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 and 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 really excited to have with me Dr. Sally Spencer Thomas who is a psychologist and impact entrepreneur. We’re going to have to talk about what that really means. And entails a passion for suicide prevention. She’s also the President of the United Suicide Survivors International. We have a really important topic to discuss today and it’s really as we’re talking about Suicide Prevention Week and International Suicide Prevention Day is really the connection between safety and mental health well-being and suicide. So, incredibly important topic, and very happy to have you with me, Sally.

Grateful to be here, Eric. I’m so glad to be making the connections here. 

Excellent. So, before we jump into your story and some of the themes around it, tell me a little bit about what it is to be an impact entrepreneur.

So, an impact entrepreneur brings kind of the heart of a non-profit, a mission-oriented perspective, but kind of the business mind and the efficiencies of a business model. So social entrepreneurship is another term for it but it’s basically a business that measures its profit by impact.

Excellent. Well, excellent. Thank you for the work that you’re doing in this space. So maybe let’s start with a bit of your story, your background, and how you got passionate about this critically important topic. 

Yeah, so I’m a psychologist by training and I’ve been in the field of mental health for upwards of 16 years if you count my undergraduate years when I lost my brother to suicide. This happened in 2004. My brother was a business leader himself, an executive in the insurance industry. He had launched a company in his mid-20s by his early thirty s that had gone national. And so, in all the ways that we tend to measure success in our country, my brother had those opportunities and so he was beloved. But what people didn’t know is that he fought depression and a mental health condition that ultimately proved to be fatal. And so many people have these before and after moments in their life and his death was most definitely mine. Within a couple of months. I definitely felt a calling to try to figure out some bold, gap-filling things that could prevent what happened to Carson from happening to other people. And that led us on a path to trying to engage the workplace. It was eye-opening to me. After all, this year in mental health that no one shared. The majority of people who die by suicide are working-aged men.

Most of them have one attempt, and most of them have never stepped foot in any type of mental health resource. So, we’re not going to catch them through education, we’re not going to catch them through the health care system. They’re working, or they were just working. It’s the workplace that’s the most cross-cutting system. And so eventually, that is what leads me to you. 

Wow. First, really sorry to hear about your loss, but I think it’s really impactful, you said in terms of the role that workplaces have around us, and it’s a common theme, and people don’t necessarily talk about it. We’re talking about it more these days, but there needs to be a lot more openness around talking about these teams. As you said, he was a successful executive. Most people would think he’s in a good spot and may not ask questions.

Yeah. And when we first started to try to engage workplaces in 2007, like, hey, how about some suicide prevention in the workplace? They were like, no, that’s a medical issue. People need to take that stuff up with their doctors. And I was like, but they’re not, and they’re here, they’re working, so how about you do something? But there was just so much fear and resistance in the early days. A much different story today.

Let’s touch a little bit on the link to safety, because in many cases as you said, a lot of workplaces are starting to talk about the topic, but not necessarily linking it to safety. So, can you bring some of the connections between these two areas? 

Sure. So, we didn’t have great data. So, I’m in the US. And everybody here kind of benchmarks their mortality and morbidity data off the bureau of labour statistics, and that’s where everyone was focused. And relatively speaking, suicide deaths as measured there were relatively low. They were only looking at that, however, where suicide deaths on a job site well, most suicide deaths don’t happen on a job site. That happens somewhere else. But they were missing the fact that thousands of people were dying by suicide in various male-dominated industries construction, extraction, transportation, including aviation, all kinds of industries. And once those data became public in the United States in 2016, that’s when everything changed. Because when we were looking just at what we’re focusing on is the fatal four slips and falls and electrocution and copying, we’re talking about hundreds of deaths, and every single one of those deaths matter, or maybe upwards of 1000 deaths. When we come to suicide just in the construction industry, we’re talking about 5432 deaths somewhere in that range every year. So, no one knew that. So that was the AHA moment. And then when you kind of dig deeper, there are many connections that people were not drawing the dots through between psychological safety, mental health promotion, suicide prevention, and job C-suite safety or workplace safety.

