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REDI for Work: A Simple Framework to Start the Right Conversations Before Risk Is Introduced with Dr. E. Kevin Kelloway

Apr 16, 2026

REDI for Work: A Simple Framework to Start the Right Conversations Before Risk Is Introduced with Dr. E. Kevin Kelloway

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We’re thrilled to welcome back Dr. E. Kevin Kelloway, Professor of Psychology and Management at Saint Mary’s University, to The Safety Guru for a powerful conversation on the critical role of work readiness and the simple yet impactful REDI framework for creating safer workplaces. In this insightful episode, Dr. Kelloway introduces the REDI model, a practical, human-centered approach to assessing work readiness through four key factors: Rested, Emotionally Calm, Distracted, and Impatient/In a hurry. When people are not fully ready for the task at hand, the risk of errors and incidents can rise, especially in high-risk environments. Dr. Kelloway explains how each element of the model influences safety outcomes and decision-making. Through real-world examples, he shares how leaders and teams can apply this framework in practice to spark meaningful conversations before risk is introduced. Tune in to explore how organizations can use this straightforward framework to strengthen safety culture, increase awareness, and create safer workplaces by ensuring every team member is truly REDI for the work ahead.

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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 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 very excited to have with me Dr. Kevin Kelloway. He’s a university research Professor with St. Mary’s University, who also works with the CN Center of Occupational Health and Safety. Kevin has been back, was on our show previously with great story recording on SAFER, some key ideas in terms of what does what does good leadership look like and how can you improve step by step. Really excited to have Kevin join us again today. Kevin, welcome to the show. Very excited.

Thanks, Eric. Glad to be here.

Today, we have a really interesting topic, which We’ll get to it very soon in terms of where we can assess and get a sense as to how people are ready for work, essentially, in terms of capability. But before we get there, Kevin, can you maybe share a little bit about yourself and your background how you got passionate about safety?

Sure. I guess in a way, I’ve always been interested in safety. I grew up in a small coal mining town in Cape Breton, and all of my uncles virtually every male in the family, worked in the pit. So, there were always stories about accidents or incidents or safety hazards in the pit. And of course, there were some explosions and fires. So that gets you interested. And then when I showed up in my first jobs, I guess maybe being sensitized to safety, you start to recognize some of the things going around you. I worked my main job When I was younger, I worked in a psychiatric hospital, so there’s lots of violence and issues around that. So always interested in safety. And then as I got into graduate school and doing my PhD and then subsequently work as a researcher, that’s one of the topics I keep coming back to, because I think this is an area where we really need evidence-based practice. We obviously need to address safety issues, but we need to address them in ways that are actually effective. I think it’s too easy for us to fall into the easy solution. But maybe if we run everybody a training course, then everything will be okay.

I’m willing to believe that’s the case, but I want to see some data backing that up. Right.

Maybe if we start out a little bit with the background behind this idea of Daily Fitness for Work and your ready model?

Sure. It’s really a subject I’ve stayed away from. I think many of us have stayed away from because you never want to be blaming the victim. You never want to be saying to someone who’s injured that this is your fault because you did something wrong. But we were approached by an organization a couple of years ago that did very safety-sensitive work, and they worked in high-risk environments. And they were interested in the notion that people are not machines. We don’t show to work the same way every day. So sometimes we have issues going on in our life that distract us or worry us, or maybe we didn’t get enough sleep that night or whatever it is. But just on any given day, we might be off our game. And we’re still well-trained and we’re still highly skilled, and we know what we’re doing. And many times, we can just overcome that. We’re a little tired, so we’re a little distracted, so we’ll try to be a little more careful that day. But the organization was interested in the notion of, sometimes we show up and we’re so tired and we’re so out of whack that maybe we really shouldn’t be doing that work.

Sure.

And they wanted people to have the ability to self-assess that and also the ability to go to their supervisor and say, Listen, here’s what’s going on, and I shouldn’t be doing this work today.

Sure.

And supervisor is an intern given the authority to respond to that by saying, okay, well, let’s rotate you out, and we’ll bring someone else in, and we’ll find something else for you to do this day. Right. And obviously, that That can’t be an ongoing thing. If it is, then we’re going to have another conversation. That’s why you’re doing. But just recognize that on any given day, there are things you should not be doing because you’re not ready.

Can you walk us maybe in terms of what you found as you were looking at the research in this space? Because I think we love the simplicity of it is you can teach somebody to self-assess, but also as a leader, you can get a sense as to what should I be looking for, what signs could I be looking for?

As we looked at the literature, there’s all kinds of things you can focus on. Of course, we research on personality and safety, and there’s certainly a lot on substance use and things like that. But these are things we know and presumably have some procedures in place. So, we were looking for those things that change every day or vary every day. So, one obvious one is sleep. So, we use the acronym ready, our EDI, and R is rested. If you’re doing anything with increased risk, you want to be well-rested. And there’s just a ton of research data out there on the effects of lack of sleep or poor-quality sleep on all kinds of outcomes, but especially on paying attention on the safety outcomes. There’s some research that says even if we miss 40 minutes of sleep, we’re more likely to experience safety the next day. We just went through the setting our clocks ahead. That’s always a discussion at this time of year that you may be at increased risk afterwards. One of One of the things is we want to be well-rested. If you’re showing up, especially if you’re going to do something of a higher risk than normal, that’s something you want to ensure is that you’re well-rested or employees are well-rested.

We may not be able to ensure that. We can’t tell people to be in bed by 8: 30.

No.

We can’t control their sleep, but we can certainly watch for signs of fatigue or people who just seem off the game. Even for us in our everyday life, if we to do something as common place as driving our car, if we’re planning a long trip, you want to make sure you’re well-rested before you do that. Ours for rested. We also found quite a bit of literature linking stress and emotional offsets to safety outcomes. So, we say people have to be emotionally calm. That’s our hope. So, you don’t want people doing high-risk work when they’re under a lot of stress or they’re feeling a lot of anxiety, or they’re just being bothered by something. Maybe the stressors we all know, like work overload or being harassed at work or something like that. All of these things are associated negatively with safety outcomes. Yeah. So again, some of those thing’s organizations can control, some of them you can’t control. Sometimes the stress is emanating from outside the workplace. Maybe there’s a problem in your marriage or your child got hit by a car and they’re in the hospital. Things are, of course, upsetting, and they may throw you off your game for that day.

Again, most of the time, we experience these things. Sometimes it’s fairly minor stuff. And we’re, again, well trained, we’re competent, and we can overcome those sorts of things. Maybe some days where it’s just, we really shouldn’t do that.

Right.

I knew a guy many years ago who was a printer. He ran a printing press. And one of the organizational hazards of running a printing press is you can lose fingers very easily.

Unfortunately, yes.

He was fortunate in that he was… When I knew him, he was self-employed. If he was really upset someday or had missed a lot of sleep, he just would not run the press that day.

Sure.

And I remember asking him about this, and this is how you make your living. How do you not run your press? And in answer, he just held up his 10 fingers and waggled and said, this is why I don’t run the press. I have 10, and I plan to keep 10. So, he was recognizing that days he’s off his game or maybe days he shouldn’t be doing something.

Sure.

High risk. So, rest it emotionally calm. We want people not to be distracted, which is very unique. So, when people are distracted, we’re worried about other things, we’re thinking about other things. Again, it doesn’t detract from our skill or our knowledge. It’s just we’re not really paying attention. That’s the time we might not recognize, for example, when something has changed in the environment.

Which is a very common one because we are very bad at spotting a change that’s occurring in front of us.

Right. You’re doing what always do and not recognizing that something has changed. That can be a serious problem when we’re talking about safety outcomes. Most of us recognize if we’re distracted, that’s the time you make Psychologists refer to them as cognitive errors or sometimes slips and lapses, so you dial the wrong phone number. I remember years ago when I was a child, my mother was upset about something, but she was making supper. We had people coming for dinner, and she made a lemon meringue pie, but she put salt in the meringue instead of sugar. I’m sure it was very tasty. My mother had three sons who never let her live that down. But again, later I realized that’s an almost perfect example of a cognitive error from distraction. She was thinking about something else, not really paying attention to what she was doing, even though she knew very well what she was doing. Right. So rested, emotionally calm, not distracted, and not impatient or not in a hurry. And although it makes sense, I hadn’t seen a lot of this in the research literature, so I was actually quite surprised when we started looking into the research literature and seeing across a wide variety of industries, how often being in a hurry is identified as a cause of incidents and injuries in the workplace.

Right. And anecdotally, we hear it all the time. People say, well, I just wanted to get this done, and it was only going to take a minute, so I didn’t bother getting my safety gear, or I didn’t bother taking these precautions, or whatever. On a low level, when we recognize that we’re in patient or in a hurry, that’s the time we want to tell ourselves, Okay, slow down. That’s true. But from an organizational perspective, that’s the time a supervisor might notice people who are visibly frustrated because things are going well or going fast enough, and they’re trying to compensate by working faster. That’s the time you might want to step in and say, Now’s the time for a break. Now’s Most of the time to just slow down, take a breath, think about it. Yeah. That’s the model we came up with. It’s all based on research evidence. We can find the studies to show that being rested, being emotionally calm, not distracted, not in a hurry, that defines when we’re ready to do the work safely.

Sure.

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.

How can it be applied? Because when you work through every step of your ready model, I see automatically some elements of as a team member, I can recognize the signs of this, so I can speak up, as you mentioned before, if I’m not ready for work. But there’s also a split side of what the organization can do. When I think about rest, the organization controls shifts, controls over time, how to schedule around your circadian cycle, which can impact sleep quality. The individual side is, I can teach you how to sleep, the sleep hygiene things that you can do around how you sleep and how you improve your sleep quality. Even in terms of when you talk about the eye in terms of being impatient, in a hurry, it could also be production pressure, the organization is pushing, go faster, or a target we need to meet, which could be real and could be present, or it could even be internalized, where I’m putting pressure on myself because I want to succeed.

Yeah. There are different levels there. Certainly, we were thinking of this originally as a model for self-assessment, where if you’re going out to do something that’s high risk, maybe that’s the time you want to do a quick check in with yourself. Am I calm? Am I well-rested? Am I focused and on task? Am I going to take my time and do this right? But we also think there’s an organizational role. So originally, when we were approached about this by an organization, what they wanted really is for employees to have the ability to go to their supervisor and say, this is not the day I should be doing that task, and that the supervisor could respond. So that’s at the extreme level. But as you point out, the organizations can manage a lot of these things. We already know that certainly organizations should be managing stressors in the environment, at least in terms of minimizing the hassles people have at work. And if there’s harassment going on or things like that, we should be dealing with that. Organizations, they can enforce sleep regimes on people, but they certainly can… There’s an educational role here. Many organizations run programs on sleep hygiene and being well-rested and things like that. 

So, we can influence that. As you say, we can look at our shift schedules. And that’s not an area I’m a great expert on, but one of the things that’s always stuck with me is when we change shifts makes a difference. And it’s often the case that because of the way our lives are structured and the way we are, we all tend to go to bed at the same time every night. But it’s the same time, whether we have to get up at 5: 00 in the morning or 10: 00 in the morning, they’ll go to bed at the same time. Obviously, one of the implications for that is you can help people get more sleep by simply making the shift change later in the day. So maybe shifts don’t have to change at, say, seven in the morning. They can change at nine in the morning, and then people will get that extra hour sleep or whatever. So, there are things that you like tweaks like that, that are going to affect how well-rested people are. There’s some education we can do. We can work on minimizing stressors in the workplace, and we can certainly help people with stress management and things like that.

That doesn’t replace minimizing stressors in the workplace. Yeah, of course. It can certainly help. And we can also, as supervisors, we can just be aware and monitoring, looking for signs that people are not up to their normal standard. Certainly, if you see people making a lot of little mistakes or having to do things twice or three times or forgetting things, those are all signs that maybe someone’s under a lot of stress. It could be something totally different. I get older, I forget things all the time now. But That would be the cues. In another context, we’ve called these the signs of struggle. That might be the cues that a supervisor could use to go and start that conversation with an employee. Are you feeling, okay? Are you up to this today? Do you want me to find something else for you to do? And things like that.

That requires you having a baseline knowledge of your team. If you actively care about them and you know how they show up on a regular basis, then you can spot the difference. If you’re an absentee leader in your office the whole day, you may not even notice these changes.

Absolutely, yeah. It requires you to be, A, with the team and be aware of the way they normally show up. I talked about the signs of struggle. This was another area we did research on. We were looking for signs that somebody had a mental health crisis going on. But when you look at that, there are some very visible things you see that I think are relevant here. People under a lot of stress or dealing with issues in their own life often withdraw from people socially. You go for coffee with the gang or anything like that where they normally would. When you start seeing absences and decrements in performance. Sometimes people just tell you. Because if somebody’s really exhausted or they’re really stressed out, they will often say that at work. I’m just dead today. I can’t get it together. Things like that. Some of the signs are quite obvious. But again, supervisor has to be there and aware to pick up on them and say, well, maybe this is the time to have a conversation about that. Yeah.

Even in terms of distractions, there’s a fair bit that can be done. We talked briefly around in aviation, how there’s been several crashes over history because of a minor distraction. Light bulb, somebody looking out the window at a beautiful site instead of looking at where they were heading, little details along those lines. There’s a lot that’s also been done to make sure that at key critical moments of the flight, there’s no distractions. Not allowed to have an interaction that’s not related to the mission on takeoff or landing, and nobody can interrupt the pilot for that reason.

Right. So, whenever we can limit things like that, it’s interesting because I would say, think back to when you were learning how to drive, and you were sitting upright with your hands at 10: 00 and 2: 00, and there’s no radio on, and you’re fully focused at the task in the hand. Then after you get your license and some years of experience, now you’re driving down the 401 with one hand and the radios there. Police tell horror stories about things they’ve seen on the highway, people on their laptop or shaving or doing their makeup. People are multitasking like crazy. But some of that’s because our sense of risk has gone down.

Change.

When you first start driving, that’s a very risky endeavor and you need to be totally focused.

Excellent. I really like the simplicity, again, ready as a tool for, I think, leaders to understand How is my team ready for work? But also, like you talked about, for team members to understand what are the things that could get in the way of being safe today and being comfortable speaking up. Like you said, if every day you didn’t sleep because you went out to pub at night, there’s a point where it’s a different conversation, but it’s also making sure we don’t put somebody who’s not ready and well for work to work. I remember talking to one leader, and they shared a really powerful story for me. It was a team member who was showing up for work, and the supervisor was very cognizant of how she normally shows up and realized that on that particular day, she seemed very distracted. He just went said, Are you okay? She says, well, actually, I got evicted last night, so we slept on the street. He says, okay, that’s not the moment to operate the machinery. I think that’s the importance of recognizing those signs. I like the element you’re also bringing up, which is if team members recognize those signs and feel comfortable speaking up, then it can also keep people safer.

Yeah. We’ve talked about supervisors in the individual, but there’s a role there for teammates, too.

Yeah, for sure.

If you recognize that one of your coworkers is not doing well or seems off, or if you see them make a lot of these little mistakes, that might be a time, and it gives you a reason to have that conversation with them.

Kevin, thank you so much for joining me today. If you haven’t listened to the previous episode, I really encourage you to listen to the one we recorded several years back on the safer model. I love the insights there in terms of as a leader, what are the steps we can make to get better and more powerful as a safety leader? I really love the analogy at the time of the 10,000 steps, I remember, and the little meaningful step forward in terms of that difference that you can do. If somebody wants to get in touch with you or the CN Center for Occupational Health and Safety at St. Mary’s, what’s the best way to do that?

Well, certainly, you can drop me an email. It’s first name and last name @smu.ca. So [email protected]. And the CN Center for Occupational Health and Safety, which is a center for research excellence in health and safety, can be reached as [email protected]. Excellent. Those are the easiest ways to reach us.

Perfect. Thank you so much, Kevin.

