, I could tell you a little bit of a history of how we’ve gotten to where we are today in aviation with our understanding of safety. And I think what’s important to understand, if you look back to the 70s and 80s, there was this culture where if a pilot was to make a mistake and survive an accident, then they would be fired and removed from the industry. And I think that everybody’s responses finger pointing at that person, how could they have possibly made such a terrible mistake? 

Which, of course, has devastating impacts because not only is there the pain in the accident, but there’s also that individual is going to be experiencing a lot of traumas from that, because what we learned over time was that number one, in the late 1970s and early 80s, there were a series of very high-profile aviation accidents that were primarily caused by pilot error. And it really challenged the industry to say, how is this possible? How could such an intense network of intelligent, dedicated people make such obvious mistakes? 

Eastern Airlines, like, for one, is probably the make an obvious example. 

Yeah. Which is just a faulty light bulb which caused so much focus of attention. They didn’t realize they disengaged the autopilot and flew their aircraft into the ground. And so, these kinds of things challenge the industry. So, what happened was a really amazing example of government, academia, and industry coming together to say, what can we do about this? And they created the first human factors training program, which they called now it’s called Pro Resource Management training, or CRM, meant to teach pilots about human limitations. But that’s only one part of it, because that still puts, I think, a lot of the focus of blame on the individual, and it doesn’t ask broader organizational questions around.

Is it really that person’s fault if they have faulty equipment or didn’t receive training or they have been on a schedule that’s impossible, and any human would be tired or exhausted? So, it also shifted at the same time. So, we have human factors. But we also have the organizational approach to safety. What this does, it looks at the entire organization from the top all the way to the bottom and making sure that everybody is in identifying areas of risk and eliminating them before an accident happens. 

So, it’s not just about the end pilot user. It’s about everybody that contributed to that accident or that flight on a particular day. And I think there’s a lot of parallels and a lot of learnings that come of that space that could definitely be translated into a lot of other environments. I know you’ve done some work on some ground safety, I believe on the main inside of aviation. What are some of the parallels that you saw when you were translating principles from human factors to workers on the ground that could be exposed to hazards? 

Absolutely. Well, I think what is very universally true is that we’re all human beings. And so, the same types of limitations that one experiences as a pilot or a maintenance engineer, an airside worker. These are all the same basic issues because they’re all about our natural bodies and our minds. So, when I’m explaining this to my students, I always say if somebody makes a mistake and you pull that person out and put any other random person in with the same types of background and experience, if that new person, it’s feasible that they might make that same mistake, then we really need to question if it’s fair for us to be blaming all of our focus on that individual. 

We really need to look at the task of the environment and the situation. But what I did find in translating it is that you have to articulate this gets such an emotionally impactful and sometimes challenging issue, because if you don’t articulate it correctly, it sounds like you’re questioning a person’s competency or questioning their commitment to their job when in reality, what you’re just saying is we’re all people and our limitations can be scientifically predicted and tracked. So why don’t we learn all of that information and take it in before it leads to an accident? 

But it does require us to make sure what that core message, that it’s basically being wrapped in something that is true to the job rule, and that is using the right language and examples to that role. 

That makes a lot of sense. So, tell me about the importance of education when it comes to safety. 

Yeah. Well, I’m a big education, not the focus of my world is in trying to support the next generation and trying to teach them as best that I can to support the future of our industry. So that being said, as much as I love teaching, and I think some of my most exciting and powerful experiences professionally have been in classrooms as a teacher. That being said, education is not always the best way to eliminate risk in an organization that from a human factor’s perspective. If you change the task that they’re doing, if you change the equipment that they’re using operational environments and noise, temperature, distractions, a lot of those things are, I think, universally easier ways to eliminate risk. 

And sometimes I think it falls back to where we’re using education as a default that it’s too challenging or expensive to change some of those bigger structures of a trip. And so, we try to solve a problem by throwing a few hours of training at the problem. But I think it really does offload some of that responsibility to the workers. And I think we have to question and always be really careful. Is that ethical? And is that fair, or are we really putting our priority on the appearance that we’ve done something rather than investing our best effort to actually reduce that risk? 

I think that’s an important the hierarchy of controls, really in terms of eliminating the hazard that could be present as opposed to trying to train the individual to manage it. 

Yes. Exactly. And the reality, we know from a human factor’s perspective, that training is one of the tools in your toolbox that you can use to support big organizational change and improvement to make things safer. But it’s not the only thing. And sometimes it’s the more expensive and the one that has more substantial ongoing costs over a longer period of time. You can imagine, for example, if we’re looking at cars, we all know that texting and driving is very dangerous, that nobody should ever do that. But if we’re teaching a person like how much energy and effort has gone into teaching teenagers don’t do this right. 

The so dangerous you should never do this. But if there was a way where the cell phone itself could just disengage while it’s in a car, for example, then that equipment shift eliminates at risk. Right. And then something quite simple where it has, like a sleeping widespread. Obviously, there’s other implications in that example, but around. But I think it’s a much more effective way to eliminate the risk of that one situation rather than putting the emphasis on the people and through training. 

This is similar to a lot of Ops is in cars that will typically stop working or stop allowing to be managed or controlled when the vehicle is in motion. You could do the exact same thing with a texting device. 