So, one is a distraction. Everybody knows that when workers are distracted, they make errors and they put themselves in hazardous situations. But no one has been talking about the fact that when you are in the throes of a pretty intense mental health condition or a mental health moment or suicide intensity, as we like to call it, your brain is off doing other stuff. And I’ll speak from personal experience. I went through my own experience with major depression in the spring of 2012. For whatever reason, that perfect storm of stressors hit me, and I had this meta-awareness that my mental health was going down the toilet. And it was one of those things like every single one of my usual coping strategies where it was meditation, trying to eat right, trying to sleep, nothing was touching it. I couldn’t sleep. Food tasted like paste, so I stopped eating. And I remember very distinctly, I like others, I could zip myself up for little periods of time to go do the thing. And for me, doing the thing is getting on a stage and talking to a whole bunch of people. And so, I knew I was really unwell, but I also had to make a living. 

So, I went to this conference, and it was actually a sorority convention in Atlanta, and I had to drive from the venue, from my hotel to the venue. And I remember driving on the highway and having a very clear thought I should not be driving. My mind was racing a million miles an hour. I had an overwhelming sense of panic that I was going to get in a car crash or get lost like there was no way I should have been driving. And that’s true for hundreds of thousands of people every day that are in safety-critical workplaces and their brain is working on something else that is not focused on the job at hand. So that’s one. Number two is fatigue. Again, everybody is connecting the dots between fatigue and job site safety, but they’re almost always only concerned with hours worked. And yes, we have lots of clear data that over certain thresholds, probably about 60 hours a week, we start to get too tired, and we make mistakes that lead to safety problems. But that’s not the only thing that causes fatigue. Most mental health conditions have some kind of sleep dysregulation as part of the criteria.

And it is either I can’t fall asleep, I can’t stay asleep, I try to sleep, and I have tons of nightmares. I’m trying to sleep with a substance use disorder. So, I’m not getting quality restorative sleep, or I sleep and sleep and sleep and sleep and I never feel rested. I always say that sleep, sleep disruption is the canary in the coal mine for some kind of mental health condition. It’s the thing that comes first. And yeah, we all have rough nights of sleep and we’ve got a lot on our minds, but if it’s night after night after night, you’re going to feel tired. And so that’s another piece. The other piece is that some mental health conditions, you can see this on brain scans, cause the brain to not properly function. And in the cases like depression, our synapses are just not firing in the way that they do when we’re well, you can see the brain is really shut down. And the experience I remember this too, the experience is kind of like you’re in this dark tunnel or this dark fog, everything is negative. You’re seeing the world through rust-coloured glasses. 

It’s very hard to generate solutions to problems or to see things from a different perspective. So, again, in safety-critical workplaces, you need that kind of decisiveness problem-solving piece that’s happening so that we can shift gears quickly and come up with an alternative plan that’s hard to do with an impaired brain. And then lastly, ongoing high levels of distress, whether that’s internally caused by a predisposed mental health condition or externally caused from trauma or overwhelmed or whatever, eventually something has got to give, and things will start to fall apart in your body. So, our immune system gets compromised. So, we’re much more likely to get things like, I don’t know, viruses much more susceptible to heart disease and even some cancers and so on and so forth. Pain issues get exacerbated. And so again, we start to see this cycle happening, our mental unwellness contributing to our physical unwellness, contributing to work sites, stresses and pressures, and then here we go round and round. So, there’s many ways that these things are connected.

Yeah, and I think you touched on we talk all the time about distraction, fatigue, all these pieces that you can’t have focused on the task at hand. If you’re thinking about other things, you’re tired. So very strong connection. So, what are some of the tactics that businesses can take to make a meaningful difference?

Well, the good news is the silver lining of the pandemic woke a lot of people up, a lot of workplace leaders, whether that’s employers, professional associations, labor unions, whatever because there was hardly a person on the planet that was impacted in one way or another. We all had this shared experience of like, oh my gosh, and workplaces got really concerned about mental health disruption of their workforce. And then add to that, we’ve got a new generation coming in, the gen Xers who are fluent in mental health awareness from birth. They have those psychosocial education things in preschool. They get it and it’s a huge priority for them. So, when it comes to recruitment, retention, and engagement of young talent, workplaces have got to get this right or we’re going to continue to see that great resignation and the turn that is so disruptive for so many employers. So that’s where suddenly, in the last couple of years, people have learned in ways that they haven’t learned in before. And because we also had data in many of the safety-critical industries that suicide was an issue, we have workplaces leaning in, not just on well-being.