Thanks, Eric.

Thank you for listening to The Safety Guru on C-suite Radio. Leave a legacy. Distinguish yourself from the past. Grow your success. Capture the hearts and minds of your teams. Elevate your safety. Like every successful athlete, top leaders continuously invest in their safety leadership with an expert coach to boost safety performance. Begin your journey at execsafetycoach.com. Come back in two weeks for the next episode with your host, Eric Michrowski. This podcast is powered by Propulo Consulting.

ABOUT THE GUEST

Dr. E. Kevin Kelloway is the University Research Professor and Professor of Psychology and Management at Saint Mary’s University, Halifax, Nova Scotia. A prolific researcher, he has authored over 200 articles and chapters and has authored/edited 15 books to date.  His research focuses on occupational health psychology and, in particular, how leaders affect health and safety within organizations.  Kevin has been elected a Fellow of the Association for Psychological Science, the Canadian Psychological Association, the International Association for Applied Psychology, and the Society for Industrial/Organizational Psychology. In 2016, he served as President of the Canadian Psychological Association. Kevin works with both private and public sector clients on issues related to leadership, safety, and HR management, and is a popular speaker at conferences and corporate events.

For more information: https://www.smu.ca/psychology/faculty-and-staff.html

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The Importance of Neuroscience and Behavior in Improving Safety Performance with Cristian Sylvestre

Apr 2, 2026

The Importance of Neuroscience and Behavior in Improving Safety Performance with Cristian Sylvestre

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In this thought-provoking episode of The Safety Guru, Cristian Sylvestre unpacks the importance of neuroscience and behavior in improving safety performance. Cristian breaks down four key brain modes that drive nearly everything we do, offering a powerful lens for understanding how attention and awareness influence our actions and how subconscious states like complacency, impatience, and fatigue quietly shape behavior in high-risk environments. He also explores the limitations of current safety practices and the critical role of attention in safety, helping us understand why even the best safety systems cannot fully protect us when attention slips. From understanding the root causes of inattention to building awareness and safer habits through repetition, this episode provides practical strategies to help prevent serious incidents and fatalities through individual actions. Cristian also highlights why workers should be seen as valuable resources in safety discussions to strengthen overall safety performance. Don’t miss these transformative insights and powerful takeaways to create safer workplaces. Tune in now!

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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 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 very excited to have with me Cristian Sylvestre. He’s a managing director of Habitsafe based out of Sydney. Christian, so happy to have you with me today.

Thanks very much, Eric. Appreciate you having me.

Absolutely. So, I’d love to start with your story and how you got passionate about safety.

Okay, so look, I’m a chemical engineer and I worked as a process safety engineer for a refinery here in Sydney. And what I found, as a process safety engineer, you quickly come to the realization that you can’t rely on the person in order to foresee what’s going to happen and deal with it, because things are very complex. So, nobody’s got enough cognitive horsepower to be able to foresee it with enough anticipation in order to be able to fix it. So, process safety is really very much about having the system and the checks and balances in place. So, things don’t get away from you.

Sure.

But the refinery that I was working for had the worst occupational or personal safety record in the shell world. So, the refinery manager said to me, why don’t you look at it and see what you can come up with? And I looked at it, I looked at the management system, and it was pretty robust. Leaders were talking about safety on an ongoing basis. So, we were doing all the right things. And the only thing that I could come up with at the time was that, well, people are just not paying attention at the time when the hazard is nearby.

Sure.

So initially we went out and we started telling people to pay more attention and be more careful and all that kind of stuff. It had no impact at all.

Right.

So, then I kind of left shelter, went off and did and did other things. And in sort of 2005, 2006, I started seeing papers that were looking at how the brain worked, but not how the brain works from the point of view of, you know, when something, when somebody’s sort of got problems with it, but how the brain worked for the function of how, how things happen. So where does behavior come from? And all that kind of stuff. So, I started looking at that, and what I found was that there were four main brain modes that decide almost 100% of what we do. And that’s conscious control.

Sure.

Autopilot, usually sort of. The third one is impatience. So, fatigue, frustration, anger, that kind of stuff, and also fatigue. So, I started getting interested, given my background with Shell of. Okay, well, how can we use this information in order to help people manage, you know, their ability to pay attention when hazards are about?

And so, when we’re talking about hazards, where do most accidents or fatalities actually happen?

So, when you look at where accidents are happening in the United States, for instance, there’s about 5,000 accidental fatalities every year. And they’re divided between process safety and personal or occupational safety. And when you look at that, what you find, I mean, process safety is really the refinery blowing up, the nuclear meltdown. Really complex things. Not many of those deaths and not many incidents are associated with process safety. But when you have a process safety incident, it’s kind of. It’s big. You’ll see it big.

Yeah.

So, when you look at just the workplace, what you find is that you find for each. Everyone, process safety, accidental fatality, there might be 20, 25. And that’s the same ratio in the U.S. in Australia, in the U.K. i suspect in Canada and New Zealand as well. But that is only 4% of the total data available. What we also know is that 120,000 accidental fatalities happen outside of work, a good deal of those on the road, people driving. So, 4%, in my view, is not really representative enough to give a complete picture of the total problem. And what that leads to is that it leads to a limiting of the range of possible solutions that get considered. So, if you’re wrongly looking at fatalities at work, you’ve got a fair amount of control over the environment. So, what you do is you tend to focus on doing things around the person. Yep. And you tend to assume that the person can’t do anything about keeping themselves safe. And I think that that’s a real weakness. Because when you start looking at all the accidental fatalities, what you find is that the majority of those fatalities, the person could have done something different in order to avoid it.

Sure. And so that brings me to the how does this connect with hop? And maybe some of the challenges with a purely HOP lens when looking at safety, because we’re not talking about blaming the employee, but we are talking about how is it that I can do things differently to have a better outcome?

So, HOP came about from process Safety. And it’s been around for a long time. And I think when you use hop in process safety, it helps a great deal. The issue, I think, is that we’ve extended that into personal safety. And I think what hop it does is actually gives people the sense that they can control everything around the person. So, for me, the problem with hop is that it kind of negates what you can do with the person, which doesn’t really help. So, whether you do hop safety differently, safety one, safety two, maybe they’ll come up with safety 137 soon. That is only about doing work around the person. And that gives us the illusion of control, in my view. Now, I think that is a part of what we need to do. So, we need to do things around the person, so the person is safe. But if you look at the workplace fatalities over the last 10 years in the US haven’t really changed. If you take out the suicides and the overdoses, they’ve gone up by almost 7%. The population has gone up by 6%. So, you can’t argue that that’s actually having an impact.  

And we’ve been doing hop and focusing on things around the person for the last 10, 15 years. So, when I look at the data and you think about, okay, so it seems to be that we’re stuck in a zone of diminishing returns. We keep doing the same thing over and over under a different label, expecting a different result. I tend to think that that’s the definition of insanity. We also need to look at what can we do with the person.

Sure. I would just. So, I agree, the last 15 years of data in the U.S. most countries have shown very little impact. Most cases, an increase in terms of fatalities, workplace fatalities. The other thing, though, a lot of organizations are doing is treating the same thing, the bee sting, in the same way as a fatality or potential Sifs and getting distracted from things that could have CIF impact. But I don’t think it detracts from this element that you need to look at the person as well as the context in the system.

Yeah, it’s kind of. I think it’s fascinating that we keep, you know, riding the worker out of the safety story. If you look at incidents outside of work, sure. The majority of prevention happens because the worker or the person did something different. 

Right.

So, one of the things that we asked when we do some training with people is we say to them, is a safety management system 100% effective, 100% of the time? Every single person goes, well, no. And I Say it’s okay. So, when the system fails, what keeps you safe? The workers intuitively know. They say, it’s me. And I said, that depends on whether you’re paying attention to what could hurt you at the time. Would you agree? So, the second question I ask is, so, what keeps you safe outside of work? And most of the time they go, well, it’s me. And I go. And that is a function of how good you are at paying attention. And given the number of accidental deaths that there are outside of work, what that tells you is that we’re not very good at paying attention, but we think we are. So really, when you analyze that for people, you go, okay. At work, your first line of defense is the safety system. Right. Your second line of defense is whether you were paying attention at the time that it failed outside of work. Your first and a lot of the times your only line of defense is how good you are at paying attention.

Right.

So, for me, it kind of makes sense. If the safety System is not 100% effective 100% of the time, what have you got when it fails? Because at the moment, what I see is all the effort is going into making sure that it never fails,

which is fair. And I think in some cases that’s impossible. I think it’s one thing in a controlled environment to be able to think you can control a lot of the failure points. But a lot of environments people work in are uncontrolled.

Yeah.

They change by the day.

Yeah. So, what I think happens is that people frame the problem in a way with a solution in mind. Right, sure. So, plenty of safety professionals have said to me, oh, no, look, the safety system should prevent all incidents. I go, really? I mean, what about, okay, I’ve investigated a number of incidents, ran into a pole that had been there for 50 years. Right. They tripped coming down the stairs. That have been there for 20 years. Right. So. And some of those have been quite serious in their consequences. You know, you fall down the stairs, and you hit your head hard enough,

and it’s quite charming, substantial.

So, for me, I tend to think that there’s this second sort of layer of protection that we could have that we’re not doing anything with. And the question that I always ask is, I mean, why is it that we are so allergic and want to continue to ignore this? It just doesn’t make a lot of sense. Now, are you familiar with the Lewin equation?

No, I’m not.  

Okay, so Lewin was in the 1930s. He was a behavioral psychologist or something. I don’t really know, but he basically wrote an equation that said behavior is a function of the person and the environment. You put the person first. Why did he put the person first is because you’ve got a lot more control over what we do with ourselves than what the world does around us. It seems to me like safety without really realizing or intentionally doing it. It’s trying to maneuver or to change the Lewin’s equation to behavior is only a function of the environment. Which is kind of bizarre to me because you can control a good deal of the environment at work, but the majority of people are not dying at work. They’re not killing themselves accidentally at work. And for me, if I was running a business and one of my employees had a car crash and couldn’t come to work, that is just as bad as whether they got injured at work. I’ve got to find somebody, I’ve got to train them, all that kind of stuff. So, I tend to sort of continue to try and push this argument that it’s great to do things around the worker and we should do as much as we can, but we also need to start looking at what causes inattention and what can people do in order to be more attentive.

Because when we do that, we can actually help prevent many incidents where the safety system wasn’t 100% effective.

And ultimately, behaviors matter, the person matters. If we are taking a view that only the environment matters, then that’s a very fatalistic view that eliminates personal choice decisions. And I think it’s a very dangerous path to go in. In general.

Look, I. I totally agree with you. I mean, this thing about, you know, only context drives behavior. Right? I mean, people. People go, is that true or. And I go, well, it’s true, but it’s also misleading because if you drop the only.

I think it’s okay.

Yeah, I think so. So, I think that when you talk about the environment and people talk about the environment drives behavior, what they talk about is the external environment. And the external environment does generate a situation, right? No doubt about that.

Yeah, no doubt.

But they never talk about the internal environment, what’s going on inside people’s heads. And that situation gets interpreted by the internal environment, which then generates a behavior that could be attentive or inattentive. And that’s what a person needs to do in order to avoid harm.

Sure.

So, what I talk to people about is I say, look, you can certainly control the external environment to an extent, but there’s many situations. There are many different triggers for people. Why would you not want to train people in understanding what causes inattention and how they can be more attentive? Because if you teach them to do that, then their behavior becomes more attentive and it’s much easier for them to avoid harm, which is the game that we’re trying to play.

Yeah. Can we touch a little bit on neuroscience and the link between neuroscience and behaviors? Recognizing that, we could probably talk for an hour on this and probably we can get you back onto another episode to go deeper on the neuroscience piece. But I think that’s a very interesting connection point.

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 [email protected]

So those four main brain modes conscious control, autopilot, impatience, and fatigue. Which one of those so we asked this question when we, when we train, which one of those do you think determines most of what you do? And most people will answer autopilot. Because most of the stuff that I do, I’ve done plenty of times before. And that’s true. But if you think about it, safety through social science or whatever it is, has tried to convince us that it’s conscious control for the last 30 or 40 years. And the assumption is that because safety is important, people should be able to keep it front of mind. Now, I wish the brain worked that way because it would make it a lot easier, but that’s just not how the brain works. So, what happens is that when we are given a situation, what the brain does is it says, it asks itself, what is this most like? Not what is it exactly like, what is this most like? And it decides within 20 milliseconds, right. 1 50th of a second, not even a blink of an eyelid, which of those four modes it’s going to assign.

Sure, if it’s new or different, it’s the conscious mind, because we need to analyze it, we need to sort of work through it in order to get a solution. But the problem with that one is that it’s really slow and it uses a lot more energy, like a hundred times more energy than habits. So the brain doesn’t want to use it unless it’s absolutely necessary. And it’s absolutely necessary where it deems it absolutely necessary. About 5% of the time. I mean, neuroscience measures this. It’s beyond debate in the neuroscience. Right. So new or different is the first option. Second option, is it familiar and do I feel safe doing it? If that’s the case, you do it in autopilot. But most of the autopilot involves an inattentive habit. So, if you think about things like, you know, texting while driving and you talk to people and you ask them, why do you do it? I say, well, because I’ve done it a thousand times before. Nothing bads ever happened. You know, it’s illegal. And they go, yeah. Do you know it increases risk significantly? And they go, yeah, but what your brain does is it assigns behavior today based on the outcomes of the same behavior previously.

So, if you’ve texted while driving, nothing bads ever happened, your brain is going, hey, nothing bad will ever happen. Well, nothing bad.

Will it feel safe?

Yeah, exactly. Right. So, when you are doing things that are familiar, which is most of what we do, it’s not really autopilot. It’s actually complacency. So, what we do is we define autopilot with inattentive habits as complacency.

Sure.

Okay. If you’re short of time or something’s getting in your way, then what tends to happen is that’s frustration, fatigue. Sorry, frustration, rushing, anger, that kind of stuff. What you tend to do is you tend to use a shortcut because you get very focused on the outcome.

Sure.

And the last one, fatigue, is when you. That happens when you sort of don’t have a lot of energy. And what you tend to do under fatigue is you tend to do a bad in the moment decision. So, for instance, if you’re tired, what your brain knows is that you need to go to sleep. And what it also knows is that you sleep much better in your own bed than everywhere else. So it says to you in the car, you know, get in your car and drive home. Right. You, if you were lucid, you consciously understand that that’s high risk. But because you’re tired and you’ve got mental blocks and you’re not making good decisions, that sort of tends to happen. So what the brain does is that it interprets a situation in 20 milliseconds is the size of brain mode. And with that brain mode, what you get is you get an operating mode. And the operating mode, you either think about it consciously or you use a habit. Most of the time inattentive, you either do a shortcut, or you end up making a bad decision in the moment. That you don’t know about.

Sure.

And 95% of behavior is driven by the subconscious brain modes, which are complacency, impatience, and fatigue. But. But this is the catch. It still feels like a conscious decision. And we understand why that is. And the reason why that is, is because the conscious mind is the last step. So, the last step the brain uses is conscious processing. And because as soon as we become aware, the behavior happens, it feels conscious. When we go into organizations and we talk to people, we give them a choice. We say, you can either manage safety the way it feels, or you can manage safety the way it is. Which one you want, because you can’t do both. And in my view, a lot of the safety that we’ve done over the last 30, 40 years, it’s about how it feels. It’s all outside in. There’s none of this, what’s going on inside the brain so that we could understand behavior from the inside out, which. Which is really what I’m interested in.

Right. And so fascinating. But what can we do about it? How do we wire that in so that people actually can make tangible differences in terms of how they show up? 

So, there’s a couple of obstacles. And the first obstacle is that most of the time when people are inattentive, so part of the training, we ask them, so what is the most common consequence when you’re doing things and you’re in an inattentive state?

Sure.