Exactly. And I think, of course, it’s a simple example. But if you think of the parallels to aviation, I think it’s still very true that it’s such a heavily regulated industry. And so, we’re always trying to provide the evidence that’s required to the regulators. I’ve completed 5 hours of training on this. You’ve demonstrated that you’ve taken that action. But I’ve had some really interesting talks with international regulators at the highest level around this hour’s metric for training, because in aviation is always based on hours. Or I get to do 5 hours of this or 10 hours of this. 

And I said, why hours? Because everyone knows it’s not the hours that make an impact. It’s what happens during that time. It’s the experience and learning. And he said, okay, I’ll tell you a secret. We know that. But he said the reality is put yourself in my shoes. If I’m an international regulator and our safety board has identified some sort of a safety deficiency, he said, that the most obvious and direct thing that I can do is to throw a few hours of training at the problem because it shows that we’ve made this effort to address it. 

But he said, even I know that it’s not going to fully eliminate that risk for me. That was mind blowing, because some of you love aviation, like you grow up aligning everything under these regulations, and when you come to learn that they’re made by people as well, and people are perfect and just doing the best they can under challenging situations, then it does allow you to really refocus, and I think question whether there’s an opportunity to do things even better. 

Great. So, some of the topics you talked about earlier on when you’re talking about human factors was around care resource management and how that got cascaded for listeners that aren’t familiar with crew resource management. And maybe some of the elements in terms of how human factors can get trained or taught to pilots. Can you give maybe a bit of a highlight as to what the core principles are? So, people can think maybe about how we could translate to on the ground examples? 

Yeah. Absolutely. So, crew research management, as it is today, is required annual training for almost all pilots in the civilian world, and it has a few core components that includes things like workload management. So, in our world is fly the plane first, so Ava, then navigate, then communicate. So, it’s this task prioritization. So, workload management is number one. Situation awareness is number two, and situation awareness is sort of like if you’re in your operational setting, it’s your mental picture of everything around you. And people may be shocked. 

But one of the most common categories of accidents is called controlled flight into train. So, it’s flying a perfectly good airplane into the ground, which is a result of a lack of situation awareness. And that’s a very big one as well. Communication and crew coordination. So how you talk to and use the resources around you, including the technology, but also all the people in the aircraft and air traffic controllers and other supporters on the ground. So those are some of the big categories, but it’s based on a very robust and deep interdisciplinary field of research, which maybe doesn’t mean a lot to people. 

But I can tell you when I’m teaching human factors, I don’t teach, like a list of memorizations. So new pilots will learn something called the I’m safe checklist where before they go flying, they should do illness, medications, stress, alcohol, fatigue and eating kind of checks like, am I okay? All these categories. So that’s what most pilots know at the very beginning. But when I teach it at the University, it’s sort of a foundation of your natural human limitation. So, it’s some psychology and thinking. How much information can you reasonably be expected to retain at any one point in time? 

And when is the any person going to start making mistakes? It’s your senses so all of your senses, how you take in that information and how it could be tricked and distorted and how you can’t always trust your senses. It’s anthropometry, which is the measurement of the human body, because in an aircraft, all of the controls have to be within a certain level of reach of humans. And it’s the limitations of work. So, when anybody in the world would expect it to be come tired and start making mistakes, whether it’s due to a lack of sleep or just a prolonged period of mental or physical work. 

And there’s also we get into some issues around things like mental health and substance abuse, because those are also very human things that affect all of us in our population. There’s a lot of other factors I’m probably missing, but that’s kind of how we build it up the foundational building blocks. And if I have the students take away one thing, it’s that its air is human, that you shouldn’t expect people to never make mistakes. It should be the exact opposite. You should expect that it’s 100% normal for even the most competent professionals to make mistakes. 

And if you start from that foundation, then you can build up to say, where are those mistakes most likely to happen? And how can I manage to capture them before they may have an impact that costs for. 

This episode of The Safety Guru podcast is brought to you by Propulo Consulting. The leading safety and safety culture advisory firm. Whether you are looking to access your safety culture to develop strategies to level up your safety performance, introduce human performance capabilities, re energize your BBS program, enhanced supervisory safety capabilities, or introduce unique safety leadership training and talent solution. Propulo has you covered. Visit us at Propulo.com. 

That’s excellent. So, tell me a little bit about you talked about human factors. How does a contrast to safety management system as it pertains to the aviation the world? 

Sure. Yeah. So, this is probably one of the biggest confusions in the aviation world is that even career professionals sometimes don’t know the difference between human factors and safety management. So human factors are kind of like, like I said already, it’s a scientific discipline and why people make mistakes. So, a little bit of psychology, economics, physiology. So, all of these sorts of scientific foundation, it’s all of education. That’s a really big turn as well. And then that leads up to CEER resource management, which is where we teach operators about all of these limitations and give them some strategies about how to avoid them and how to work together and how to avoid error. 

And that’s sort of in one category. And then the second category is its organizational factors associated with safety. So, most people in aviation most commonly noticed through what we call reasons. Model reasons. Model has layers of protection. So, there’s, like, five squares you can imagine, but then each one of them has holes in it, which you can think of as layers of Swiss cheese. So, each layer has its own holes and each layer represents it from the highest-level senior management. And then as you work forward, it’s not training manager. 