A lot of people like to do the light stuff, well-being, stress management, conflict management, okay, all that stuff matters. And also, we’ve got to talk about the hard stuff. We’ve got to talk about addiction. We’ve got to talk about overdose. We’ve got to talk about suicidal despair, suicide, death, and mental health emergencies. We’ve got to prep workplaces for the whole continuum of experiences, not just the lighter stuff that’s easier to talk about. 

Sure. 

So, what I love about a lot of the safety-critical industries is that they tend to be very problem-solving and pragmatic people. And so, for the most part, people leaned in quickly and said, okay, we got a problem. How do we solve the problem? Give us some tools. We’ll try stuff out. And they did. So, there’s a bunch of us that have also around the same time we published it on October 19, 2019. So right before the pandemic in the United States, the national guidelines for workplace suicide prevention. Canada has something similar with its psychological safety standards for the workplace. Australia has a couple of things around a position statement for workplace suicide prevention. We were late to the party, but we got it done in 2019. And all these documents, standards, guidelines, whatever you want to call them, give workplaces a roadmap to tackle the hard stuff. And in the United States, we frame it as upstream, midstream, and downstream. So, there are a lot of things workplaces can do in the upstream part of the equation, which is promoting what we call protective factors and decreasing psychosocial hazards. Protective factors are things like belonging.

That’s why the die was concerned to play it’s about psychological safety, where people feel okay about bringing their whole selves to work. And how do we create a trustworthy work environment, a culture of care? How do we position our leadership to authentically communicate that this is a health and safety priority for their workplace? How do we have lived experience stories come through and lived experience realized as a form of expertise that can help code design all these programs? So, all of those things that are in the upstream and then with psychosocial hazards, it’s a really important paradigm shift for a lot of workplaces that it’s not good enough just to get a whole bunch of quote-unquote troubled people to counsellors. That’s usually where everybody goes, let’s get these troubled people to the counsellors for a whole bunch of reasons that are fraught we’ll get into that I’m sure that is helpful, for sure if it’s accessible, culturally responsive, all of those things. And also, there’s a whole bunch of stuff workplaces are doing every single day that is driving overwhelming despair, and mental unwellness every single day. So, they also need to take responsibility for mitigating or eliminating psychosocial hazards. 

And one of the AHA moments that we had when we were looking at this again, the United States has an inverted pyramid of the hierarchy of controls when it comes to job site safety. Sure, every single work trail I go to, every single training room on safety-critical workplaces, I see this thing hanging up. It’s like the Bible. Very important. And so, we all know that we’re going to be far more successful if we eliminate or mitigate job site safety hazards in the environment. Then only the thing we do is promote our individual responsibility for wearing our PPE like a hard hat, professional vest, whatever it is. We’re going to be far more successful if we figure out what the hazards are. Same thing here, but nobody is paying attention to this yet, at least not. 

In the United States.

The UK is doing some really cool stuff. They’re actually starting to legislate this, which is very interesting. We’re not there nowhere near there yet. But when we look at the psychosocial hazards like problems in job design, so low autonomy, low job variety, poor effort rewarded balance, those kinds of things, when we look at toxic relationships within a job C suite or within a workplace, especially a supervisor, if that’s a very toxic relationship, the chances are good the worker is going to have high levels of distress. Another piece very common is work and life getting disrupted. So, life spilling into work, work spilling into life, and having no way to navigate that in a healthy way. Another really important piece that doesn’t get talked about enough but is very clearly connected to suicidal despair is if workers feel like they’re a cog in the wheel, they really don’t have a purpose, they don’t connect to the mission, and they really feel like their contribution doesn’t really matter in the big scheme of life and really actually helping someone else have success or profit or whatever. So that disconnect. Like the thing I do 60 hours a week just doesn’t matter, leads to that sense of purposeless.

And then lastly, there are also a lot of hazards that the workplace does just by the nature of the work. So, in our first responder communities, they’re exposed to a lot of traumas. The same with a lot of our healthcare communities. There’s just a lot of sleep disruption by the nature of the job shift, work or long hours or early hours or not enough time off, all of those kinds of things can also contribute. And then the last thing I’ll say is that workplace culture also contributes to mental unwellness. If your main source of relieving stress culturally contributes to really poor coping strategies like high levels of substance abuse. I mean, I work a lot with first responder communities, and I know they get off a long shift. It doesn’t matter if it’s 08:00 in the morning they’re hitting the bars and that just sets up people for addictive patterns that lead to a whole bunch of dominoes falling over. So, lots of things and so that’s the upstream in the midstream. We’re trying to catch things early, trying to help with what we call early detection. This works for all healthcare issues. We want to catch those cancer lumps and bumps when they’re small.