Most people will say there’s an incident. Right. And I go, well, not really. When you’re inattentive, nothing happens.

Sure.

Because if every time you were inattentive you had an incident, you would teach yourself how to pay attention. Right?

Correct.

Most of the time when. When you’re inattentive and nothing happens, what you do as a human being is you repeat whatever it is you’re doing, like texting while driving. So, what that means is that you’re continually embedding inattentive habits. So that’s what you end up with. You end up with a suite of inattentive habits. That sounds bad enough as it is, but it’s even worse because you’re not even. You don’t even know that that’s what you’re doing. So, it’s a huge blind spot for the person, it’s a huge blind spot for the supervisor, and it’s a huge blind spot for the leader. And what we know about human beings is that we do nothing about our blind spots because we don’t even know they’re there. That’s what we Call them. The first obstacle we need to overcome is to convince people that are a lot more inattentive than what they are. But the problem is that their brain doesn’t register inattention unless something new or different happens. Because unless something new or different happens, the conscious mind doesn’t come into play. Right. So, the first thing we get them to do is we get them to look for the causes of inattention.

So that’s the first practice technique. So, this is the whole thing about the neuroscience, is that there’s only one way to change, you know, your neural circuits, and that is through repetition.

Sure.

And what we know is that it’s far easy or far better to do five minutes a day for, then do an hour on Sundays. The rewiring happens when you’re asleep. So, when you’re asleep, what the brain does is that it detaches or it breaks up neural circuits that you’re not using and uses those, make connections with the ones that you’re actually using. So, if you’re talking about if you want to not do texting while driving. So initially what you consciously have to do is stop yourself from doing it.

Sure.

Right. So initially it’s a conscious thing. Right. But with enough repetition, it becomes automatic.

Sure.

And that’s the process that we need to take people through. So, we take people through. The first one is to convince them that they’re a lot more attentive than what they are. But. But, you know, whenever we do the training that we hear this a fair bit, they go, well, if I’m so inattentive, why is it that I’m still alive? Well, most of the time, inattention doesn’t lead to an incident. Maybe in a couple of. Couple of times in your life, you know, you could have been a meter or a second away from, you know, from fitting the gene pool. Have you got any of those examples? And most people have got more than a few. You. Right, right. So, I say to them, well, think about the poor guy that drove when he was fatigued and ended not surviving. Do you think that there was always a close call that made him aware before he had that fatal incident? Sure, he might have been. He may have been, but because he got away with it, he didn’t put any time and effort into changing. Right. So, we give people a technique to first and foremost convince themselves that they’re more inattentive than what they are.

Right.

Even if they improve, you know, even they acknowledge it, you know, 25 or 30% more, that tends to be enough for them to go, oh, maybe I need to do something about this.

Sure.

We give them a technique to deal with. Well, we go with the easier, the in the moment one first, which is impatience. So, things like rushing, frustration, you know, that kind of thing. We give them a technique to deal with fatigue because that’s kind of you can warning signs to fatigue. So, we teach them about what those early warning signs could be and which is the one for you. And then the third one, which is the more difficult one to deal with is complacency. Because when you’re doing stuff inattentive it just feels normal.

Yeah.

So, we tend to say to people, look, you can’t detect complacency. You have to look at what you do, decide what habits you may need to change and start practicing those new habits. And just to give you an idea of. And this is not; it’s not rocket science to identify which habits is that. Look before you move. Right. Look for the line of fire because if you see it, you can avoid it, but you don’t see it unless you look first. So, a lot of what hurts us we can actually see not everything, but a lot of what can hurt us we can actually see as long as we look for it. And most people are not very good at looking for it. If you have any doubts, Eric, go to the, the go to the, the nearest mall and look at how many people are looking at the mobile phones while they’re walking.

It’s crazy. And it’s getting worse. I’ve actually seen in some countries when I travel where the, they’re starting to change the lights for pedestrians at crosswalks to even be on the floor so that it, you can have a better chance of seeing it while you, you’re walking and texting. It’s scary.

So, it seems like we are, we kind of, we don’t want to help people. And this is what I think. I think that inattention is a modern-day problem that’s getting worse. But everybody wants to ignore it or they only want to deal with it just doing things around the person. And you can’t do everything around the person everywhere. So sooner or later it’s actually going to catch up with you. I think it’s far more efficient in the longer term to teach people what are the core causes of inattention and what can you do to be more attentive. I mean that’s what I do with my kids.

Right.

Nobody’s perfect. But you know, it’s far better to be a little bit more attentive than to be totally inattentive. And I don’t know about. About you, where you are, but I’m now starting to see people cross the road looking at the mobile phone.

Oh, it’s crazy. Yeah, it’s dangerous.

It’s not. I’ve never seen somebody miss a red light or miss a pedestrian crossing, but

I’ve had people walk into me because they were texting.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. So, when we were. When we were sort of. I mean, my kids now are in their 20s, but when they were little and to teach them how to cross the road, what we would say to them is that, look, I don’t care what the green man’s telling you to do. I don’t care what. I don’t know what you call them Lollipop ladies. You know, the ones that have a little sign, help people, Help. Help kids cross the road. At schools, we call them lollipop ladies. I don’t care what she’s telling you to do. I don’t care what your friends are telling you to do. Right. You look both ways before you go, and you continue to look both ways while you’re crossing until you get to the other side. Because I wanted to put them in a position where they could see it coming as early as possible because that gives them the most chance to get out of the way if somebody misses a red light or doesn’t, like, the lollipop lady tries to hit it or whatever. So, if you think about this as it applies not just at work, but also the people that you care about outside of work, I mean, it’s really worthwhile doing.

And a lot of the stuff that we do with people is we. Actually, the byline at the end of our presentations is take it home, bring it to work, take it home. Because they’re the most important people you are. Teach it to them and then bring it to work. And if they go home and they teach it, they’ve got to model it. And then when they come to work, they’re much better at the techniques that we try and teach them.

Your point around. Look before you move. I think I remember I had a guest earlier talking about the number of electrical contacts with wires above ground. Yeah, I can’t remember the exact number, but I think it was 20 times more per mile of cable versus the one that’s underground that you can’t see because there you are, you don’t see the hazard, you’re more concerned. But people walking in, touching, going up, a boom, hitting a wire is incredibly high. If it’s above ground where you should see it very similar to what you’re, you bring up.

Yeah. Look, if you can, you can look at a lot of behavior through this prism and all of a sudden start making sense.

Right. 

And really, I don’t know why safety is, does not want to understand what’s going on inside the worker’s head. I think it makes them feel good if you just sort of, if you, if you assume that you can just do things around the person and don’t get me wrong, I think that is the place to start. But once you start having good robust safety management systems and you’re doing a lot around the person, then there’s not a hell of a lot left that you have. You get into diminishing returns. What are you going to do next? Well, don’t do it faster, harder and for longer look at what can you do with the person because that is a resource. I mean your workers are your most valuable resource and yet we keep riding them out of the safety story. Doesn’t make any sense to me whatsoever.

Right. Fascinating story. I’d love to explore more on the neuroscience in a future episode. If somebody wants to get in touch with you, Christian, continue the conversation, learn more about some of the training programs you’ve talked about and about habitsafe. How can they get in touch with you?

Well, look, the easiest way is to go to our website, which is habitsafe.com au I live in Australia, so people sometimes forget the AU. That’s the easiest way. You can have a look at the kind of things that we do. And there’s also a contact page. So if you want to shoot me a message, then I can always sort of make contact and talk to them about what we do, how we do it and see if it’s for them. 

Perfect. Sounds good. Thank you so much for joining me, Christian. It’s been a very thought-provoking conversation.

Thank you for having me, Eric. I appreciate it.

Thank you for listening to The Safety Guru on C-suite Radio. Leave a legacy. Distinguish yourself from the past. Grow your success. Capture the hearts and minds of your teams. Elevate your safety. Like every successful athlete, top leaders continuously invest in their safety leadership with an expert coach to boost safety performance. Begin your journey at execsafetycoach.com. Come back in two weeks for the next episode with your host, Eric Michrowski. This podcast is powered by Propulo Consulting.

ABOUT THE GUEST

Cristian Sylvestre is a chemical engineer with a Master’s degree. He started his 25-year safety career in heavy processing, where he learned to think holistically about safety. His research shows that inattention is involved in 95% of incidents of all severities.

His work uses the discoveries of neuroscience to understand what really drives behaviour, how to minimise inattention, reduce errors, and prevent incidents everywhere, not just at work. He authored “Third Generation Safety: The Missing Piece” to help organisations understand the main causes of inattention and what can be done to help their people fail less.

For more information: https://www.habitsafe.com.au/

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How Psychology Influences Human Behavior in Safety with Dr. Jared Dempsey

Mar 19, 2026

How Psychology Influences Human Behavior in Safety with Dr. Jared Dempsey

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In this informative and enlightening episode, Dr. Jared Dempsey, a seasoned industrial psychologist, explores the powerful psychological factors that influence human behavior in safety-critical environments. Dr. Dempsey unpacks why understanding error-producing conditions is essential, takes a deeper look into human performance, and explains how cognitive and social psychology influence safety practices. He also highlights the need to move beyond blame, foster psychological safety, encourage open communication, and strengthen proactive risk management to improve safety performance. Don’t miss these exclusive insights into how psychology influences human behavior in safety and what leaders and organizations can do to create safer workplaces. Tune in!

READ THE EPISODE

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’s success story begins now.

Hi, and welcome to the Safety Guru. Today, I’m very excited to have with me Dr. Jared Dempsey. He’s an industrial You’re a psychologist. Worked in the behavior space for the last 30-some-old years. So, Jared, welcome to the show. Very excited to have you with me.

Good to be here. Thank you very much.

Why don’t you get us started with a little bit about how you got your passion for safety?

Well, my passion for safety probably came about in quite an inadvertent way. I never saw myself as wanting to work in safety. It’s where I’ve landed. I think that’s quite common for a lot of safety professionals. I’m not even sure I would call myself a safety professional, though. I’m an industrial psychologist who happens to work in safety, but it’s something I have a passion for. What happened was I had done my undergraduate degree in psychology. I then moved on to do an occupational psychology degree, and towards the end, I was looking for a topic for a thesis, for my master’s thesis. And I was looking at all the usual suspects, culture, leadership, teamwork. And we know that those impacts safely quite significantly, but I wasn’t looking at them in the self-safety realm. I was married to the same person I’ve been married to for the last 30 years. My wife was working as a nurse at the time, as a registered nurse, and she suggested that I looked at a journal that she’d brought home, especially because she thought I would find it interesting she’d brought home from work. I thought, Well, that’s nursing. I don’t see why nursing would attract or fascinate me at all.

If I wanted to look at nursing, I would have been a nurse. I ignored that request. I ignored it once, and then the following week, I ignored it again. Then the third, we got to about the third week, and I thought, Right, I just need to have a look at this, get the monkey off my back, so to speak. Just have a look to really terrible looking back, just pacify the person that I decided to spend my whole entire life with. Well, more for me because the journal article actually changed the course of my life and it really changed the way that I looked at things. To cut long story short, there was a story in the journal, and it was about a surgeon who was cutting into somebody’s brain to remove a tumor. They cut it into the cranium, and then they couldn’t see what they were looking for. They cut over a bit more and a bit more and a bit more. Then eventually, they realized that they were operating on the wrong hemisphere, the wrong side of the head. The reason for that is the X-ray or a scan, whatever visual that they had pinned up was put the wrong way around.

That is bizarre enough because in my mind at that time, medical error really wasn’t something that was widely spoken about. For me, I thought, A, just how could that happen? But B, the most dramatic thing, if you like, is that there was a nurse in the room who suspected that was the case, that the scan, the image was the wrong way around but didn’t feel comfortable enough to speak up. Maybe through youth and naivety, I just really couldn’t understand why if you saw a risk like that, why you wouldn’t actually raise your hand and say, hold on, this doesn’t look right. That set me off on a bit of a career looking, initially, we call it psychological safety now. We refer it to as speaking up. It wasn’t at the time necessarily even occupational safety. It was more patient safety. But then some years later, it was this… I managed to really get into occupational safety, and it was looking at the same type of things as, why don’t people speak? Why don’t they take action? What’s the psychology behind people actually doing what you would, in a perfect world, you would expect them to do?

That was one of the key experiences that took me into safety and really spurred me on and developed my passion is really just trying to understand what is and what should never be.

That’s a good segue into How is it that things go wrong? What are some of the error-producing conditions that cause things to go wrong?

Well, I think that if we look at how things go wrong, then we might be talking more about cognition. But if we’re talking about why things go wrong, then what we understand now, when we start looking at human performance, is that people get things wrong a lot of the time, quite simply because of the situations in which they find themselves. If we’re talking about conditions, is it light? Is it dark? Is there a glare? Do they feel under pressure? Is the quality of the work they need to do? Is it high? Are they under time pressures? Do they need to get something done in a relatively short amount of time? Are the instructions, the written instructions that they have, are fit for purpose? Is the verbal communication during a task? They talk about the dirty dozen. I would say it’s probably about depending on how you slice it and dice it, there’s probably around 10 core factors that when we look back at incidents, we find them time and time again. Obviously, what you want to do is you want to be thinking about these environmental precursors, precursors to incidents before you actually do a job, and you want to be talking about them.

But what we’ve done for a long time is we’ve focused on traditional hazards. You think about things like gravity, chemical, electrical, radiation. We prime people to think in those areas, and then we actually don’t get them to think the human factors and the conditions that actually compromise a cognitive function, which is a fancy way of saying the way that our brain is thinking at a particular time, how we process an information. So, error-producing conditions, they’ve been around for a while. In the UK, we call them performance influencing factors. Basically, they might go by error traps. But we I still find there’s a lot of work to be done bridging that gap of actually get people to understand them, use them, and actually talk about them prior to starting work.

Is it mostly about the knowledge and how you look at… You recognize the conditions that may be impacting you? You talked about production pressure as an example, and you create awareness of it and talk about it to then think about how I mitigate, or is there more that can be done on that front?

It really depends. If it’s a bit like a work instruction or procedure, written instructions, then that can be flagged by a work team, or it should be caught ahead of time. There’s that type of things that structurally you can take care of. But there are other things that actually they’re pretty dynamic, and you really only going to pick them up as part of your dynamic risk assessment. So, we talk about worker readiness. Are you Are you stressed? Are you fatigued? You’re not going to necessarily know that with your team until the actual day of doing a task. But I think you’re absolutely right there. It is about being empowered to identify the less-than-ideal conditions. Because one of the struggles that we have with human factors is human factors in human error. Are almost treated interchangeably synonymously because they’re so closely related. But I can always guarantee if I go on to the BBC news and I see, if there’s been a massive mistake that’s basically a major harm to plant or somebody’s been hurt, as such it has become newsworthy, then you’ll see the words human error. The way that those words human error are left is somebody did something wrong.

Actually, you might reasonably expect that person to have got it right, and it becomes a blame exercise, and organizations are very good at that. It’s all fine and well saying we’ve got these error-producing conditions. But if the organization doesn’t actually take ownership and really encourage for people to say, Hey, we’re fatigued because we did a double shift earlier on the week, or whatever it is, unless they feel empowered and safe to actually point them out, then it’s not really going to make any difference, and they’re not going to point them out. I guess it’s like most things. When we talk about behaviors and safety, you can have programs and you can have things written down, but ultimately, everybody needs to buy in and you’re going organization from the top down to make sure that, yeah, A, you identified, and B, we’re going to support you and do something about that. We’re going to get those conditions changed.

I think the other part, I’d say, is sometimes the organization causes these factors. The shift schedule, as an example, is something the organization typically either accepts or creates that could induce the fatigue, or if there’s a quick turnaround, these are things that the organization can also That same as production pressure on every construction site. There tends to be a countdown clock that tells you how many days until this goes live and you need to finish. That creates pressure, but some of it could also be internalized.