And then the far piece is the actual operators like the phone. And the concept is that those holes in the layers represent latent failures. So, they’re like accidents waiting to happen, whether it’s management not investing up in training or a maintenance engine who has a poor practice where they’re making a mistake over and over or whatever it happens to be there these opportunities for accidents. And then it’s only when holes and all those layers and line up perfectly that an accident happens. So, the concept is that the accident itself is actually quite rare. 

Instead of focusing all of our attention on the accident, which is what we had starkly done, fire the crew, it doesn’t address all those holes. Those risks are still in that organization. So, the concept of safety management systems at its core is the identification and illumination of those latent failures before they have an opportunity to line up and cause an accident. So, it’s a proactive rather than reactive approach to aviation safety. 

Alright. So essentially reducing the probability of those holes lining up. 

Yeah. And human factors play in because human factors can create those holes through the whole system. So that’s one of the ways we can reduce those holes. But human factors can’t address everything, because like I said, if there’s, like high level management, managerial decisions that are affecting every part of the operation and equipment, then no matter how hard a pilot at the end tries to do the best, tries to be as professional as safe as possible. They don’t have control over those other factors, or they will be influenced by them regardless. 

Excellent. So, we love to talk a little bit about the work you’ve done at Waterloo, which is really interesting. As I mentioned on the front end, you’re the founding director of the Waterloo Institute for Sustainable Aeronautics. Tell me a little bit about what this Institute does and what are you trying to accomplish with all of this linked experience that you’re bringing together? 

Thank you. Well, I’m really excited because our Institute is we’ll be launching on October 5, 2021, and it’s the product of years of work. But what really led to the Institute for me was when the pandemic hits and in my field, like so many others, so many people are out of work, alumni, friends and colleagues, just tremendous devastation. And when I saw so many of my colleagues who were 100% focused on just survival of other organizations through pandemic, I started questioning, what can I do to support this sector that I care about? 

I’m an academic. I was in university. I can’t necessarily impact business decisions, but I kept questioning what could be of value that I could contribute during this time. And reflecting on the big challenges that aviation was facing before the Pandemic, which I sort of defined as widespread personnel shortages on international scale, the growing environmental emissions. So, if you remember the right Greta Thunberg like Shaming movement was really just growing when the Pandemic hit, as well as the rapid evolution of technology. And when you think of those three things, they really aligned with the three pillars of sustainability is social, environmental and economic sustainability. 

And at the same time, I also saw now my other big aviation universities around the world were actively recruiting in areas where Waterloo has tremendous world leading experts already. So, they’re looking for AI experts in cyber security and everything in between. And it really hit me that we could have a tremendous impact in supporting the sector to set aviation and aerospace up for a more sustainable future after the Pandemic. If I could mobilize the strength that we’re already at the University and sort of direct the powerhouse that is Waterloo towards these big challenges that I know we’re having a direct impact on the people in the industry that I cared about. 

So that’s how wise it came to be and really what it is now we have about 40 to 45 different professors as well as their labs and grad students. We have a really distinguished advisory committee with an honorary advisor of Commander Chris Hadfield and some amazing advisors internationally and some industry partners who are coming on board. And really what it’s meant to do is to form a bridge between aviation and aerospace and the University. So, if industry partners have challenges or problems, they can work with university professors to address those. 

And the beautiful part of that is in the process, they’re educating graduate students who then go on and support Canada’s, a knowledge economy, then become future leaders. So, we’re just getting started. But we’ve got a lot of excitement about what comes next. 

And when we talked earlier, you mentioned some of the examples of a linking experience. You talked about some examples of bringing engineering to the table machine learning. Can you give maybe some of the examples of how these themes come together and the power that it brings? 

Yeah. So, what’s different I think about universities as opposed to industry, is that industry problems are very multi-dimensional. Lots of different skill sets come together to create that problem. But then, when you compare it to a university environment, professors are incredibly high levels of expertise in a very narrow area, and they live within pockets of their own discipline. So, you have psychology in one pocket and engineering and another and health or science in another, for example. And then what I think is what we’re hoping to do with the Institute was to break down those silos and allow a connection between the different disciplines on campus. 

So as an example, I’m working with a few colleagues right now, and we’re looking at how pilots are trained because as I mentioned earlier, there’s sort of distinct personnel shortages projected internationally. And so how do we address that? So, I have one colleague to in cognitive psychology looking at the process of how people taking information and learn. Another who is in kinesiology who looks at hand-eye coordination and the development of those skills. Another who’s in optometry. So, she’s looking at how your eyes move across your environment and taking that information, and whether that can come together to be an indication of expertise. 

And another who is in engineering who looks at it’s a form of machine learning artificial intelligence. So, if you could take all those data points into a computer, basically, could the computer, then when a new person comes in and flies automatically assess their performance and automatically tell them where they’re strong and where they need to focus more to improve their skills by comparing to a big database of others. And I think the really exciting part of that is if we were able to do that effectively, you can then justify to the regular is moving more training out of aircraft flying in the real world and simulators, and that has distinct environmental benefits so that it’s far less emissions. 

And it’s also saving young people money because training becomes far more customized to what they need. So, they’re paying for less hours. And simulators are usually cheaper than the airplane. So, you’re hitting the economic, you’re hitting the social improvement and the environmental improvement when you see this beautiful, magical mix of all these disciplines coming together to address a problem that’s excellent. 

And I think when I see that when I hear your story, what you trying to drive is this multi-disciplinary view really can be used in other sectors, in other environments to really start meshing different levels of expertise to address safety challenges across the board 100%. 