We want to make sure we’ve got the blood pressure under control when the problems are coming on early. All of those things. Same thing here. We want people to be able to identify emerging issues in their mental health and not wait until things are catastrophic to reach out for help. So, the best way that we can do that is really helps the workforce own this part of their health like they own other parts of their health like we own our fitness and our nutrition. We know largely it’s up to us and the choices that we make every day. It’s not entirely but we have a lot of agencies over the decisions that we make in that space. Same thing here. Our wellbeing is largely a part of our decisions and our own self-awareness and so how can we provide a self-care orientation that matters for our overall happiness and well-being in life. And one of the things that we can empower workplaces to do in this area is advocate for anonymous confidential and voluntary self-screening. There are programs out there where workers can just host a screening day for depression and really emphasize this is anonymous and confidential.

It’s not coming back to the employer. This is just a check-up from the neck up. We’re going to do this like we do your fitness tests or other kinds of things. The other piece that I know we’re going to get into in a little bit is peer support. We have found in safety-critical environments there’s often great reluctance for a whole bucket of reasons for workers to reach out to formal mental health supports. There are layers and layers and layers of reasons why there’s a lot of reluctance we’ll get into that. And so, peer support, formally trained peer support programs, not necessarily peer support groups per se but a formal peer support program where people are recruited and trained, and they self-identify. They’ve got outward-facing cues that you’re a safe person to talk to. Most of them have significant lived experience so they can come and meet people where they are, offer empathy because of their own shared meaningful experiences, and so on. That seems to be the major missing link in many workplaces they just land so hard on. We’ve got an EAP, why is our utilization rate 2%? Because people don’t trust it, but they trust appear super.

Peer support is another piece.

There’s also an accessibility and relatability piece because I saw that in the aviation space where there was peer support and it was almost the onboarding to EAP, so they could triage. People felt comfortable they related to the person. It was hugely powerful. Versus EAP, I’ve seldom seen people other than a manager saying, oh, don’t forget to call EAP. 

Which by the way, most managers have never called. So why would I trust you? This is the same thing when you yourself have never used it. Exactly right, yeah. Let’s dive into peer support a little bit more because, for many workplaces, this is a daunting step because they have HR folks, they have employment lawyers who are like, oh no, the liability. And they get up all in a frenzy about fears of being sued. And what we’re learning again from our European colleagues is actually the opposite is true. If you don’t start doing some best practices around providing mental health support for your workforce in areas, we know that work, you’re going to be seen as negligence. You’re going to be seen as not doing what you need to do to protect your workforce. So, this is one of those areas. And we have some proven examples. Like you said, in aviation, I’m familiar with Project Wingman out of American Airlines. They became a really great gold standard for the world. And all of a sudden now most major airlines have a very viable peer support program for the pilots and then many other roles within aviation. 

And when we think about it, yeah, nobody wants a suicidal pilot, nobody wants. 

No, not a good idea. 

And at the same time, or a drunk one, right? And we were preventing our pilots from raising their hands and saying, I need help. Well, that’s a conundrum. So, peer support became, again, that safe pathway for people to get support. We’ve got a lot of really great examples from our first responder communities, especially law enforcement, fire service, and big municipal departments. They’ve had things operating for decades. So, we’ve got models that we can then translate and Trans Culture to other types of industries. And my joy at the moment I spend probably 80% of my time or more in the construction space is to watch the construction industry start to embrace this. The unions have stepped forward most boldly first, and they’re having some really good experiences. They were already set up for that in many ways because of the culture of I’ve got your back. But now we’ve got professional associations coming in and many large companies starting to look at this with seriousness. So, it’s great. And not only is peer support good for the person who’s in distress, but it’s also good for the peer supporter. We have this again, this huge body of data that shows helping others helps us. 