Yeah, I mean, I would suggest that 98% of the system factors and organizational factors, even when it comes down to things like the socio-technical, but the social side of things and whether you’ve got a good culture. Again, that’s down to the organization. If there isn’t a good culture, if people don’t have psychological safety, then the company or the organization itself is errant, and it really isn’t doing all that it should and it needs to do. Sure. You might have people who for their own reason, are negligent, careless. But on the whole, my belief is, and I think if you work in this space and if you are a safety coach or a consultant, then you really should have the belief that most people are good people trying to do a good job.

Nobody chooses to get injured in the morning, goes to work thinking, I’m going to get injured. Unless you’re atrocious at hiring, you should not have a lot of bad actors in your organization either.

Well, that’s it. Sometimes we’ve got a people problem. Yeah, you’ve got a people hiring problem, perhaps. Even we’ve got a leadership problem. But again, the thing about trying to understand human factors is just trying to take it back. I’m saying human factors isn’t about your mess-ups, it’s about what messes you up. Again, let’s go back and let’s look at the conditions. There’s someone, a professor here in Aberdeen called Rhona Flynn, and I don’t want to misquote her. However, I think what Rhona had said was human factors It’s simply defined as what gets in the way of you doing a good job. When we think of it like that, we could demystify it, take away a lot of the mystery, because I can always guarantee You get into a room of people and you say, okay, someone give me a definition of human factors. A lot of times people look at you blank because it’s so amorphous, it’s so big, it’s everything they think in human nature and in the world, when in but really, it’s those things that time and time again catches out and make the job difficult to do.

You talked about human factors. I’d like to touch a little bit on human performance and matching people where they are. I’d love to get a bit of you on that.

Yeah, I think we have to change our expectations that our expectations need to meet people where they are as opposed to people need to meet our expectations. That there’s somewhere in the middle there is understanding as human beings, how we function and what we can realistically do. I guess my point is there’s three main cognitions that time and time again, if situations aren’t ideal. If we are under pressure, if we are fatigued, if we maybe have some stress, if the communication in the job isn’t good, then we end up with situations when our body lets us down, our attention lets us down, or our decision-making lets us down. That’s going to be nine times out of 10. That’s what’s going to happen. There’s going to be an environmental circumstance, there’s going to be a cognitive failure. If we think about our decision making, it’s a lack of understanding, our attention, it’s a lack of noticing something needs to be done, or we forget to do something. When you ask people, we know this almost intuitively, when you ask people, okay, is anybody’s memory perfect? Everybody says no. Is anybody’s attention limitless? Again, everybody says no.

Does everybody make great decisions time after time after time? And everyone says no. So, we know that these are limited, but sometimes in work situations, we say, Well, you’re a professional. You shouldn’t make mistakes. Well, I think you can see.

We’re human.

Yeah, the discombobulation between there. There’s no congruence with those two thoughts. We do talk about Traditionally, we prime people to look at things like radiation, gravity, so on and so forth, slip, trip, slip.

Energy wheel and so forth. Yeah.

But I think it’s really useful to It’s like saying the left hand doesn’t need the right-hand if you don’t actually engage in that as well. But I think it’s really useful to say things like, okay, what is it about this job can be difficult? What’s tricky? What’s going to cause you to struggle? What’s awkward? Because what you actually do then is you open people’s minds, because when you prime someone with pre-existing risks, that’s all that they can see. Cognitively, what you’ve done is you’ve almost got them to engage in some tunneling. You’ve cut off the vision. But when you actually get them to step back and say, okay, what is it that is difficult about this job? What’s it going to cause us to struggle? Then the They start talking about things that they’ve not thought about before that are going to get in the way of the job. It’s at that point where the job starts to get away from them.

Sure.

It’s not necessarily a safety issue, but what we find is when you start to lose control, not only is it a production issue, but it also then becomes a safety issue. If you’re not in control of a job, it’s not a safe job. I am a great fan of just winding it up and asking people, what is it that’s different? What is it that might be a bit dodgy about this? What is it we’re putting up with? If you go back to even the three cognitions of memory, attention and decision-making, let’s go back and ask, okay, what is it we absolutely need to remember that could be easily forgot?

Sure.

Okay, what is it we need to pay attention to that could easily go and notice?

Enjoying attention. Right.

It’s a different way of looking at things that in my experience, it pays dividends. People who are involved in the human performance movement, if you like, that’s the direction of travel. Sure.

Excellent. If we talk about accountability, I think one of the things you talk about as well as the word coaching tends to be overused. I’d love to hear more in terms of this. How do we drive accountability in the right way?

Well, I think accountability, again, we talk about accountability, but it’s usually for the person at the sharp end as opposed to the accountability of the people making the decisions and designing the environment further up. When things do go wrong, I think we need to basically hold up the mirror and They say, okay, well, okay, what situation did we place this person in? Is there something that’s routine? And then judge them with the same yardstick. Now, clearly, if somebody isn’t doing as they need to do as the standards require. But we talk about the substitution check test, and that person went off and then Basically, for the want of a bit of a word, they rebelled, but nobody else would. There’s a case for discipline there. But what we do know, if we just try and use that, the safety stick, we’ll call it, and hold people to account continually because we think that consequence is the only way to manage behaviors, not understanding that actually, if we apply what we could call negative consequences, that we’re going to drive people’s behaviors underground, we’re going to have a lack of transparency. Just one point on terminology.

I’ve heard the word coaching used in various ways. If I’m going to discipline someone, I’m going to give them some coaching. Not the same concept, right? No, absolutely not. The other The thing is, well, safety professionals take it away. You give them a different title. They’re no longer a safety officer or safety manager. We’re going to call you a safety coach. Then all of a sudden, they’re supposed to be coaches with coaching skills. Again, you’ve taken something and we dilute the meaning. Then that’s not to say that we can’t have people who are worker safety officers who can be great safety coaches. We just have to give them the support so they’re able to- And skills. Yes, absolutely. You need to give them the skills, and that needs to be supported by the organization of this is part of their role. Some things are going to be about compliance and about assured us. But equally, there’s going to be other times when the safety coaches are going to call them out, they’re going to help you with communication skills, they’re going to give you a reflection on how you’re showing up as a leader and a supervisor.

That can be tough if you’ve got people who’ve been in more of a traditional role for a long time, not just for them to do, but to change the perceptions of the people that they need to coach. Because as I’m sure you’re aware, when we are coaching, one of the things we’ll say is, Would you like some feedback? Would you like me to give you don’t jump in. If you go in as a coach, that’s your sole role, as I would term a safety leadership coach, then the people that you’re going to work with, they’re more likely to accept you because that’s your core role and that’s how they see you. It adheres to their perspective and their expectations.

Because coaching really should be about how do I develop somebody, how do I create awareness sometimes on certain factors that may be influencing the work, the quality of the work. It should really be just like a coach in a sports team that’s helping you perform at a higher level, not this disciplinary measure.

Yeah, absolutely.

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, free energy 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.

Two topics I know we talked about before when we first connected is around cognitive and social psychology and how it impacts safety in the organization. On the cognitive side, in terms of how we process information, I know when we first talked, you talked about three different air types. I’d love to explore a little bit this area.

Yes, so it’s just really going back to memory, attention, attention and decision-making. Because if your memory is compromised, then you may be going to miss out an essential check, you’re going to miss out a part of a job. It may be going to misremember how to do a task. If you misremember how to do it, you’re going to get it wrong. Attention is a case of I don’t notice something. And if you don’t notice something, you might not be able to react. Also, you might think that if you have a valve that needs to be shut, and sometimes then that might still be open because you’ve missed it. You haven’t noticed that you haven’t done it. So sometimes the memory and the attention, they come close together. And decision making, I think what you’ve got a decision making a lot of the time, it’s down to the information you have. It’s almost like garbage in, garbage out. If you’ve not got good information, acting on good information, then you’re mistaken about the situation. And Any solutions you come up with, any actions you take, are not going to be right for the situation.

Sure.

For me, the two massive areas for information are verbal communication before and during a job and the quality of your written information. In addition to that, I also like to talk about biases because we all carry biases. In fact, we say blind spot bias. The biggest bias is believing you don’t have any biases. Again, a lot of my work is in energy. If we look out with energy and we look to aviation, and if you do work in a human factor space, then we revert it, revert aviation as the pioneers of human factors and really getting lots and lots right. But you will, when you do your crew resource management essential training, which they used to call cockpit Resource Management, which is how you operate in the cockpit. But then within time, they realized, actually, it’s about how you… A lot of it’s about how you communicate with the crew members. They changed the terminology to crew resource management. But when you do your mandatory training, you will be taught about biases. For example, you’re going to be taught about what we would call plan continuation bias, which is the impulse, the tendency of once you start a job, you just don’t to stop, even if those conditions become less and less ideal.

I think we’ve all been there. You’ve maybe been out there cutting the hedge, and it starts to get dark, and you just want to get the job done. It’s a very normal thing. Obviously, for pilots, they’re told, if your approach is poor, just circle around, come back again, and then land. Don’t try and land it for the one of a better term, you’re a little bit wobbly. They’ll teach that in aviation. I think just in general, in safety, we could do a better job of teaching people about what I would call the continuation bias. I think optimism bias is probably the biggest one we all face. I met someone a few years ago, and he said something that really stuck with me. He said, when you go onto an asset, when you go into a plant, perhaps the most dangerous thing on that plant is the sentiment, perhaps I should know this, because people don’t actually… If they think that they should know it, they don’t want to look foolish by leaving themselves open and saying anything. If I was to counter that, I would say, probably the most dangerous thing is the sentiment of it will be okay.

When I hear those words, even myself, then to me, that’s a trigger. There’s something saying, actually, you need to step back and reappraise the risk. For me, optimism bias is a huge one. As you said, no one actually thinks they’re going to get up in the morning, go to work and get hurt. As human beings, if we’re healthy, actually, we are optimistic. We do have this almost idealized picture of the That’s why we make New Year’s resolutions that we don’t keep. We join gyms. We go three times, and it takes us two years to actually cancel the gym membership. We get credit cards with Teaser 8 because we think we’ll pay it off in in the months, and then it moves on to the higher rate. Organizations know this. They know that as human beings, we’re very optimistic, which is generally a good thing, but just not so much in the safety space. Sure. Just one more thing on the optimism is we have to teach biases and train them as the most natural things in the world that usually have some healthy purpose, but it can’t. Applied in the wrong setting, it can be detrimental.

For example, plan continuation bias, the drive to keep going That can be a great thing, but it’s just not going to be a great thing if it’s going to get you permanently disabled or you’re involved in a fatality. But if you think about sports, if you think about Pushing yourself, it’s good. It’s what we do as human beings. It’s how we thrive. But I guess language is important for me. I hear people banding around the word complacency, and I’m just never a fan. I think if we’re going to talk about complacency, we need to be very, very clear with people that what we mean is an underestimation of risk. We use it in the strictest sense of the meaning, because if you point fingers at people and say to them, you’re complacent, what are you doing?

That doesn’t go well.

No, it doesn’t go down well. It’s like we said, you’re negligent You’re careless. None of those things are great. If we want to get people brought in, bought into safety, we want to bring them on side, and we want to get them to act Safety is a value, and there to be that trust between supervisors, managers, and workers. Walking around using words like complacent, we’re on a hide into nothing. It’s not going to help our cause at all.

No. We’ve talked about cognitive psychology in terms of how we process information. Love to talk about social psychology. Essentially, how we interact with each other in a group setting, how that also impacts safety.

We’re basically social creatures. We’re tribal creatures, where we have a tendency herd mentality, and that can be good because we can form. If you can get a mass or a body of people doing the right things, then the joiners, people will fall into that. If people aren’t doing the right things, then it can be negative because you don’t have that critical mass where people join in the group or part of the group. Nobody really wants to put their head above the parapet and be the jobs were Earth or the clean guy. But what really interests me about social psychology is if we look at the helping literature, if we look at the literature of why people get involved and why people help each other, then I think that we can learn a lot and why people do or don’t. If we look at the helping literature, again, it’s slightly removed from safety in some terms, but if you think about a culture of care, not a culture of compliance, but a culture of care, that’s really people trying to help each other and looking out for each other. If you go back to what I would consider is in some ways the best and easiest way of looking at the safety culture, which is independence, dependence, and interdependence, is you want to get to a stage where people are interdependent and helping each other.

If we look at the literature and the studies of bystander apathy and conformity and compliance, then we started to realize, really, it drives home the message that we are creatures. We have a herd mentality.

That was a great example in terms of conformity. Love to explore one in terms of more around the herd mentality.

Yeah, I think there’s probably a great example of that. It’s not necessarily an experiment. But Gerry Harvey was an organizational specialist many years ago, and he tells of a story called the Abilene Paradox, whereby he was in Texas. He was visiting his mother and father-in-law, and they were sitting on the porch on what was a hot but pleasant Sunday afternoon when his father-in-law said, I heard there’s a new restaurant opened in the other town. Why don’t we get in the car and go and get a meal? Everybody said, Yeah, that sounds like a great idea. This was in the days before air conditioning was as good as it is now. They went over and They had a meal. The food was barely palatable. The car journey was horrific. It was a 100-mile round trip. They came home and someone said, sitting on the porch, the mother-in-law, the father-in-law, Gerry and his wife, and someone said, Yeah, well, that was great, wasn’t it? Then someone said, I didn’t think much of the food, and then everybody just let loose. It actually turned out that no one wanted to go in the first place. You end up in a situation, and it’s just how human beings are.

You end up in a situation where you have the worst possible outcome because no one feels comfortable enough to actually say what they really feel. People think that they’re the only one who feels like this, or they suspect they’re the only one who feels like this. The fancy names for it, like pluralistic ignorance, and there have been many experience done on it. The bigger the group, the more likely, if you only got two or three people, it is more likely that someone’s going to say, I’m not comfortable with this job. I don’t think this is safe. But when you’ve got a group of six or seven, it It’s far less likely someone’s going to speak up. We know about that from all the conformity studies. We really are herd creatures. If we’re going to get to a place where people will speak up and they will share their opinions and they will point out risks. We have to be very pointed and almost religiously saying, okay, what is it we see? Does anybody have any concerns, questions or comments before we get started? What’s our comfort level with this job? That should be before every job.

We can’t take it for granted. I’ve heard many times people say, my people know that they can.

Actually, more often More often than not, it’s the leaders that say to me, it’s their people don’t know because they really do lack that self-awareness. Yeah, that makes sense. Excellent. Thank you for sharing that.

I think I said earlier on, when I started out, I looked at nurses, nurses speaking up behavior. That’s why I actually ended up examining four for my PhD. But there’s a classic study, I don’t know if you’ve heard of it, it’s called the ASTRO-10 Study. In the study, and I remember back, psychology used to be quite… It didn’t have quite the same ethics as it has now. I’m not sure this would get past the Ethics Committee. But what happened is they set up nurses on a ward. You’d have a nurse going on to a ward, and these nurses, individually, they weren’t all together. The nurse would receive a call from a doctor, but the doctor was actually just one of the researchers that was, if you want social experiment, playing a trick, call it what you will. He would say, hi, this is Dr. Jones. I want you to go down to see patient Smith in bed number 9, and I want you to give him 20 milligrams of astra10. Now, I’m telling this, I’m paraphrasing. I want you to give him 20 milligrams of Astra fen. The nurses had all recently been given training on this new drug called Astra fen.

What they didn’t know was a placebo. They were sugar pills. There was nothing. It very clearly said on the pill bottle that the maximum dose was 10 milligrams. It actually might be five milligrams. My memory escapes me. But what happened was that nearly every nurse that was placed in that situation gave the medicine to the patient. And what’s really interesting, though, is thereafter, when you take a control group of nurses and you talk about the experiment and you say, what would you do? Every single nurse said, there’s no way I would have given the patient that drug. We end up doing things because we’re told to and because that’s how we see ourselves in these social situations. When you understand that, you understand the influence of a supervisor or manager saying, get this done. I’ll get this done. I’ll get this done, but be safe, but I need it done in this time and sending mixed messages. It’s like, okay, so what would you really want? What we’re probably going to get is they are going to do what they’ve been told to do, and that safety request becomes an optional, an additional extra.