And I think safety is such a perfect illustration of this because just like education, it’s not one thing. It’s not one discipline, right? So, you can’t create a perfectly safe system. Only looking at from the perspective of psychology, it feels like it’s almost like you have pieces of the puzzle and that’s one important piece of the puzzle. But until you identify and link those other pieces together, then you don’t have the full picture. 

I think that’s an incredibly important message in teams of that multidisciplinary view of things to drive things forward. Suzanne, thank you so much for the work that you’re driving around safety and the aviation space. As somebody who used to fly a lot. I appreciate that part as well, but more importantly, really coming to our podcast to share your story, share some ideas. I think there’s some really great examples, illustrations that people can take from what’s being done in the aviation space to translate it to really that learning organization thinking about as humans. 

Where are we going to make a mistake? Because it’s bound to happen. So, I really appreciate you coming to share a story. 

Thank you very much. 

Thank you for listening to the Safety Guru on C-suite radio. Leave a legacy. Distinguish yourself from the pack. Grow your success. Capture the hearts and minds of your teams. Fuel your future. Come back in two weeks for the next episode or listen to our sister show with the Ops guru. Eric Michrowski. 

The Safety Guru with Eric Michrowski

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Dr. Suzanne Kearns is an Associate Professor of Aviation at the University of Waterloo. She is an internationally recognized leader in aviation education research, earned airplane and helicopter pilot licenses at the age of 17, advanced aeronautical degrees from Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University and began working as an aviation professor upon graduation at the age of 24. In the 16 years since, she has taught and mentored thousands of aviation students, and written/co-authored six books printed in multiple translations (including Competency-Based Education in Aviation, Fundamentals of International Aviation, and Engaging the Next Generation of Aviation Professionals). She has received several awards for research and educational works, frequently delivers invited keynote addresses at international conferences, and holds leadership positions with several international aviation organizations. In 2021 she founded the Waterloo Institute for Sustainable Aeronautics (WISA), which she leads as its Director.

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Powerline Safety: Look up and Live with Cookie

The Safety Guru_Glen Cook(Cookie)_Powerline Safety Look up and live

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October is ‘Safe Work’ month in Australia. We’re heading Down Under with special guest Cookie, an award-winning powerline safety expert from Queensland, Australia! In this episode, he illustrates the importance of powerline safety, the significance of ‘unintentional blindness’ and shares life saving tips in the event of a contact. Tune in to learn more about his innovative app ‘Look up and Live’ along with how your organization can proactively prepare for powerline risk..

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Real leaders leave a legacy. They capture the hearts and minds of their teams. Their origin story puts the safety and well-being of their people. First, great companies ubiquitously have safe yet productive operations. For those companies, safety is an investment, not a cost for the C-suite. It’s a real topic of daily focus. This is the safety Guru with your host, Eric Michrowski, a globally recognized Ops on safety guru, public speaker and author. Are you ready to leave a safety legacy? Your legacy success story begins now. 

Hi and welcome to the safety Guru today. I’m very excited to have with me, none other than Cookie. And we’ll get to his name very soon. But he’s Australia’s health and safety professional. The year in 2020 out from Queensland, Australia an expert in powerline safety. So, I’m really looking forward to this conversation. So, Cookie, first, we’ve got to get into the name. How did you end up with that nickname? 

Well, my given name is Glen Cook. So, in Australia were very good at giving people nicknames, but we weren’t real creative on this one. It just became a Cookie. My old band or my father was called Cookie as well. Very officially known as Cookie. So, yeah, just from schoolmate, from all my mates and everyone just started calling me Cookie in this role, it’s a very good name to sort of break them barriers very quickly with workers. Right. So, you’re instantly approachable. 

Yeah, I absolutely agree. So, tell me a little bit about how you got into safety, but more specifically about power line safety. 

I’ve been an electrician for over 30 years now. The bulk of my time was on the tools, climate pals, digging holes and putting power lines back up after natural disasters and storms and cyclones and stuff like that. So, I sort of fell into an Inspector role. So, I’m an Inspector as well. And I became a senior Inspector up in Fan of Queensland in Cans. And I sort of worked all over Queensland from Cans in North Queensland, right up to Thursday Island, which is in the Torah Straits in Queensland, all over Cape. 

You all can even bit of time in Brisbane, like I never thought that I’d ever be in safety. No one likes a safety go. Here comes to safety guy. Look at, you know, it wasn’t where I thought I’d be at all. And then being a senior Inspector, I’ve done over 300 shock investigations as well. So, part of that role is investigated fatalities. But on top of that, I was also the first responder to numerous accidental contacts of power lines. So, my cross Korea sort of moved to Harvey Bay, which is sort of in South Queensland. 

And I moved here. And within the first couple of months, I had another incident involving accidental contact with power lines. And, you know, I was employed as a leader here in Harvey Bay, and I got a phone call something’s going on down the road. And I just jumped in my vehicle straight away because all my guys are out working. And I thought I go and have a look myself. I started driving down the road, and then I could see a big commotion near an elevated work platform. 

You know, the fires were there, the ambulance were there. I thought about myself because I knew straight away, I’ve gone. Someone’s contacted power lines. You know, I thought about myself, though I still sat for this day of self as you me. But you do think about yourself, right. And I’m like, why me again, I’m bet to see something that is not nice. And I instantly forgot about that because I looked to my left. And it’s the Harvey Bay High School. And it’s lunchtime. And there’s about 80 to 100 kids all lined up on the skill fence. 