So, it helps that peer support person stay in recovery, and be accountable for their own wellness. It’s a great gap-filling thing that I see is absolutely the future. Oh, and to all the employers out there, cost savings, let me just say that it’s not been replicated in any peer-reviewed journal. But when I ask aviation, when I ask my fire service folks, how much of the distress and despair do you feel is resolved at the peer level? The consistent number I get from these different industries is about 80%. 75% to 80% they say are resolved at the peer level, which means people are not having to take formal medical leave or accommodations. They’re not having to go into any costly treatment for themselves or the company. They’re resolving things at the peer level so people can stay at work and do what they need to do to support their work and their families. Cost savings is another awesome reason to do peer support.

Very compelling argument on this one. And this is something I think a lot of organizations need to really seriously look at, because I’ve seen some cases where, as you mentioned, often union gets involved partners on that front. But how powerful it is, and how many more people can use it, I think it’s a huge game changer in space.

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Yeah, and the last thing I’ll mention in the Midstream space, again, midstream is about identifying problems as they’re emerging. That way things are catastrophic is training. So again, in a lot of safety-critical industries, training is the first go-to. We got a problem, let’s have training. And so, this is again a very quick cultural fit. We can just bake into stuff that’s already happening. I’ve seen some very innovative people, again for the US. Bake it into their Ocean 30 requirements as an elective that some quasi-required, and there are lots of ways we can do it. So, there is what we call gatekeeper training out there. It’s kind of an unfortunate name, but it’s stuck over the decade. Basically, gatekeeper means it’s like CPR. We’re training everyday people to know enough to recognize when somebody might be in a situation that’s driving despair at pretty high levels, and to have the confidence and confidence to go in just like a CPR person, to do what’s needed to sustain that person until we can link them to the next level of care. And so, this is Saturation training. Just like CPR. We want to train as many people as possible in the hopes that when something’s going down, somebody’s going to have the confidence to step in and know what the next level of care needs to be. 

Maybe it’s to the formal peer support person, maybe it’s to the EAP, maybe it’s to a very well-vetted substance use recovery centre in the community. Whatever they’re going to be helpful in kind of connecting those dots, and if not, they’re going to know who knows? And that’s what it does. And so, some of these that are well known are QPR stands for Question, Persuade. Referendum One is safe to talk coming out of Canada, but globally implemented. And then I’m involved with one that’s specifically addressing the workplace. It was called working minds. We’re going through a branding change this year to Vital Cog, and we can put this in the show notes.

Sure. 

If that’s of interest.

Sure.

Where, again, we’re just in an hour or two, we are training everyday people to be able to intervene with best practice skills and conversations and referral and support. Will everybody does it? No. Does that mean it’s a failure? No. We train millions and millions of people in CPR every year. Most, like myself, never used it, and probably never will, but I’m glad I have it. I’m certainly glad I have it. And then lastly, downstream. And again, that training thing gets some of the HR folks and the employee employers like, oh no, are we now responsible for the things I’m like? Are you responsible for CPR if it didn’t work out, if they broke a rib, are you responsible? No, because we all believe in the Good Samaritan. Who is the layperson coming in to help with that Good Samaritan perspective? Here’s the kicker in the law piece, they don’t have the duty. It’s not like this is their job like it would be if you were a licensed psychologist. No, they’re Good Samaritans doing what they’ve been told is helpful at the moment. So that’s how we get through that quandary. And then finally downstream.

So downstream is getting prepared for the worst-case scenario. You are prepared for worst-case scenario around cyber-attacks. You are prepared for worst-case scenario around some kind of job site disaster. You need to also be prepared for the worst-case scenario of a mental health emergency because it’s going to happen. It’s inevitable. Most people will have one in five having them now, so you’re going to need to get prepared. And so, what does that look like? Well, number one, it looks like, go in and check out the mental health resources you have because chances are you have no idea what they do. Most companies went to the lowest bidder for their EAP, and guess what? You get what you pay for. So, if you go in, I say kick the tires, go and do some secret shopper work, make some calls, maybe have a session or two yourself, see what it’s all about. You’re going to realize either that it’s amazing and people are really responsive and understand your industry, or you’re going to realize there are a lot of problems. And then you think through, what if you’re a person on their worst day trying to navigate the system and not having people call you back and not feeling like people?