Right. So covered a lot of ground today from just the social psychology and how we operate in more of a herd mentality, which can be, as you said, good or bad. And the cognitive psychology in terms of some of the biases that we have, particularly with other topics, but even just how we can miss information or how biases can impact our choices. We touched on human performance, but also the air-producing conditions. A lot of ground we’ve covered. If somebody wants to get in touch with you, Jared, what’s the best way to do that?

Just reach out on my website, which is www.cognivate.com.

Excellent. Thank you so much for joining me today, Jared.

Eric, it’s been a pleasure. Anytime. Thank you very much.

Thank you.

Thank you for listening to The Safety Guru on C-suite Radio. Leave a legacy. Distinguish yourself from the past. Grow your success. Capture the hearts and minds of your teams. Elevate your safety. Like every successful athlete, top leaders continuously invest in their safety leadership with an expert coach to boost safety performance. Begin your journey at execsafetycoach.com. Come back in two weeks for the next episode with your host, Eric Michrowski. This podcast is powered by Propulo Consulting.

ABOUT THE GUEST

Dr. Jared Dempsey is an industrial psychologist who believes safety shouldn’t be boring — and it certainly shouldn’t live in spreadsheets and policy binders. Working across energy and construction, he focuses on how work really happens in messy, imperfect, real-world conditions — not sanitised versions imagined far from site.

He pushes back on blaming workers and focuses on the conditions that actually drive performance. Because when you understand psychology, safety stops being dry and compliance-driven and starts making sense — it becomes human, practical, and something people actually connect with.
For more information – Americas: www.excel-erate.org or UK, Europe & Rest of World: www.kognivate.com

 

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From Crisis to Care: Strengthening Mental Health in the Workplace with Jessi Beyer

Mar 5, 2026

From Crisis to Care: Strengthening Mental Health in the Workplace with Jessi Beyer

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ABOUT THE EPISODE

Join us for a powerful episode exploring mental health in the workplace and practical support strategies with crisis mental health expert Jessi Beyer. In this compelling conversation, Jessi unpacks the realities of mental health challenges, particularly in high-risk and safety-critical environments. Backed by eye-opening statistics and real-world stories, she explains how these challenges directly impact performance, culture, and overall workplace safety. Jessi emphasizes the importance of building a true culture of care grounded in trust, psychological safety, and meaningful peer support. She also introduces her impactful L.I.F.E. framework for suicide prevention, offering clear, practical guidance to help leaders and teams take meaningful steps toward prevention. If you are ready to move your workplace from crisis response to proactive care, this episode delivers practical strategies to strengthen mental health and ensure every team member feels seen, supported, and valued. Tune in. This is a conversation that truly matters!

READ THE EPISODE

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 very excited to have with me Jessi Beyer. She’s a crisis mental health professional. Jessi, welcome to the show. Very excited to have you with me today.

Thank you so much for having me. I’m excited to be here as well.

Let’s get started with how you got started in this space and really your passion, your motivation around it. Then we’ll get into why it’s so important.

Absolutely. So, my story started when I was 16, and my boyfriend at the time attempted suicide. He had texted me. He said, Hey, tonight’s the night. Can you come over and say goodbye? And I was like, well, I can come over and bring 911 with me. I can definitely do that. And so, I ended up calling law enforcement, calling 911. Law enforcement showed up, and he was safe. He was taken to the hospital. That story ends well. But the reason I bring this up is because there was a social worker that showed up with law enforcement. So, once they had made sure scene was safe and everything. She came in, she spoke to him for a little bit, and she handed me her card. And she told me, she’s like, hey, if you ever need anything, if you have a hard night, you can always give me a call. Understandably, that night was incredibly difficult for me. I mean, that was a teenager trying to handle life and death in a very real, very emergent way. And her card and her presence was just this little bright spot in the night for me. I did what any good 16-year-old does.

I took her business card, and I promptly I put it in the top bathroom drawer of my bathroom, and I never looked at it again. But what that card did and what that moment did was it planted this seed for me of, that was cool. I went to school, I studied psychology, undergrad, grad school. I found myself really drawn to the trauma and crisis side of the world as opposed to the private practice side of the world. I’ve always been that way. I was an EMT for a little bit. I worked in search and rescue for a little bit. I’ve always been drawn to more of those short-term interventions, a little bit of adrenaline, a little bit of crisis. That’s where I thrive. And as I was graduating grad school, I got this call from an organization that was like, hey, we’re standing up an infield crisis intervention program, and we want you to be our first, our first clinician. And I was like, oh, my gosh, I’d love to, because it was a thought in the back of my head of like, wow, wouldn’t it be cool if I could, blah, blah, blah?

But I didn’t really think it existed. And so, when they called me, I was like, I would love to. And I just had this full circle moment back to that business card in my bathroom drawer of, wow, this is funny how life turns out this way. So that’s my story. I’ve been working in this program for the past almost three years, which is really exciting to see it grow over those past couple of years. And it all started with a really, really, really terrible night in high school and a co-responder’s business card.

Wow, what a powerful story in terms of how you got started in the connection in life. We’re mostly talking to safety executives, leaders. This is a topic that’s sometimes not talked enough in the safety space. Huge levels of connections with safety. Sometimes mental health is passed on to a responsibility that belongs to HR versus safety, has to handle the safety events. Let’s start with a little bit about the stats. Why is it so important for organizations to be aware of mental health, suicide prevention, all those themes?

Mental health is something in the workplace that I think a lot of people, especially in the safety liability risk management side of things, they think it happens over there. It’s something that happens in homes, in parking lots, on sidewalks, but not in the workplace. Because when you’re working, you’re working, and you’re here to work, and you’re here to be professional, and you’re here to do all those things.

Wouldn’t that be simple? 

Wouldn’t that be so nice? I think if we actually sat down with ourselves, we would recognize that that’s not the case. It doesn’t quite work that cleanly. But a lot of people are like, well, I can focus on physical risk. I can make sure there’s no hazardous chemicals spilled everywhere. I can make sure that there’s barriers, so people don’t fall off of things. You can probably tell that I’m not a physical safety expert because I don’t know what those things look like. But people talk about those things. But what they don’t recognize is that how someone is in their own head is how they also show up at work. So, a few stats to put to this. Approximately 4% of Americans consider suicide annually. And this is a It’s an actual serious consideration, not just a fleeting thought, intrusive thought type of thing. Which means that if you’re running an organization of 100 people, you’ve had four folks that came close to dying in the last year. If you’re running an organization of a thousand people, you’ve had 40. That’s a lot of humans that are really, really struggling. When someone is having a mental health concern to the level of thinking, Maybe I should die, that’s going to affect how they show up in the workplace.

Another stat that is somewhat interesting related to this is that in the US, the cost of mental illness in the workplace to employers is over 500 billion per year. This is in absenteeism, this is in loss of productivity, this is in terms of health care cost, and this is in terms of lost life potential from premature death because of suicide or depression. I bring these stats up not to say that, oh, my gosh, we only care about it because it costs us money, but to show that this is not some little, tiny thing that a few people across the country struggle with. This is something that everyday humans, every day, bring into the workplace. And that’s why it’s so important that safety managers, risk management liability, understand that because their people are struggling. I was talking to a potential client one time, and I just cold-pitched him on LinkedIn like we do. And he responded, and he’s like, well, we don’t have any mental health concerns in our organization. And I was like, okay, you have 500 people. I didn’t say this. I did not this. This was just in my head. I was like, you have 500 people on your team.

Your people are probably struggling more than you know if you’re the type of leader that thinks that they’re not struggling at all in a team of 500 people. So, food for thought for folks that are running organizations of any size, but especially organizations where those 4% statistics are going to stack up into meaningful numbers of humans. It means it’s a challenge in your workplace, even if you don’t think it is.

One thing I would add as well is if you think about what you just You mentioned the 4% considers suicide every year, a lot of safety requires a team member to have focus on task, to have attention on the work they’re doing, to be looking at risks, mitigating those risks in the work environment. If you’re not well, you’re not there in the moment present assessing all these pieces, your awareness of the risk in front of you may dramatically change.

Absolutely. It absolutely could. And that’s something where we start to see not necessarily deaths in the workplace, but accidents in the workplace that could have been prevented. If we think about this at a super, super basic level, depression as a mental illness slows everything down. Anxiety as a mental illness speeds everything up. So, if you think of a time in your life where you’ve been super anxious about something, maybe not to a clinical level, but even just in-laws are coming over, right? And you’re like, oh, my God, we got to clean the house. We got to do this. We got to do that. All these things are going on. You get a little bit You’re physically shaking a little bit, and maybe you spin around in the kitchen too quickly and knock a cup off the counter. This is a very, very mundane example, but now extrapolate that to a high-risk workplace. You spin around and knock a chemical off the counter because you’re anxious and you’re panicked about this and you’re thinking about this, and maybe it does rise to a clinical level. That’s not good from a physical safety and risk management perspective.

Conversely, on the depression side of things, everything’s slower. It’s harder to do things, to have the motivation to do things. And so now we’re moving through the workplace in a fog. We’re thinking that we’re not connecting with our coworkers. We’re not having those… I’m putting unnecessary in quotes because it’s like, what conversations can I take off my plate to reduce mental load? But we’re not having those conversations with colleagues about, hey, did you do this? Did you check this? Let me double check this. Again, that’s where we start to see these accidents in the workplace. I’m, of course, not saying that every accident in the workplace is caused by mental illness. That’s way too much of a stretch. But those types of concerns of mental health challenges of depression, anxiety, suicidal ideation, those can have very real translations into increased accidents in the workplace.

Are there some sectors that introduce more risks? Because one of the things that I’ve historically heard is a lot of the fly-in/fly-out type of operation where there isn’t necessarily stability in the home environment because you’re gone for potentially a week or two weeks at a time, more at risk. Certain types of professions, like construction where you could be on the road for extensive periods of time, also increase the risk? Are there some other industries like that that would have maybe a higher risk around suicide or mental health challenges?

Absolutely. This is such a good question. And to answer this fully, I’m going to zoom out and look at this from a societal lens. So, yes, certain professions are definitely at a higher risk. Broadly speaking, your high trauma careers, so your military first responder types, those are going to have higher rates of mental health challenges, specifically suicide, as well as a lot of your more blue-collar type professions. So, construction is consistently at the top of that list of professions that have high risk of suicidal ideation and suicide attempts and suicide deaths, everything on that spectrum, as well as a lot of your food type industries, your agriculture, your forestry. A lot of those blue collar, traditionally lower wage professions are the ones that have high suicide rates. On the other end of that spectrum, your finance, your business, things like that, they have generally a bit lower suicide rates. And when I’m referencing higher and lower, it’s in reference to the national average. Sure, exactly. So, the national average is measured as per 100,000 people, higher or lower than that. It’s what we’re talking about here. And there’s some different professions that are weighted by genders.

So, it’s like, male of this profession has a higher suicide rate than female of the… Things like that. But in general, those are the trends. And if we zoom out and look at why, you started hinting that. But in order to have a full happy, healthy life, in order to be a fully healthy human, we look at not just what is your physical health or even what is your mental health, but we look at social determinants of health. We look at your social relationships. We look at your financial stability. We look at your ability to keep a roof over your head. We look at all of these different things. And it’s interesting because I took a class recently on suicide forensic autopsies, which is basically the practice of if someone passes away, likely suicide, doing an investigation into the few months before their death to learn about what is contributed to that death and how organizations or families or societies can change things to prevent similar deaths in the future. Really, really interesting. But we spent six hours talking about all the different risk factors for suicide. And if I had to sum it up in one sentence, the one sentence would be, the worse your life is, the more likely you are to consider suicide.

And so, in a lot of these professions, we see things Exactly like you were talking about. Inconsistent social relationships because you’re constantly changing crews, changing jobs, moving here, moving there. We see some financial instability. You have periods of I’m working a ton. There’s a ton of construction. Oh, God, I can’t find a job. Now I’m on unemployment. Now I’m worried about how I’m going to pay my bills. I’m getting food from the local organizations that are giving it away instead of being able to buy it. Maybe I can’t pay my rent. Maybe I start to cope with those things by using substances more than I should. It’s all connected with how these things turn into a downward spiral. And then if you look at someone’s life and you see homelessness and you see addiction and you see maybe strained relationships in the marriage because they’re stressed about work, all of these things compile into what could be a suicide attempt or self-alternation or depression or anxiety or all these different things. And so, it’s more than just saying, Oh, shame on you. You work construction. It automatically means you have a higher likelihood of dying by suicide.

But it actually means, hey, these professions come with certain social and societal risks, and all of those things together correlate into higher suicide risks. And the last thing I’ll say is that for those of you that are listening that work in safety, recognize that the professions that I just named are often the ones with robust internal safety departments because of the physical risks as well.

Correct. That’s exactly where I was going to go.

Yeah, exactly. Take it away, Eric. But yeah, that was the point I wanted to make there.

No, I think it’s a great observation because the industries you mentioned are the industries that typically have higher physical risk. It’s not the accountant; it’s not the lawyers that typically are going to have a serious injury. It can obviously happen. But those are the industries that have more robust safety cultures, generally more risk awareness. But not necessarily addressing the full spectrum of the mental health element.

Yeah, absolutely. I think that that’s an opportunity for change. Risk is a whole human. Social determinants of health, it’s a whole human. How do you take care of your whole people. It’s not just the physical risk. It’s not just, hey, let’s make sure someone doesn’t accidentally chainsaw their leg off. But it’s also, how do we make sure that they are taken care of on the inside as well? Cool.

Maybe let’s talk about some of the existing interventions that we see in many organizations. Let’s look at some of the challenges or shortfalls to be aware of with them.

Absolutely. I want to start by saying that any organization that is doing anything at all to address employee mental health deserves a round of applause. This is by no means a critique on, well, shame on you, you’re not doing enough. This is just an evaluation of how some of these things work. One of the most common ones is what’s called an EAP, so an Employee Assistance Program. And it is, broadly speaking, there’s different formats, but it is a hotline or a website that you can access that provides short term resources for different things. So, you can get a couple financial counseling sessions. You can get a couple mental health therapy sessions. They can refer you to some other resources Some EAPs will have monthly trainings. We recently had one on buying your first home, so how to navigate that whole process. So, it’s like a miniature two one, a miniature location where people can go and get resources for things that they’re struggling with. But the challenge with EAPs is, well, actually a couple of different things. But one, their employer provided, and so confidentiality is a concern. EAPs are in theory confidential. They should not be telling your employer that, oh, they took financial counseling from us, or, oh, they took mental health counseling from us.

But there’s always that concern, especially in organizations or professions where there’s a culture of, I’m strong, I don’t need it, or maybe even the very real risk of, if my supervisors find out that I’m struggling with my mental health, they’ll bench me, they’ll fire me, they’ll demote me. All of those things in certain professions are very real risks, unfortunately. And so, there’s that concern of, okay, well, I’m calling this number that my employer gave me. I don’t want this getting back to I don’t want this getting back to them in any fashion. So, there’s that concern related to confidentiality. But there’s also the concern about a true connection to the resource that’s being provided. Three therapy sessions, great. Love it. Any person getting in the door of therapy is amazing. But in order to really have positive impacts from mental health counseling, you need that strong therapeutic relationship with the person that you’re providing. With an EAP, it’s usually very short-lived, and there’s usually not a huge variety of providers or even the opportunity to choose which provider that you’re working with. I’m sure there’s an EAP out there that’s going to comment on this and be like, well, we can do that, and that’s amazing.