And they’ve seen a person accidentally electrocute himself operating an elevated work platform with he had a paint roller in his hand and got too close to eleven0 volt power lines and was instantly killed after he got too close. Like, on this particular day, he didn’t even touch that power line. He just got too close. And then for me, I’ve gone. Why don’t people understand, why don’t people in the construction industry, why don’t people in the agricultural sector understand how dangerous power lines can be if you get too close to them? 

Right. And I sort of got found out on my business in this investigation because once I got interviewed by the investigators because not coming from this region is sort of well-known in my own patch up in Font of Queensland. But moving to a new area, people start asking these questions and they’ve gone, well, you know, you’ve got a lot of experience there. And I met my wife, boss, Aaron Smith, who basically has empowered me to do what I do today and sort of explain the job to me. 

He’s like, you should come work for me. And I’m like, no, I’m not interested in safety. And he said, I started asking questions. I said, What’s the title of it? And he said, oh, community health and safety advisor. And I said, sounds like a condone at the hospital. Oh, you’re right. I’ll stick with what I’m doing, right. And then, yeah, he did explain a little bit more to me. And I went. Actually, I think this is an area where I could actually help people. Right. And, you know, it was nearly ten years ago to the day, it’s probably about ten years and six months since I sort of started this role. 

And, you know, like I said, I never thought I’d be in safety, let alone win a national award in safety. So, yeah, it’s been an interesting journey to be, to be honest, Kudos and the award. 

So, tell me a little bit about power line. Obviously, power lines, high voltage, very dangerous. But how come people have so often make contact with a power line or get close to it and go through that? Because, as you said, it’s not necessarily making contact. Sometimes it’s just getting close to it. 

Yeah, that’s right. I mean, when I first started this role, I’m looking at it from a very on a power industry employee. Right. And I was looking at it like people are just silly. How can they not see the power lines? And are they just working too close? And that’s what I was thinking. Like, people are just taking risks. I quickly found out that it’s just not the case. So, when I first started the role, I realized that I had to take off my power line employee had and start thinking about it from a worker perspective. 

So, once I started looking at all the stats, and I quickly realized that 90% of these incidents are all workers. So, their workers in the construction and agricultural industry primarily. Right. The other are normally just people cutting trees in their front yard or stuff like that. So, I started looking at it and talking to just, you know, putting myself in that situation. Like, for instance, I knew nothing about the cotton industry and Cotton’s. A very big industry in southwest Queensland coming from North Queensland, knew a lot about can, the cane industry. 

But I didn’t know cotton. I basically went to one of our cotton regions, one of the local depots. So, I don’t want to know about more about the cotton industry. And he introduced me to a cotton farmer. And I went on the farm for a day, and he showed me his whole operation and the height of the machines and what they were up against. And I’ve just gone and quickly realize that people simply do not see the power on to the stories that I’ve heard in the last ten years.

People have got a very similar story. Every time I say to people say what happened on that particular day, and they say, Cookie, I wanted percent knew the power lines there. I just didn’t see it and doing lots of training and that in human factors over the years, I’ve just gone, wow. All these trainings coming back to haunt me. And then I quickly realized it’s could be humans. And we got human fat. 

Exactly right. 

And our eyes and our brain actually don’t work that well together. So that eyes and your brain aren’t, like the video camera on your phone, you simply will not pick up everything in your sphere of vision. So being able to explain that to people when I jump up in front of an audience and helping people understand that they’ve got these human factors and they actually don’t see power lines. It’s just powerful. Right. And I term at inattentional blindness. So, I sort of did a bit of research on Google and there’s lots of different teams that people use for it. 

I explained it as an inattentional blindness because I’ve met a few pilots and they do lots of work, inattentional blindness and human face. And they sort of term inattentional blindness. So, I sort of grabbed on to that term just to try and explain it to people. Having understood why people are hitting power lines. So, I always ask people who said, so when you strove here this morning before I’m doing my talk, I say, how many power lines did you see? And people look around the room and they go, how does Cookie? 

No, I didn’t see any power lines. And I go, well, you know, you don’t see them, but I drive around and I look at them all day. I get in trouble. When we go on holidays, I’ll be looking at power lines. And my wife and kids began days. Look at power lines again. I’m like, I might be a little bit weird, I suppose, but that’s the industry. I mean, I see them, but normal people don’t because your brain has actually trained you to your brain’s constantly trying to conserve energy and your brains gone. 

You don’t need to worry about their power lines. They’re out of your reach. So, power lines are designed to be out of your normal everyday reach. And you’re normal everyday lives. Driving to and from work, going to get the kids from school, going to get shopping. But when you start work and you’ve got a ladder, you’ve got an elevator, work platform, you’ve got an excavator on the back of the truck, you’re using an excavator. All these things are very high and have got the, you know, the risk of actually contacting overhead power lines. 

And then the further I got into it, then you realize that nobody understands how electricity works or the basic theory of electricity and what to do in an emergency, because that was the other thing that I found straight away in this role was the fatalities that I was seeing was people hit a power line. Then they panic and try and get out of the vehicle. 

Right. 