Understand the culture of the work that you do, I’m going to say you’re probably going to need to often in many cases find a better EAP. That’s been my experience with pretty much every employer I’ve worked with. And then also you probably need more than just an in-person traditional kind of mental health service provider model. A lot of safety-critical industries work around the clock. They don’t have time or accessibility to drive somewhere and have an in-person thing. So, there’s been a lot of innovation in the mental health space during Covet. It forced us to get through some pretty previously challenging barriers. So again, you need to vet it though because oh my goodness, the marketplace just proliferated with all kinds of apps and telemetry health and digital health and most of them are credible. So, find the good ones and find the ones that will fit your industry. So that’s number one. Number two, you need a crisis response plan. It’s not good enough just to have the resources there. You need to equip your managers, supervisors, the people who are in those decision-making spaces, and even your communications folks. What are we going to do? 

What are we going to do if we have an overdose? What are we going to do if we have a suicide on a job site where it’s public-facing, we’ve had witnesses, the media is coming down, we’ve got all kinds of people traumatized, we’ve got many, many people significantly bereaved by the situation. We need a plan in place and you put that plan in place before the thing happens because if you’re trying to put that do the thing on the fly, the chances are good you’re going to make a whole host of pretty bad mistakes that are not only going to not support the people left behind but can also increase the risk for future suicide death. So, you want to have a plan in place. We have a guide. It’s called Manager’s Guide to Suicide. Postvention is what we call that at work and just other things that people are going to need to be equipped. We are putting out, as I mentioned to you earlier, a white paper and again we’ll put that in the show notes also for HR and employment law because they have so many fears about how to manage this if they get stuck.

And we want to help address some of those fears to help them move forward to do the right thing for people who are experiencing their darkest day. And so, in that white paper, we talk about the kinds of accommodations that can be helpful for people experiencing mental health emergencies not only in themselves but also in their families. And so that we can come up with a really good collaborative plan that upholds the dignity of people who are suffering. That’s a very important point that we don’t respond out of fear, but we respond out of compassion to help people through because we’re all going to take our turns and we would like to be treated in that same way with dignity, partnership, respect, all of that. And then finally, again, if there should be some kind of death of a co-worker or a client or a vendor, something that’s going to impact the workplace in a significant way, we need to create safe spaces for people to grieve, to come together. Not everybody is going to need it in long teams, but we need to be on point with the communication, with the support that we’re providing. 

And what we know about suicide is in particular, it’s complicated, especially if you’ve lost a first-degree loved one, a child, say, or a partner or a parent or a best friend. It’s not the thing you’re going to get over in the three days we often give people to grieve. It’s going to take years. And in many cases, if you’re a parent that’s lost a child, it can take decades before any kind of new normal comes around. You’re just suffering very deeply for a long time. So how can workers work with people who are in that space to make sure they don’t lose an otherwise incredible worker?

Sure.

But support them. Because I’ll tell you what, I had a workplace that did that for me. When my brother died, I was working at a Jesuit university, a Catholic school. And I’m not Catholic, but I’ll tell you what, the Jesuits, understand grief and they came alongside me at the moment. Here I am, almost 18 years out from the loss. Every year they still send me a note thinking of your precious brother Carson. Today I get chills just thinking about it magnified the number of employees, the number of years they are handwriting those for thousands and thousands and thousands of people every year. That matters, right? And when I was going through it, in the acute sense, they gave me time off. They gave me flex time. They allowed me to go to the support groups and the grief counsellors. They gave me a lot of grace and a lot of space. And because of that, I was a super loyal, gracious, and grateful employee for a long time. So, it makes a big difference.

Yeah, you shared a lot of incredible resources. And I think the two things that really struck me is in terms of the training that can become available because people need to recognize whether it’s peer, even leaders in the safety language. You talk a lot of actively caring. That’s a component of actively caring for your team members. The other theme that came up is really the evolution of EAP towards peer support. And I think these are two areas as well that you’ve helped, and you can help organizations in terms of taking that step forward. Is that correct?