But for the vast majority of them, it’s a pretty limited system. And research has consistently shown that the quality of the therapeutic relationship is even more important when it comes to positive outcomes from therapy than the modality of therapy or the clinical skill of the provider. So, this isn’t just, oh, it’s nice to like your therapist. It’s there are actually measurable clinical outcomes from having a positive relationship with your therapist. And then EAP simply doesn’t provide that for most people. So better than nothing, but also something to consider that, hey, maybe this isn’t doing quite what we think it is, and we can’t just check the box of, Good. Mental health’s solved. We have an AP. The other resource that I see a lot are flyers for the crisis line. So, the National Suicide Prevention Crisis Line is 988. It works just like 911. It’s a 24/7 free resource that you can call. It is completely confidential. All of their clinicians are bound by HIPAA. So, it’s not something that me, as your employer, could call and say, hey, has Eric called 988 lately? They’d play down and be like, I don’t know who Eric is.

I’ve literally never heard him in my life. I know this because I’ve had to handle some of those calls. Yeah, no, it’s a really, really phenomenal resource, and I absolutely love it. The challenge with 988 is that it is a reactive resource. So, it requires the person in crisis to say, I’m in crisis. I’m going to reach out for this resource. And as we just talked about in a lot of these professions, there’s that culture of, I’m okay, I’m okay, I’m okay, I don’t need help. What we really need instead is, yes, we need an EAP. Yes, we need to refer people to the crisis line. But we need to go upstream a little bit more and look at how do we turn our organization into a culture of care within itself, where I can look at you and say, hey, I’m noticing something. You’ve been late, you’ve knocked over a few things, you just look sad. Maybe don’t say it like that, but you’re recognizing some of these things and saying, hey, are you okay? I’m going to check in with you. And not only do I have this skill to recognize when you might need a check in, but I have this skill to know how to handle that check in and what to say, how to have that conversation and where to send you afterwards, which is where we talk about EAP-988. 

But we need to come a little bit further earlier in the system than that to really get people before it turns into a crisis.

Great observations on that one. Another thing on the EAPs that I’ve often heard from frontline team members is I’m calling somebody on a phone that’s obviously in an office in a big city who has no understanding of the work that I do, and they’re struggling to connect with me and my specific challenges. That element also changes because if you speak to a lot of… In the aviation space as an example, often they’ll have something that’s more in tune with what you’re talking about, where you’re talking to somebody who understands the space. Maybe they were a pilot before they understand the environment. And so, it becomes, I’m talking to somebody who gets me, which also helps.

It helps so much. Yeah. And here’s another plug for the 988 Crisis Lines. They do have some specialized options out there for certain professions. So, there’s hotline specifically for first responders. There’s hotline specifically for military service members. In Washington, where I live, there’s a hotline specifically for members of indigenous communities, where it’s staffed entirely by folks of indigenous backgrounds. I don’t know about hot lines for construction or things like that, but there are definitely hot lines for medical professions. There’s a hotline specifically for sexual assault survivors. All of these ways of crunching down the community into these are a group of people that can understand what I’m going through. That’s phenomenal. And so, I love those unique crisis lines that are out there for things like that.

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You touched on this element of culture of care, and I’d love you to double click a little bit more on that in terms of what is this culture that you’re trying to build? How would you go about it? Because it sounds simple in many ways, but it’s not as simple as to say, Are you okay? Tell me a little bit more.

Absolutely. It’s simple, but it’s not easy. I’ll say that. It’s not a complex process, but it does take buy-in and time and training in order to make something like that happen. When I say culture of care, what I mean is that most employees, especially if you’re working overtime, especially if you’re working shift work, you end up spending more time with your coworkers than you likely do with your family at home over the course of your working years. And so, what that means is that hopefully you have some pretty strong relationships with the people at work, though not always. But it also means that they are going to be the ones that notice some of these signs and symptoms if they are trained to before your family might or before you yourself It’s another touch point. It’s another opportunity to reach out and connect with someone before whatever they’re struggling with turns into a crisis. And so that’s what I’m talking about with the culture of care is how do we build that entity to where it’s not, I come in, I clock in, I do my work, I go home. But it’s, I come in, I clock in, I see Eric crying in the corner, I check in with Eric, and I see how Eric’s doing, and I connect Eric to a better resource.

That’s what we’re trying to build, is how do we take care of each other? And it’s not It’s not just, oh, I am the HR person, so therefore, I am now the person that everyone comes to. That’s great, but that’s a huge load on you for one person to try to manage the mental health of the entire organization. It’s how do we get all of us to do that? It’s not one person for everyone. It’s one person for one person. And so that person has someone for them. And it’s this spider web that we’re trying to connect people in. And so, what I really tell people and what I teach people is what I’ve designed as my life model of prevention. And it’s an acronym, L-I-F-E. And I will tell you, I spent entirely too much time trying to come up with a relevant acronym for this.

So please be- But it’s a good acronym.

A lot of work that went into that. But our life model here. So, our life model is four steps, and I’ll high level it. Eric, we can break it down if you have specific questions there. But this is really everything that I learned in grad school, everything that I do in the field, condensed into four simple steps that anyone can use to interact with someone in crisis. The L of this model is listened. And bear with me, because people who hear active listening usually are like, oh, for the love of God, please not again. We don’t need more fluffy stuff. Or they’re like, okay, this is really cool. And I will tell you, in my current job, I do crisis work. I’m in the field. I’m also a negotiator on our SWAT team. And the whole skillset that we use when it comes to diffusing those really, really high-risk situations and convincing someone to walk out of the house and get arrested is active listening. Sure. So, this is not fluffy. This is not, oh, show them you care. This is very tactical. Here’s how to phrase this sentence when they say this.

That’s how much we’re breaking it down in the L of that life model. Our I, F, and E of the life model, those are specifically to someone who might be considering suicide. So, we do all the active listening. We understand their story. They feel really heard and understood and validated. And then we move into the I, which is inquire. This is where we ask if someone is considering suicide, and we do it very calmly, very directly. No wiggling around it because we’re uncomfortable about saying the word. This is also the place where if they say yes, we do a very, very basic risk assessment to understand if this is a, I can handle this situation, or an, oh, my God, I need to call 911 situation. Very, very basic risk assessment there. Sure. In our F of the life model, this is forming a safety plan. So historically, 10, 20 years ago, we used safety contracts, which is essentially if I was feeling suicidal and Eric was my therapist, we would both sign a literal contract, like a piece of paper that said that I would not kill myself. And understandably, that really didn’t work super well.

And we unfortunately had to lose a lot of people to recognize that me living out of obligation to a piece of paper that I signed with Eric is not fantastic. And so, what we have now are safety plans. Safety plans are a collection of resources that a person in crisis can use the next time that they’re in crisis in order to get them over that hump of the crisis into a longer term resource, whether that’s making it to their therapist appointment in a couple of days, whether it’s waiting until there’s a bed available at inpatient, whatever that is. So, there’s actually things that they can do, people they can connect with and resources that they can engage with on that safety plan. The last step of our life model, the E, this is eliminating lethal means. Lethal means is just the fancy term for what they’re going to use to try to kill themselves with. And so, we’re not trying to do perfect lethal means restriction and take away every single possible thing that someone could use to end their life. But we’re trying to pull away some of the big ones and create time and distance between when they’re having that suicidal thought and when they could act on it. 

This ties in well with the safety plan because most suicidal crises, really, really acute, I’m going to go jump off the building type of suicidal crises, are actually quite short. It’s a couple minutes to maybe a day or two is when those really, really, really acute crises last. And so, we with the safety plan and with the lethal means restriction, we’re trying to see if we can keep them away from that method long enough for that crisis to pass. So, to give a concrete example of this, if someone is considering using a firearm to end their life, and the firearms is loaded safety off in their unlocked nightstand drawer, all they have to do is open a drawer and pull a trigger if they’re in a crisis. But if the ammo was completely removed from the house and the gun is in the safe in the basement, and only their partner has the code to that, then they would have this thought about ending their life. They’d have to call their partner, get the code, get the gun out of the basement, put on pants, drive to the store, buy ammo, drive back home, and then pull the trigger.

And with all of that time, that gives it space for that person to metabolize the crisis, and hopefully for their partner to step in and say, hey, honey, why do you need the gun safe code? So, there’s opportunities there for that path to reverse. And that’s what we’re trying to do with lethal means restriction. So, all of these things, it can sound complicated. It can sound overwhelming when I’m saying this right now. And I’m not trying to turn anyone into a therapist. If you’re feeling like this is too much for you to handle, sit down with the person and just listen. Forget the I, the F, and the E. Call 911, call their therapist. Call the crisis line. That’s what they are trained to do day in and day out. But if you can do the listening really, really well, if you can inquire well, confidently and calmly, and you can connect them to resources and distance them from what they’re thinking of using, you’re phenomenal. That’s amazing. You probably just save that person’s life. And so those are the skills that I’m trying to instill in these communities and in these organizations, especially those that, like we talked about previously, statistically have that higher likelihood of having folks die by suicide.

Sure. And fairly straightforward in terms of the steps. What I liked about when you talked about culture of care, and safety is also this reference of actively caring. Really, if I know your baseline, if I get to know how you are every day, then I can also spot when somebody’s a little bit off, different, something’s bothering them at that point in time as well. It connects very, very nicely to what you’re talking about on the life side in terms of the life model. Tell me a little bit more about how you go about it in organizations because you obviously are trying to train lots of people in work environment, not some HR person far away, but different people in the work environment. How do you go about doing it? What has worked well in terms of those interventions?

Absolutely. I just want to comment really quickly on what you said previously just this moment ago, because I think that this culture of care is not just, hey, let’s proactively take care of each other, but it also informs how we reactively respond to problems. If someone is having more physical accidents, they’re knocking over more stuff. I just keep coming back to that example, but it’s an easy one to use. They’re knocking over more things. They’re late a couple of days in a row. Their frequency of calling in sick has increased over the past period of time. Instead of you as a leader or you as an administrator sitting down with them and saying, we got to put you on a performance plan. We got to fix these issues. We got to do this, that, and the other thing. Instead of starting there, start with this life conversation. Because for someone to go from a model employee to, oh, my God, they’re barely making it through the door every day, something changed in in that person’s life, meaningful in that person’s life. And that is an opportunity for you to start with, Are you okay? Talk to me human to human.

You’re not in trouble. This is not going to be disciplinary. What’s going on? And start there. I’m not saying don’t have discipline. Because some people make performance plans and all those things but start with that culture of care. That’s really important to start with. So, in terms of what I actually do within organizations, the first question that I ask when I’m speaking to leaders that are like, hey, we want to train our people in this. We want to understand this better. I ask them not who are your managers, but I ask, who are the people within your organization that your people already go to for support? Maybe that is the HR department. Maybe it’s the second-tier level. So, I work with a lot of law enforcement. I do a lot of law enforcement training. And oftentimes it’s the sergeants, which is like one or two steps up from patrol. It’s not the captains, the lieutenants, the command staff. It’s the one level up. So, I want to sit down with leaders and understand who within your organization is already fielding these types of emotional pleas from people. Because those are the people that we want to start with.

If I’m coming into an organization that has a thousand people and I’m like, let’s train all of your people, they’re going to be like, we can’t take a thousand people off the front lines to come sit in this training. It’s not going to work. So who are these people that are already those cornerstones of the emotional structure of the organization? And then we’re going to train them. And everyone has been through a million and one different trainings, all the online, on demand, mandatory, click the button as fast as you possibly can to get it over with type of trainings. And that’s not what we do. We come in, we are in person, and we do a lot of roles playing and activities and scenarios. And I’m not just saying, oh, I’m going to pretend to be a person in crisis. I mean scenarios where I’m literally sobbing my eyes out in the front of the room, and we have to work through this together, and we have to practice those active listening skills. And so, what this does is it obviously is way more engaging, but it also gives folks an opportunity to practice these skills before it’s an actual crisis.

The last thing I want to have happen is teach you this amazing life model that you probably fell asleep through half of it because you’re bored out of your mind just sitting there listening to me talk for 2 hours and then say, go forth and conquer. And you’re like, well, I vaguely remember she said something about a reflective statement, but I have no idea how to use that. I’ve never done it before, and now I’m trying to talk my colleague off the roof of the building. We don’t want to have that happen. And so, we’re looking at how do we implement all of this in a way that is actionable and trainable, and people actually get something out of it. And so, we come in, we have these training sessions, we have these scenarios, we have these discussions with leadership of more from a consulting perspective of how do you change this organization? Do you want to build a peer support team? Do you want to find an EAP that actually works? Do you want to create a literal space within your organization where people can go to have these hard conversations? Because doing it in the lunchroom with everyone walking by is probably not the best idea. 

We look at the organization as a form, again, those social determinants of health and say, what can we do to fix this problem? The last thing I’ll add as well is I briefly touched on this earlier with the suicide forensic autopsies. I’ve had a few clients that I’ve worked with where they have tragically lost someone to suicide. And everyone is scrambling, emotionally, logistically, professionally. And so, we’re able to come into organizations and do those autopsies and say, hey, as an organization, here are some things to think about, here are some things to potentially actually change. I want to be very clear with that, I guess, service offering. It is not to point fingers. It is not to point fingers and say, well, this is your fault that your employee died. It is not about that. It is saying, how do we take this absolute tragedy of an instance and make sure that it doesn’t happen to anyone else? Sure. That’s really the lens that we approach that with. So, variety of different options, but the base of it is instilling these skills in folks in a way where they actually feel confident in using them and have some fun along the process.

Because, again, we don’t need another online self-paced, just click the button type training.

So, can the people that are trained, can they be peers? If it’s a unionized environment, I can imagine sometimes it’s a union rep who’s the one that people turn to. Is it always leadership type roles?

Not necessarily. When I say, hey, who are the people that your people are coming to? A lot of times it’s someone with absolutely no formal leadership role. It’s the janitor sometimes because they’re always there and they’re always seeing stuff and they’re part of that community and they recognize people. So, it doesn’t matter a leadership or not. And to your point about peer support, that is my dream, to have clients that say, okay, here are 5, 10, 15 people that people always come to. We’re going to put them through this training, and then we’re going to turn them into a formal peer support team. So how do we structure that? How do we give them access? How do we do this? How do we do that? And then it’s not just, Cool, the people know the thing, but it’s the people know the thing, and there’s actually a structure that other employees can engage with when they’re looking for that level of support. So I am all for people extrapolating this training into a formal peer support team that lives in perpetuity and that provides that legally protected confidential conversation for people when they’re looking for something.

To round this full circle back to our EAP conversations, there’s that concern of, well, I don’t really know this person. I don’t have relationship with them. They don’t understand my profession. All of those very valid challenges within EAP. And that’s what an internal peer support team or even just a culture of care in and of itself can fix. You know these people. They know you. They know your profession. They understand what it’s like. There’s our ready that baseline level of trust, which makes this whole life intervention just a million times easier from there.

And I’ve definitely heard of organizations that have done that with peers, and it really, really rave reviews in that regard because people feel more comfortable sometimes talking to somebody who does exactly the same work as them who understands the work in some cases, even that went through similar challenges. It could be drugs, alcohol, could be mental health, and then just having that recognition of somebody who understands their job, their role. Then the union as well. If you’ve got a good partnership with the union, sometimes that union rep can be also the person if they’re speaking the same language, doing similar actions.

Yes, absolutely. I’ll just add as well, if you leader are thinking, Hey, I want to put together a peer support team, I cannot instill this enough in you that it is not the people that you think are the most emotionally literate or the best at intervention that should be on the peer support team.

That’s a good point.

It needs to be the people that your people think are the most emotionally literate and the best at mental health that need to be on this peer support team. I’ve worked with organizations where I’m looking at the team and I’m looking at the people, and there’s this grumpy old dude in the corner who doesn’t want to be here and wants nothing to do with what I’m talking about. And then we find out later that he’s the team dad that everyone goes to. And so, it’s like, I want that person on the peer support team. So, you as a leader, again, it’s not about what you think or what you want or who you necessarily would trust. It’s who your people trust. Just that framing, if you take away nothing else when it comes to peer support team creation, take away that framing.