So, they’re the things that I promote my talks is my personal experience and why I got into safety and how become an expert. So, people then go, oh, cookies, the expert a bit listener who you’re talking about and talk about the legislation and why we have exclusion zones and why there’s laws to work around, Pallone, because if you hit them, you’re going to come off second best. But then also the basics on electricity, so as to people knowledge is the best defense when it comes to electrical safety and particularly Parello safety. 

Because if you understand how electricity works and if you stay in the vehicle, you’ll be safe. You won’t get hurt. Talk to people all over Queensland, Australia, mostly in New Zealand, and I’ll be in Outback pub somewhere, having a meal at night after I’ve spoken to a group and I’ve got me look up and live shirt on and people come to me and say, what do you do? And then you say, I’m in Parel on safety and they go, oh, yeah. I know how that works. 

Here. 

You jump out and you shuffle away and they get it all wrong. Right. And I said you’ve missed the point that the most important point is to actually stay right. You’re more likely to win the Lotto or then actually hit a power line and have to escape. Right. So hopefully all the technology works and the power trips off or turns off. And if you just stay in the vehicle, you’re safe. But you don’t know whether it’s on or off. So, I always just push the fact that it’s staying the vehicle you call emergency and you wait for help. 

If that takes 4 hours, you’re still going to be alive. Right. So, I’ve just seen too many people where you get into that fight or flight back to the cave man days. If you actually have that knowledge, knowledge is the best defense. If you’ve got the knowledge and you understand that you’re like a bird on a wire because the machines made of metal and metals are better conductive than the human body. You’re like, it’s going to go through the middle first. So just stay there so that’s the crux of what I try and communicate to my clients and people in my sessions is then if you understand how it works, it can save your life. 

So, understanding why we actually make mistakes because we’re humans. Right. 

Exactly. 

Yeah. 

One of the things that I remember when we first connected that really struck me. As you talked about. I believe the exact number was 25 times more likely to hit an overhead wire versus an underground. The call before you dig, can you double click on this? Because that’s a shocking difference. Same electrical circumstance. But why is it there’s more risk on the overhead versus underground? 

I look at it comes back to the intentional blindness again. Right. So, I have been doing this for a number of years, and I sat down for a beer one afternoon with my boss and we’re hardly in the same spot at the same time. So, we’ve been together for the day and we had a feed and a beer. And I said to him, might we be missing the Mark when it comes to, you know, the overhead power on safety because we do these talks. But at the end, we don’t have a tool for people to actually plan works the power lines. 

And I said to him, I’ve looked at the stats. We have one undergrad power line incident to 25 overheads. You know, it’s a huge difference. And I said the reason why people are hitting the overhead stuff is because of an intentional blindness. But the reason why we don’t hit underground power lines is people are about to dig and they go. Well, I can’t see that underground power lines. So, we do in Australia, we call it do before you dig to then you get the dog before you dig up and try and get a plan. 

It is the start of a very simple plan. So, you’re already less likely to hit an underground power line or gas or communications already by just starting that very simple plan. Whereas with overhead, businesses rely on operators and machinery and workers to actually see the overhead infrastructure. And as we’ll set at the start, they simply don’t. So, we’re setting people and workers up to fail because they turn up on-site and look. 99% of these are all males as well. So, males just want to get their job done.  

Let’s just jump in and, you know, way we go. And you just absolutely do not see the overhead infrastructure. So, I said, you know, we need a way to help people plan their work, their overhead power lines. And I think that’s where you get into is we developed a Lookup and Live app. So, a lookup and live com. Also, in the app stores, you’ll find the Lookup and Live app, which basically maps every power on in Queensland, New SAP, Whales, and South Australia at the moment. 

And we’re also talking to all the other States to see whether they want to join in New Zealand. And I’ve also spoken to some of the guys in Canada as well about joining the Look Up and Live app to basically overlay power lines onto a Google map. So, it allows people to just start that plan from a project that’s nine months out or twelve months out. What’s there? Okay. There are some high voltage power lines that are going to be the way for our unit development, or, you know, whatever it is on a farm like we’ve got a harvest, we’ve got a plan. 

What is the plan to work around this overhead power on and being able to put that plan in place reduces the risk of hitting an overhead powered on? We have managed to reduce a few of the incidents. So, since we’ve implemented it in 2017 as a trial with lots of different industries, we’ve reduced total contacts by 25%, and in particular in agricultural, we reduce the instance by and in in aviation. We reduced it by as well. So, it’s been a very successful tool to be honest. 

And people are using it, which is great, but a simple concept. 

But really at the end of the day, it sounds like I need to have a plan and really understand my hazards and be aware that the hazards may not be as visible as I thought. And if something goes wrong, understand how to manage the circumstances, which is really state put. 

And that’s right. So, in the app, we’ve got all that emergency information as well. Right. And the other beauty of it is it’s a serve you type application so do before you dig in. Australia is very much okay. I want to excavate here and then all the members get sent your information and they will send it back bit by bit. Normally it’s in a schematic, right. But whereas with the overhead stuff, people are after different information. So, looking at it on a desktop or a laptop or even using it on your phone together the next job, for example, I know a lot of crane companies are using this, so they type in their address for the next job.

They have a look on their phone and they go, oh, yeah, there’s power lines there. So, when they’re on the way, they’re thinking about it. Once they turn up at the construction site, for example, their brain is now going, oh, you’ve seen that on your phone and then it’s identifying all the hazards. Like I said, because it’s images, right? We’re humans. We love images. Right? We want to correlate and make sense of things. So, once you’ve looked at it on your phone, you turn up on site, you go, oh, yeah, that’s the line I’ve seen that was eleven 0 volt and the exclusion zone is 3 meters. 