That is, I’m excited to say that I also think what’s on the next phase of the frontier here of how we’re going to move this forward. We’re piloting a certification program right now. It’s not ready for prime time, but it will be in 2023 when we are working with the state of New York. So, they have underwritten this to walk a cohort of organizations, all of them in safety-critical organizations, through those nine best practices that I just shared with you and provide them technical assistance and coaching. It’s a deep dive. It’s not a flyby two-hour workshop, it’s six-month. We would prefer that it was a twelve-month, but it’s a six-month implementation of regular training modules. And then they got deliverables and got third-party verification, just like a lead certification. There’s a high level of accountability that they’re demonstrating. They’re doing best practice, they have to pass quizzes, all these kinds of things. So far, so good. So hopefully that’ll be ready for primetime in 2023 and then we can really move it forward. I already have some owners for construction that are saying, can you speed that up a little bit? 

Because we need some kind of benchmark to know like, are you really doing the thing? Are you just checking boxes here? So that’s also pretty exciting.

And given the safety implications, do you normally see safety organizations reaching out, or is it that safety organizations partnering with HR and NHR reaching out? What do you normally see? Because what I’ve normally seen is it becomes the HR dialogue as opposed to the safety dollars, whereas I think it needs to also be owned in the safety arena.

So, in the early days, again, 20 07 20 11 my inclination was to go to HR. It made sense, right? They’re the ones who are people. They are the ones who are in charge of the benefits. And I got because I’m talking suicide, which is scary to them, but they were like, oh no, I got frustrated and I’m like, why are you not running with this? When the safety data or when the deaf data came out, the safety people came right up to the front. And like I said, the problem-solving people, understand the connections, they have, the mechanism around that training piece. I would say in my world, the safety people have made far more advancements than the HR folks. The HR folks have been more of a roadblock historically. And that’s not universal, but historically more of a put the brakes on this, let’s back it up and play it down. Where the safety people are like, nobody dies. That’s our goal. Nobody dies and nobody suffers, whether it’s from a mental health injury or a physical injury, because they’re connected, they get it. So, we’re really driving what we hope is more of a partnership between the two because obviously, we’ve got to get the HR and employment law people on board championing this, not just putting the brakes on it. 

Yeah, they need to do the due diligence with the laws. Absolutely. And we want them to feel confident, which is why we published the white paper. But don’t put the brakes on it just because you’re afraid. If it’s just you, because we’re dealing with life and death, I get it. But we don’t respond well when we’re so afraid. We go into self-protection mode and then we can’t see the options. There are many, so I love the partnership when things come together. So, for example, we have a team do that implementation and the Hope certification. And I say absolutely, we need someone from HR, we need someone from safety. We absolutely need people with lived experience. I need someone with decision-making power, someone up at the top who knows what’s going on here, and someone from communications that’s a really strong team to help do this implementation really well.

Perfect. Well, thank you very much, Sally, for sharing all of this. I know you also have a white paper that’s coming out on near misses and instead of reporting and the link to mental well-being, do you want to give it maybe a quick highlight on some of the links there?

Yeah, well, I’ll just give the punchline, which is psychological safety. Psychological safety. So, if it means that I have psychological safety telling you I’ve made a mistake, then I feel like you’re going to have my back and not punish me for that information. And that’s how we learn about near misses or even incidents. If I have psychological safety to say I don’t feel right, there’s something wrong, and I trust that you’re going to support me and have my back, I’m much more likely to disclose that when the problems are small. If I feel like you’re going to fire me or punish me or discriminate against me, I’m going to white-knuckle it. And that can end up being a fatal overdose in the porta potty, which happens all too often. And then the last piece that ties in with electrical safety is if I feel that I don’t belong here because I’m different in some way, which of course has been such a hot topic, then I won’t ever come up with my whole self. I won’t tell you what it’s really like for life for me, or the experiences of being bullied or discriminated against, or how that impacts me and my well-being.

I won’t share that with you. And again, that leads people to overwhelming levels of despair. So, this whole idea of psychological safety is way more than I don’t feel safe in admitting a mistake or maybe suggesting an innovative way to solve a problem. It really goes to the heart of people’s well-being. And so, I’m a big fan of the movement. I just think we need to expand the definition a little more and that’s how things are tied very closely to the near miss and job site safety literature. So, I’ll send that to you I’ll put those in the show notes.

Perfect. Well, thank you very much, Sally, for sharing all these great insights. If somebody wants to reach out to you, what’s the easiest way to reach out? 

Probably the Web stop shop pieces are websites, so sally Spencer Thomas.com. My name is sally Spencer Thomas.

Excellent. Thank you so much, Sally. 

Thank you. 

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