Jessi, thank you so much. Really good insights, ideas. I think it’s something that a lot of safety professionals really need to think about as to how does that fit into my safety program? If it’s within HR, how do I partner with HR to have adjacent goals around, make sure that we’re bringing this topic forward, not only just for the suicide prevention elements that you talked about, but in terms of even just directly from a safety standpoint, there’s a huge connection. If you’re not well, you’re not going to perform as safely as you possibly could in the tasks that you’re doing. So, Jessi, if somebody wants to get in touch with you, what’s the best way to do so?

Absolutely. Well, thank you for having me. This has It’s been an awesome conversation, and I’m excited for your folks to get their hands on it. I am on LinkedIn. Feel free to shoot me a message on LinkedIn. If you’re like, yes, I’m bought in. Let’s do this. I want to make sure that my people are protected with their mental health as well. Shoot me a message. I’d be more than happy to have a conversation with you. I offer free consultations related to suicide prevention where we can look at your organization, what are the risks, what’s your industry doing right now related to this, and how can we move forward there. So, questions, if you want to get started, just find me on LinkedIn, and I’m happy to have those conversations.

Awesome. Thank you so much.

Take care.

Thank you for listening to The Safety Guru on C-suite Radio. Leave a legacy. Distinguish yourself from the past. Grow your success. Capture the hearts and minds of your teams. Elevate your safety. Like every successful athlete, top leaders continuously invest in their safety leadership with an expert coach to boost safety performance. Begin your journey at execsafetycoach.com. Come back in two weeks for the next episode with your host, Eric Michrowski. This podcast is powered by Propulo Consulting.

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Jessi Beyer, MHP, is an international TEDx speaker; the #1 best-selling author of How To Heal: A Practical Guide To Nine Integrative Therapies That Can Help Release Trauma; a crisis mental health professional embedded with law enforcement in Snohomish County, Washington; and a negotiator with Region 1 SWAT.

Named the 2025 Best International Mental Health Speaker by Global Health and Pharma, she has been featured in over 200 media outlets, including Thrive Global, Refinery29, and Elite Daily, and has spoken to thousands of people around the world through groups like Penn State University, Leadercast NOW, and the Institute on Violence, Abuse, and Trauma’s international summit. Jessi holds master’s degrees in critical psychology and human services (focusing on trauma and crisis intervention) from Prescott College and in military psychology (focusing on terrorism) from Adler University. Outside of her professional life, she enjoys exploring the trails of the Pacific Northwest and baking (and eating) copious amounts of chocolate chip cookies.

Jessi also holds a special passion for military and first responder mental health. Her father, cousin, and grandfathers served in the military, and Jessi has experience as an EMT, a search-and-rescue volunteer, and a First Responder Therapy Dogs K9 handler. Her heart is with those who are first on the scene, first to fight, and first to help people when they need it most.

For more information: https://jessibeyerinternational.com/

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jessierinbeyer

 

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Lessons from Aviation Psychology: The Importance of Competencies and a Broader View of Human Factors with Aleksandra Kapela

Feb 19, 2026

Lessons from Aviation Psychology: The Importance of Competencies and a Broader View of Human Factors with Aleksandra Kapela

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ABOUT THE EPISODE

In this episode of The Safety Guru, we’re joined by certified aviation psychologist Aleksandra Kapela for a deep dive into aviation psychology and human factors, exploring what other safety-critical industries can learn from aviation. Aleksandra shares how modern thinking on human factors has evolved, emphasizing the importance of understanding the environment in which we operate, as well as the capabilities and limitations of the human brain. She breaks down the importance of identifying core competencies and explains why competency-based training and assessment (CBTA) is essential for preparing individuals to perform effectively in unpredictable, safety-critical situations and how these principles can be applied across a wide range of industries. She also explains why a broader, more holistic view of human factors is essential for improving safety performance and building sustainable safety cultures where people feel supported, are encouraged to speak up, and perform at their best. Don’t miss this informative episode packed with valuable lessons from aviation psychology!

READ THE EPISODE

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 very excited to have Aleksandra Kapela with me. She’s an aviation psychologist and human factor specialist. So, Aleksandra, first, as we get started, that’s not a common thing to be an aviation psychologist. So, I’d love to hear a little bit about how you got started, what you do, and the passion you have around this space. Let’s start there.

Sure, absolutely. Thank you very much, first of all, for having me. It’s a pleasure to be here and talk about such important topics. In my stories, usually in aviation, the story goes the same way. People, they fall in love with flying first. They become pilots, cabin crew, and engineers, and only later do they start becoming interested in safety, human factors, or psychology. But for me, for me, that was the other way around. I always knew that I wanted to be a psychologist. Long before aviation entered my life, I was fascinated and fell in love with the human brain. So, behavior, decision making, neurology, and especially human potential. Why do people act the way they do, how they perform under pressure, and how the environment can unlock their potential or, let’s say, limit it? That’s why I started the master’s programs in psychology and human resource management. I knew quite early on that I didn’t want to be a clinical psychologist or psychotherapist. I wanted to work with people and organizations in real, complex environments, helping them understand how and why this behavior might emerge and how systems can support them in that.

Aviation came into my life almost by coincidence. It was supposed to be a summer job at the local flight school to try something new. My friend, he was working there at that time. When I stepped into that environment, I fell in love with the industry as well. I think mostly with people at the beginning. But even more, later, I became fascinated by the safety element and safety culture. Sure. In such a critical, safety-critical domain, when a decision is made, they matter every single day. Actually, I assume that psychology and human factors would be fully embedded. I imagine that at every flight school, not to mention the airline. They would have at least one aviation psychologist supported by a team of human factor specialists. But that was a big surprise that it wasn’t the case. Even though aviation, compared with many other safety-critical industries, is usually thought to be really advanced in terms of safety awareness. I quickly realized that there was still quite a big gap between what we know today in modern psychology, neuroscience, and behavioral psychology, and how stress, attention, decision-making, and the human brain actually work, and how systems are designed and managed in the industry.

That’s when I started to look into how you can become properly qualified in this field of aviation psychology. I discovered that it is a really small, highly specialized discipline. Globally, there are only around 100 officially accredited aviation psychologists with a bit larger group of human factor specialists, of course, as let’s say, the entry requirements are a bit less demanding, you don’t need to be a psychologist. Becoming accredited required a lengthy certification journey, but it allowed me to work exactly at this intersection of psychology, safety, and operations. Today, I work in a few, let’s say, complementary roles. I run my own company, My Wingman, which focuses on supporting airlines and flight schools from the human side of safety. So, competency-based training and assessment, leadership development, instructor support, and well-being initiatives are directly linked to operational performance. At the same time, I also work as an Associate Aviation Psychologist with Symbiotics, a company known for assessment and selection solutions. Along with that, a large part of my work involves speaking and teaching, including delivering speeches, workshops, and training programs for leaders, instructors, and operational teams, mainly in Aviation but also in other safety-critical industries.

I’m also a ground instructor, so I work with students, which I really enjoy. And recently, I’ve been working on a book about Human Factors in Aviation, which is a very big project that is still a bit in the making. So, the book is still with the editor for the final editing. But this is a very exciting project I’ve been working on for the last 2 years.

Interesting. I’d love to start with human factors and really a modern perspective on what is happening in that space, when we’ve talked about it before in terms of capabilities, limitations in your mind, and the environment. Tell me a little more about how this space has evolved.

The modern view of human factors has led us to a bit more uncomfortable truth: the human brain is incredibly capable but also very limited. Sure. As its core, the modern human factor starts with this shift. Instead of asking what’s wrong with the person, why something happened, we ask what was happening inside their mind and how the environment also shaped what was possible in that moment. Because it’s really easy to say what we would do from our couch, but actually, in a specific moment, in a specific situation, with the specific limitations and capabilities of one’s mind, that might be very different. Now we focus on the capabilities and limitations of a brain as such, but also of a person at the moment. We know, for example, that attention can be our biggest help, but also our biggest enemy in stressful moments and in specific environments. We try to blend together the person, those limitations and capabilities, but also the environment, and also the system that the person operates in, which is really important. We have this systemic approach now, so we don’t look at individuals only, but we look at all those elements that made the situation happen in this specific scenario.

Somebody else or in a different environment could behave in a different way or maybe the same way. This is something that we always need to check.

Rear view mirror, once something happens, a more holistic view of what will occur, how can it practically help proactively? To ensure we act on the environment, we act on capabilities and limitations before something occurs.

Basically, if we take this more holistic perspective, then we are able to actually change things for the better for the future. If we would only focus on, let’s say, for example, in aviation, we’ve used to focus on how we can improve the aircraft for this situation not to happen again? Let’s say a certain switch was connected to this situation. How can we update or redesign the switch to help in the next situation? The problem is that the situations are so complicated that we will never be in the same situation again. Even though we replace the switch or we redesign something, which, of course, is also one of the approaches that we should have, and of course, improve that and upgrade as we can. But also, if we only hope that after changing this one switch, the situation will not happen again, or the bad situations will not happen, then this is a bit of false thinking. We need to understand how complex it is. We need to understand that things are happening both inside and outside. If we focus on this holistic approach, it’s also easier to think, even with changing that one switch of thinking, okay, but if somebody else were working with that switch, would that help them if we redesign it?

Or if this person is in this and this environment, in this company, let’s say, even in this culture, would that help them as well in the future? It helps people to rethink and redesign bigger systems. Also, it helps us educate not only system operators but also leaders and authorities, so they understand that a single change can make a big difference. That’s why, as we understand people more now and gain more knowledge about how we function and the environment, we need to use this knowledge. We need to use these findings, of course, slowly but to help improve safety and change the situation for the better in the future. So, not to add more hours, for example, in case of aviation training, but try to focus, okay, what we can change that actually, regardless of the hours, can help in the future in a similar setting, in a similar situation.

Is there anything that can be done, if I’m thinking particularly of the capabilities, but also some of the limitations, proactively from competencies development, or in terms of assessing competencies as well, for those circumstances that may exist?

Absolutely. This is one of the biggest concepts we focus on right now: competencies and some behaviors connected to them. So, they come out of our competencies. This is really important to focus on at the very beginning because, again, as I mentioned, we can add more hours, more training, more education in different industries. But again, if somebody had a low level of certain competencies, they would, regardless of the training, their knowledge, they would not be able to cope with a specific situation. If the situation becomes more stressful and more complicated, they need to adapt to this specific situation that might quickly evolve into a change. In that way, competencies and this whole approach of competency-based training and assessment, or CBTA, now focus on how we can improve human beings at the beginning. Sure. For them to be able to behave in a situation that we cannot predict. In the past, we tried to predict every possible situation, and we failed in that because those environments, even automation, everything becomes more and more advanced and complicated. One thing can change the situation that we couldn’t predict. Instead of doing that, we now shift, and we try to answer a case.

If this person had those competencies on a very high level, then it might actually be easier for them to cope with any situation. We don’t have to focus on those situations so much, but we focus on people who are capable, within their limits and capabilities of their brain, to react to different situations in different settings with different people. That’s why we first focus on those competencies. Those competencies are, there might be also a bit more technical, but we focus even more on those non-technical aspects. We focus on things that we used to talk about already in the case of human factors. But some of those things we know are actually. We are able to improve them if we know how to work on them. For example, decision making, for example, problem solving, communication, and workload management, those aspects, we know that if we have the right tools and also tools to assess them at the very beginning, and then if it improved, then actually they are proven to be those barriers that actually can stop this bad situation from continuing to happen. Now we focus on, okay, if we know the entry level of someone’s, let’s say, communication skills, then I know this level, that’s the first step.

Then I can, with the right tools, try to improve this. In the future, this person, despite stress, despite a very dangerous situation, will still be able to communicate with others, even though the possibilities of their brain would narrow their attention and their memory. Still, they would have the communication on such a high level that they would be able to communicate, even if the situation is very demanding. We know that in those safety-critical environments, proper communication with your teammates, with some people who might be responsible for the next steps, for example, is crucial. So very often this communication would be the first part that would be really affected by the stress, by this very demanding situation. Because this is a natural tendency of our brain. If we have a very stressful situation, we need to limit our attention; we need to limit what we say to others in order to be able to survive. In that way, if we focus on communication skills despite the stress, despite different problems that might occur, then we keep this relatively high level of communication, even though our brain and the situation want us to maybe limit this ability a bit.

That’s why we focus now on those core competencies, as we call them, because we know that also for the success stories that we have. Sure. Of course, in aviation, those success stories are really spectacular, let’s say. But for those stories, we know that those individuals who saved the day had a very high level of those competencies. In that way, we need to focus on this positive safety approach, as we call it safety to approach. We focus on improving the positives instead of trying to limit the negatives.

Sure. In aviation, you use the example of communication. In many cases, you have a job that is, for the most part, fairly routine until something goes horribly wrong. Then, as you mentioned, high intensity. If you think about the Air France incident where autopilots disconnect, all sorts of signals are giving you contradicting information, and you’ve got to process. Communication and stress levels are incredibly high, and you’ve got very short periods of time to address the risk in front of you. In a lot of other businesses, a lot of other industries, sometimes that difference between routine and high stress isn’t as pronounced, but in some cases, it might still be. How could some of these principles translate to other industries to still help? As you mentioned, communication. On a good day, you could be a very good communicator, but in that peak moment of stress where you really need that communication, that’s where you need at next level performance.

The beautiful and also problematic thing about our brain is that it cannot really recognize the settings that we’re in. In that way, it doesn’t matter really if we are 30,000 feet in the air, and anyone would say that that’s a really dangerous situation if something happens. Or it can be at your workplace, at your desk, but something very suddenly increases your stress level. For our brain, that would be the same situation. Very basic instincts and very basic reactions, they start to happen. We have our fight or flight response that is still really, really strong, even though we don’t have to run away from a lion anymore. But still, our nervous system doesn’t understand that. It doesn’t really matter if it’s a situation in the air or it might be a situation, let’s say, in the operating room. Still, this high peak of stress would narrow our possibilities in the same way. Our brain needs to be really focused on the basic things to survive. That’s why those higher functions, let’s say, like keeping the attention on different sources or communicating with others using complicated sentences, are something that first would be just raised.

In that way, for example, in the case of attention, I think it’s really relevant for different safety-critical domains that you need to keep your attention at a high level. You need to be sure that you’re not making any mistakes. In that way, your attention really needs to be at a high, highly functioning level. In that way, it’s really important to train those abilities. No matter what stress hits you, you can still maintain this high level of performance and teamwork, for example, because this is another competency that is pretty core. Being able to work within a team, which is, of course, connected with some other competencies. They all relate to each other. But most of the safety-critical environments need the same competencies. They need a high level of attention and situational awareness. They need communication, teamwork, and the ability to solve problems and make good, timely decisions. Of course, aviation is the industry that is the most, let’s say, spectacular in that way. But if you imagine someone working in any other safety-critical industry, they need the same competencies. But what would be different is the behaviors, so how they perform or how they use those competencies with specific behaviors.

The pilot would need to behave differently, and let’s say the surgeon would need to behave differently, but they would still need to use, let’s say, the same source and competencies. Of course, I focus mainly on aviation, but I also consult on other industries as well. I use my experience from aviation, but actually, I see more and more that it’s really the same thing, the same elements, because our brain is the same. It just needs to be used differently. That’s why we have certain training. Let’s say this technical part and the educational part are what will be different. But how we act in this really highly stressful situation is something that would be the same across different domains and industries. If we just lack those competencies, our performance will be affected. It doesn’t matter what industry it is. We aim to achieve the highest possible performance to increase safety. To do When you do that, your capacity needs to be enough to handle that situation. Of course, there are some other things, like psychological safety, that need to be at the proper level.

Your, let’s say, physical abilities need to be at the proper level. But we see that those abilities of your brain, in terms of competencies, are one of the most important things to be able to perform at a safe level in any situation that you need to perform.