Because I’ve seen that on my phone. And the phone also told me that I will look up and live app has told me that I need a safety observer to safely work there. So, I’m going to ring the construction company and ask him where the safety observer is because he needs to watch me work to make sure we don’t. It just allows people to put those control measures in place. 

So, it makes sense in a large organization you can do. Training can create more awareness. But some of the work that you’re talking about is also done by very small organizations. Like when you’re talking about some of the vegetation management, cutting out trees, some of these large companies, but I’m assuming some are quite small. How do you get that message through? How do you get leaders to make sure they put the right emphasis and awareness around it? 

This episode of the Safety Guru podcast is brought to you by Propulo Consulting, the leading safety, and safety culture advisory firm. Whether you are looking to assess your safety culture, develop strategies to level up your safety performance, introduce human performance capabilities, re-energize your BBS program, enhanced supervisory safety capabilities, or introduce unique safety leadership training and talent solution. Propulo has you covered. Visit us at propulo.com. 

It’s the face-to-face interaction, right. Like the world’s changed in the last two years. We all know, but really the face-to-face stuff when you’re able to stand in front of a group or stand in front of CEOs or managers and really get that point across that us humans make mistakes. Even the best of your workers can make a very simple mistake by not identifying that power on hazard because our own brains have trained us to go. Power lines are not an issue for you. 

So having that really simple tool that’s in the palm of your hands on your phone, just by looking at the map on your phone, when you turn up on site, you’ve already reduced the risk of actually hitting an overhead power line. So, the message is so simple. Right. And the tool is very simple. So, I use a theory called Protection Motivation Theory, which I learned from communications professor called Sam Ham. He sorts of explained it to me, and I went, oh, yeah, that’s a good idea. 

And then I showed him some of the stuff. How I communicate with people goes, Cookie, you already doing it. So, you didn’t know about the theory, but this is what you’re doing. And with safety, you really need to have that element of fear. So, number one, you need to understand how dangerous power lines actually are if you get too close. So, telling people about parking, and if you get too close in an arc, an arc is nearly 300 degrees Celsius. 

Right? 

I’ll say it again. 300 in an in. Right. So, I just had a cup of coffee before. It’s like 70 to 80 degrees. And if I split it into my lap, it’s going to burn me rockfall 300 in an instant, just a tremendous release of energy at one point in time. So being able to sort of show that even a still ad with an arc coming from a power line to a machine, for example. And it could be anything from an agricultural machine, a crane to an excavator tip truck. 

You know, showing that type of stuff makes people interested because it shows a bit of fear. Then you need to have that feeling of self-worth getting back to your family. But to make an ad work or that communication method work, it needs a really simple way to change your behavior. And that’s why the Lookup and Live app is absolutely working because you’ve got it on your phone and you can easily find it a lookup and live com. So, save it to your home screen or download the app. 

You’ve got it there. You just look at it on your phone and you’re instantly identifying the hazards. And that changes your behavior. And for listeners in Europe or the US or Canada, you mentioned Canada potentially coming on to the app as well. Is there something similar to help visualize where the lines are? 

Look, I’m sure there’s others out there that are using this are technology that we’re using. I’ve seen lots of similar products. I haven’t really seen anything, I suppose, similar as what we’re doing where we managed to, you know, get other distributors to actually start working together. And that’s the beauty of this product is if you can find it all at one location, like, even if you’ve got your own product off to the side that you can communicate to your customers. I suppose your own way if you want to do it.

But once the data is made public, if we all share it onto one application such as Lookup and Live. Com, you Zoom town to your part of the world. And once you click on that power line, it tells you who owns it. So, if you click on it in Queensland, you might find that argon or energy on it. If you go to New South Wales, you might find a company called Essential Energy owns it. If you went to sketch on, I always have trouble with that name. 

If you click on it as far, it might tell you that. Yeah, it might. Sax Power owns it, right. So, it tells you who owns it and how to find out their safety information. So that’s the beauty of it. So, the more people make their data public, the more we can add to this. I see it as an international damage protection tool. And the beauty of it, it doesn’t cost that much to operate wrong. I had no budget to build this app, right. I just went to two very smart individuals called Matt Piper and Thorston Horse in your business and said, I’ve got this idea. 

I want to overlay all our power lines onto a map and they went away and built it and brought it back. So, what’s this? Look. I said, that’s perfect. I was like, this is awesome. And then, you know, basically took it to, like, I’m an advocate for all these industries that outside of our Power on distribution company. And I’ve got all these contacts within agriculture and construction and all I said, look, we’ve built this. Do you think this would be of assistance and everyone’s gone? This is great. 

And like I said, when I do a talk and I go through all the stuff I said before and I get to look up and live part. And I said, look, I know I said at the start we’ve got all these dangers and all the rest of it. But here’s the tool to help you safely work. And when I finish the talk, people just come up to me and go, that’s amazing. Thanks for putting so much effort into this. And you can see your passion and obviously for it. 

And people are just gone. This is going to change the way I work. And I think you’ve saved my life because I’ve worked close to power lines. And you’re 100% right. I haven’t seen power lines before. I’ve had so many close calls, and, you know, it’s just it’s working and it’s because it’s so easy. You know, we don’t have to make things long and complicated and make it into a full risk assessment. For example, this is just a simple hazard Identifier for power ones. 

Make it visible. 

And yeah, and I’ve got no doubt that this is state lives, no doubt. 

Well, you had the stats before. It’s similar to the call before you dig. That is not operating normally by one company. It’s one number that you call from wherever to understand what are my hazards. 

That’s right. And the beauty of it. You mentioned it before. It works for one man band or, you know, multinational company. Right. So, if someone wants to do some work in Australia and they’re based in Malaysia, they can look up the power on infrastructure in Queensland, on sales and have a plan before they even start. So, once they’ve won, that tended to do the work, they can start planning already for the power ones and contact the power one company to other underground them or remove them. If that’s the plan, or for a farmer we in Australia, there’s a new innovation called a rotor marker. 

So, it’s a spinning red and white marker that gets attached to power lines. And it’s really working for the agricultural and construction, in particular, the aviation industry, because this new marker is very visible. It’s basically red and white and it spins. So, when something is spinning on a power line or moving, it absolutely negates the inattentional blindness, because what our eyes and our brains do like is movement. So, it’s back to the cave man days again. So, something that’s in your peripheral vision and it moves, your brain goes, that is interesting and you look at it. 

So, these Rotor markers, these red and right spinning markers are making a huge difference in these industries once they’re installed. So, if someone does the lookup and live out comes up with a plan, part of that plan is to identify the power lines and Mark them because, for example, they don’t have enough money to move them. 

So, it’s an admin control. But it’s a really effective admin control, because what it does is change. Firstly, the operator or the worker will identify that the power lines are near right. But it changes their behavior because once they’ve identified it, they go all power lines. I’m going to lower everything down to the lowest point, or I’m not going over there anymore, or I’m going to get the safety observer to come and watch me operate. Well, I can safely be there. And these two tools to look up and live tool in the rotor marker have actually come out at a very similar time. 

So, I put the success that we’ve had down to these two products. The rotor Mark is still gaining legs, as is the look up and live tool. But I see moving forward these two things being very practical way to negate power line safety. And they’re very cheap, like they’re only about $100 each. And you don’t need multiple markers on par lines. You just need one every around 50 meters and your eye will set. And like for aviation in particular, pilots can see them from over a kilometer away. 

So, you know, gives them, you know, six times more time to react. For aerial applicators coming in spraying crops, they’ve got six more times to react if they’ve missed where the power line is, for example. So that’s part of the reason why we’ve seen a reduction in the aviation industry as well, but just giving people that ability to plan plus those rotor markers. Yeah. And like I said, it’s the movement factor. So still or static balls that we use to Mark power lines, the smaller balls, in particular, the ones that are about four or 300 mills. 

They’re really hard to see, and you can only see from about five to 600 meters, whereas those rider markets because they’re spinning every Kilmer. So, it’s just another tool that we’ve got an Arsenal to try and stop accidental context. Yeah. 

I really appreciate your passion for an important topic like this where unfortunately, there’s too many fatalities, too many people that get into harm’s way. And the effect of, like you said, an arc flash. If you survive, it can be very, very lasting scars and burns as well. So, I really appreciate you sharing all of this at the end of the day. If I summarize it’s, create a plan, be aware of it, whether it’s through markers, looking in teams of an app, but making sure workers really understand where those bar lines are and then also understanding how to respond. 

Understanding an arc flash, understanding a safe distance away from the lines. And if you do end up how to basically stay. But is that correct? 

Hey, Mike, you hit the nail on the head there, Mike. Good. 

Thank you so much. And thank you for as well. Building that up. They look up to live. If you’re in Australia, New Zealand, you can download that tool and hopefully it will come up as well in other parts of the world, because I think it’s a great concept to create awareness. Create one platform where people can see where their hazards are. 

You can download it anywhere in the world. It just doesn’t have a little power on it. Not on it yet. So, if you want to check it out, just go to the app store and search, look up and live. You’ll be able to find it. Yeah. If anyone wants to contact me more than happy to talk about pay line safety. And if you want to add your data to the map, this just to have a chat, it doesn’t cost a link. 

Perfect. 

It’s a simple data share arrangement. Excellent. 

Well, thank you so much, Cookie. I really appreciate you coming on to the show, sharing examples of stories, some tips, but also in terms of building some tools that are having meaningful impact in terms of saving lives. 

No worries, Eric. Thanks. 

Thank you for listening to the safety guru on C Suite Radio. Leave a legacy. Distinguish yourself from the pack. Grow your success. Capture the hearts and minds of your teams. Fuel your future. Come back in two weeks for the next episode, or listen to our sister show with the Ops guru Eric Michrowski. 

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ABOUT THE GUEST

Glen Cook (Cookie), is an experienced and Passionate Powerline Safety Specialist based in Australia. Cookie is extremely passionate about raising powerline safety awareness and was the 2020 Australian Health and safety professional of the year. Working as an electrician for over 30 years within the construction and utilities industries he has been first responder to serious injury/burns and fatalities due to accidental contact with powerlines. Cookie is the driving force behind the award winning lookupandlive.com app that is assisting workers plan work near powerlines.

Glen CookCommunity Safety Specialist

https://www.linkedin.com/in/cookie-powerlinesafety/

Mobile: +61418443944   

[email protected]

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