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.

CBTA really helps us understand competencies that are needed, where I am at, and how I am progressing through different interventions, potentially?

Yes. They also answered the question of why those limitations exist. For example, I might repeat the same mistake in my work, and I might have more training, more education. I will be more frustrated. Still, I would not perform well in certain situations. Sometimes, a very simple key for that is just to improve the competency level. If somebody were, let’s say, very good at, say, communication, again, but they would not be very good at decision-making. They might talk with others. It might help them with other competencies as well. But they still would not be able to make timely decisions, and this can sometimes be really critical for safety. That’s why it’s really important to know those levels right from the start. If somebody enters the training or a job environment. We, as people, would be responsible for training that person. But also, this person themselves would want to know what level of those competencies I have. Because very often people cannot realize that they wouldn’t think about it earlier, that they might have problems with certain competencies because they do quite well, they progress, they live in society, etc. But actually, those levels need to be a bit higher for that safety-critical work.

In that way, it is so crucial to know it at the very beginning, and then only you will benefit from that if you retest it. If you check it again, then you know if the person can progress, if you’re doing the right things in case of the training. And also, they start to feel more and more at ease. So, they might not realize that this is their issue, their problem that they have. But after a certain period of time, we see that people with a raised level of those competencies just feel better, they function better, not even in these very stressful moments, but daily. So, in that way, it gives them more space, more capacity to work with any situation that they face. If the CBTA is done well, the safety conversation also changes. We stop asking who made a mistake and what exactly happened in that situation. We also stop blaming individuals, but we start asking whether the system built the competencies needed to deal with what actually happened. To do anything. It worked both directions, we might say, because we know that people are not perfect, systems are not perfect.

But we try to find ways to increase both of those elements together. And by increasing competencies, we see that everything goes up.

And how does this connect with psychometrics? Because of the scenario you just shared, somebody who is good at communication, but may not be great at decision-making in a peak moment of stress. And so that could make you incredibly functional in many roles. In some functions, you can have the liberty of time to make decisions. For a pilot, you don’t typically have unlimited time in terms of that decision-making. How do we start checking around for a specific work environment, and how does that connect back to CBTA?

So, of course, in the case of CBTA, the last letter is A. So, this is the assessment. And this is more connected with how the competencies can improve. So, if we can learn, if we can improve them. In case of competencies themselves, it’s a bit easier work because if, let’s say, your baseline is okay, if you don’t have any disabilities, learning disabilities, or any, let’s say, disorders that would not make it possible to increase those levels, you can work with competencies. You can improve your competencies. If you have the right tools, if you know what to work on, you can improve them. Competencies are something that we use on a daily basis in different environments. This is something people sometimes do not realize they can improve if they work on it. It’s like with our memory. We can improve it if we don’t have any disabilities in that area. Sometimes we joke that it’s like a muscle we can just improve by working on it. In assessments, we don’t focus solely on competencies; we also consider other things, like personality or attitudes, which are a bit more core to people.

They are usually built from the beginning of our life, connected with how our nervous system is built. So, they are a bit more difficult to change. Regarding personality aspects, we can also check this. So, with the right tools, with the right assessments, we can check what traits, what, let’s say, tendencies you might have. This might make you better or worse in some specific environments or jobs. Let’s say there is one personality trait called conscientiousness, which is associated with people who like to be organized and structured. They like things. They like routine. This is something that is pretty core in you. People would be higher or lower on conscientiousness. In the case of pilots, for example, we like to have pilots who are high in case of conscientiousness because they need to work with routine most of the time. They need to pay attention to procedures, follow them, etc. They need to be organized, and everything needs to be neat. In that way, if somebody were higher on that trait, it would be easier for them to feel good in this environment.

If someone has a low level of conscientiousness, it doesn’t mean they cannot become a pilot, but it does mean they would just struggle, and that struggle would make them less able to perform well under stress. It will make them less able to train in case of their competencies as well, because those things just go together. For example, there are certain traits that, let’s say, a good accountant should have. I wouldn’t be a good accountant myself for sure, knowing my personality. If I were still trying to keep this job, I would probably be really frustrated, unhappy, and struggling with my performance. In some jobs, that would just make people unhappy. But in safety-critical industries, it’s really important to have people who are a bit better suited to this specific job. Psychometrics is one of the most, let’s say, misunderstood tools in safety-critical industries, I feel, because for some people, the word itself immediately triggers fear of labeling, discrimination, and being put in a box. But that fear is understandable because psychometrics has sometimes been used poorly, so not to use the right tools, not to use the results in the right way.

But when it’s used correctly, they are not about exclusion; they are about information. If we have this information, then, for example, we can place somebody who still wants, let’s say, they really want to be a doctor, but with those traits, they might struggle, they might be not so good, for example, being a surgeon. It would be better for them to work as some other type of doctor. In that way, and for example, for pilots, it’s maybe not best for you to work in an airline when the routine is there, and work is almost the same every day. Maybe it’s better for you to go to flying, which there is less routine, more changes, and a bit more risk. Some people need to have a bit more going on to feel good. That’s why it’s so important to check it at the beginning, not to spend a lot of money, a lot of time, and invest in something that might just be some concept that you might have in your head but does not really fit your capabilities and limitations. A big part of my work is also to explain that to people, that it’s not like yes or no.

It’s more than we need that information to increase safety, because if people who are not fit for certain jobs perform those jobs, it’s the first step toward unsafe acts in this environment. It’s not a verdict; it’s a map that we use for the future.

I think it also, to your point, if you’re going to be frustrated, unhappy in that work environment, that’s not an environment that’s conducive to your well-being, and also will create more friction in terms of the work in addition to some of the safety elements that you brought up. It can also be a vehicle to get to know yourself in terms of where your best fit might be.

Yes, exactly. If you’re more frustrated, a bit more stressed, then the first thing that happens is that your limitations come to the surface. If you’re angrier, sadder, or more frustrated, then you would simply make more mistakes. Then if you make more mistakes, you will be even more frustrated. Then you start to blame, usually people, they start to blame others rather than themselves, because this is what they wanted and why it doesn’t work. Also, in some of those industries, it is really difficult to stop or to say, I’m struggling. In that way, as you said, it is really connected to well-being because not only do you feel bad and angrier, frustrated, but you will have more problems with your family and friends. But also, it adds to that silence that if something is wrong with them or me, maybe I should just keep on going, but then I see that nothing is changing. So, my level of well-being is dropping dramatically, and I might not have a safe place to question that, to ask those questions. So that’s why it is so important to have this information at the very beginning. Sometimes, also what I’ve seen is for those different industries, especially if somebody young is starting in those industries, then parents, it is very important for them, for their kids to perform well and support their dreams.

But if everybody got this information at the beginning, maybe it’s time to rethink, maybe adjust a bit this path that you want to have, then eventually everyone would be happier, more satisfied, and their well-being would be higher. So, all those things that we do at the very beginning are not to make people’s lives more stressful or more difficult, but to make it less stressful and less difficult later.

Yeah. And on this topic of well-being, what other things can an organization do to create a really safe environment where people prosper from a safety standpoint?

That’s a really interesting topic because well-being is something that we hear quite a lot about now. We are more and more about well-being, well-being. We need to ensure that there is a healthy work environment. But what is most important about well-being is to understand it. Again, to understand how people’s brains work, what well-being actually is, and what levels it has, so you can create well-being programs or actions in your workplace. Very often, there is a well-being website, sometimes that is focused on well-being, but this is just like an end product. If there is no box-sticking exercise, when there is no understanding of what really makes people well in the workplace, then it might actually not change anything, but also make things even worse. What is really important is, first of all, that well-being is closely connected to what we call safety culture, as well as psychological safety in the environment. In that way, we might create a lot of things, yoga classes or any other things that should make people more relaxed. But when the workplace is not supporting this culture, nothing really will change.

The first and most difficult element is organization’s working with the culture of the culture. When people feel good about sharing things, especially things they may have done wrong, if they are not blamed for it but it is accepted, and people focus on improving it, they are thankful you share that. Of course, it might be connected with some more serious action as well. But what is really important is that you don’t feel this fear. You have this state of mind that you can talk about everything, about what was okay, but also what was not okay. In that demanding environment, people learn really quickly what is acceptable and what is not acceptable to show. If the safety culture in the workplace is high, then people will start to follow that pretty quickly. If the safety culture is low, people will learn very quickly that you can miss some things, you cannot report some things, and that’s okay. It is really important to understand what safety culture is and how it can be built. That is also, again, connected with the environment on the outside, but also with people from the inside.

What is, I think, most important is to start with education because people are not educated about their own well-being. What does it mean? What does it mean in this specific industry or company, in the training place? People, they need to understand how they might feel. They also don’t have to feel happy every day. But what is, let’s say, in the norm? Also, what they should do very quickly if they feel that something is not right is not wait; everything is open for them to share it. Again, that brings me back to competencies once more, because, again, people with a higher level of competencies deal with some well-being fluctuation better. If you have a higher level of communication and teamwork, then it’s easier for you to share something with others, to communicate it. But without a proper safety culture, you can have great levels of communication, but if you cannot communicate it, then nothing will change. Those are two things: safety culture in an organization. People from the top levels who will set this culture, who will understand that people need to feel good to be safe and to perform well. And then from the bottom, also for people to understand what Wellbeing is.

That is not just a nice word to repeat, but what does it actually mean, and what does it mean in my job? Because for different jobs, it might be connected with a bit different elements. Let’s say in the job of a flight attendant, being a bit lonelier in a sense of not having your family all the time next to you or a lot of people, a lot of crowds to share things with. This is also typical for this job. Again, if you understand that, and do you know what tools you have if something feels different? Also, if you have the right, again, personality and competencies to deal with this specific environment. Everything connects. That’s why this holistic view is really important, no matter if it’s well-being, competencies, or any other assessment, so anything connected with safety. We are only now starting to understand it. It is a bit more difficult now for us because we built those systems that were not built for that, for the holistic view. It’s more built for, again, adding more hours of training or improving one part of something. But now we need to learn, and we start to understand that only changing things from this holistic level can actually improve safety.

So, thank you so much, Aleksandra. We covered a lot of ground today from a modern view of human factors, as you said, that talks about capabilities, limitations, the environment, connects very well to the CBTAs and how do we understand competencies and how we can you give us a little bit more about how you get involved in this element of psychometrics, and is it the right fit? Are there better fits for you? And how that also links back to well-being, which connects back to what we talked about in the environment where we operate. So, thank you very much for joining us today to share some of your insights. Somebody wants to get in touch with you. What’s the best way to do so?

I would say the fastest way would be to contact me on LinkedIn. I’m there with my full name or try to reach me through my wingman site as well. But I’m on LinkedIn every day. I post quite a lot, also about human factors and safety. That would be the best way to contact me.

Excellent. Thank you so much, Aleksandra.

Thank you for listening to The Safety Guru on C-suite Radio. Leave a legacy. Distinguish yourself from the past. Grow your success. Capture the hearts and minds of your teams. Elevate your safety. Like every successful athlete, top leaders continuously invest in their safety leadership with an expert coach to boost safety performance. Begin your journey at execsafetycoach.com. Come back in two weeks for the next episode with your host, Eric Michrowski. This podcast is powered by Propulo Consulting.

ABOUT THE GUEST

Aleksandra Kapela is a certified aviation psychologist, speaker, author, and independent consultant specializing in human factors, safety, and competency-based training and assessment (CBTA) programs. She works with airlines, flight schools, and other safety-critical industries, supporting organizations where performance, decision-making under pressure, and human reliability are critical. Her work focuses on human potential, well-being, operational performance, and modern, evidence-based approaches to human behavior in complex systems. Aleksandra is the founder of MyWingman.eu and the author of an upcoming book on human factors for pilots and aviation professionals.
For more information: https://www.mywingman.eu/
Email: [email protected]
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/aleksandra-kapela/

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Redefining Safety: Embracing Risk and the Power of Language in Safety Culture with Dave Whitefield

Feb 5, 2026

Redefining Safety: Embracing Risk and the Power of Language in Safety Culture with Dave Whitefield

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Tune in for a fascinating and thought-provoking conversation with Dave Whitefield, a seasoned safety and risk professional with more than 30 years of industry experience. Dave joins The Safety Guru to discuss the challenges facing the safety industry and why meaningful safety improvement depends less on metrics and more on people and culture. In this episode, Dave explains why embracing risk, rather than trying to eliminate it, is important and how empowering workers to actively manage risk leads to better outcomes than simply enforcing rules. He also shares the role of trust and communication, and how the language we use shapes culture, influences behavior, and impacts how risk is understood and managed. The conversation highlights the vital role of leadership in shifting from correction to learning, and in creating environments where people feel supported to speak up, take ownership, and grow. This episode offers a thoughtful perspective on redefining safety through connection, effective risk management, and meaningful change. Listen now!

READ THE EPISODE

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 very excited to have with me Dave Whitefield. He’s a culture expert in safety and risk. Dave, really excited to have you with me. I’d love to get a little bit of your background, how you got into safety and how you got the passion that you have for safety risk, but also culture. 

Yeah, cool. All right, thank you and thanks, Eric, obviously, for having me on the podcast. I’m very excited. My origin story is that I failed a subject at university and that’s how I got into safety. So, I way back, it wasn’t very many years ago, but in 91, apparently, I was doing an undergraduate psychology degree thinking I would go down that path of maybe like sports psychology or performance psych. And yeah, I failed one of my first-year psych subjects and couldn’t do the second year. And it had this other; the degree was being delivered in a health faculty and had this other major of work and health. And out of about 120th, 20, sorry, 120 who started that year, about 20 of us ended up doing this work and health major and was one of the early tertiary degrees in certainly in Brisbane and I think in Australia at the time. And so, yeah, I kind of got into it by doing that and then struggled to find work. I was a motorbike courier for a year, which was a pretty risky job running around the city.

Yeah, it was ironic. And then basically I got referred in. I’ve always been able to talk as we’ve chatted a little bit, obviously, Eric, but people will tell I can talk. And I got a referral, did some safety training, and I started with that. And so, I’ve been a safety manager a number of times, but I’ve actually worked for myself more than I’ve worked for others. And I’ve been a sort of consultant. I’ve also owned a training business with some others for about eight or nine years, and we grew that. I did a postgrad OHS degree and then I, about 10 years ago finished another postgrad in essentially social Psychology of risk, which was really the thing that helped. I’ve always been in that people side and the risk side. And. But that. That postgrad was, yeah, looking at social psychology as it applies to safety and risk and. And here I am still trying to work out what I want to do when I grow up.

And so, I think it’s a good pivot to understand so. So, what’s holding us back in safety? We’ve had this conversation for.

Yeah, for a little while. Tell me a little bit about what. What’s really holding our ability to progress?

Yeah, it can be a frustrating industry to be in. LinkedIn can be a pretty toxic place, I think, for safety at times. And then within industry, you know, if you went into the workforce, if you go on a supervisor level, particularly, and you, like, go, yeah, let’s make this better by involving the safety department, you know, like said, no one ever, like, it’s. We’ve created a bit of a problem for ourselves. So, on two levels, I think at an industry level, I think we can get better at kind of embracing the idea that there’s multiple disciplines and philosophies within safety. Some of them we’ve been used to, like, hygiene and ergonomics. But the idea that there are systems thinking, legal, behavioral, safety, process, safety culture, which is my focus, there’s sort of sub disciplines, psychosocial, psychological. And I think we can get better at going, what’s the nature of the problem? And therefore, what approach would be better as opposed to. I think what we tend to do is go, oh, I’ve got a fix for that, or I’ve got a solution. And I think part of it is, I think we think as generalists that we have to be able to do everything.

So, like, just the amount. And this happens in Australia, the amount of safety professionals that give legal advice is probably pretty scary because we go, well, yeah, we’ll run a due diligence workshop because we think it fits within the safety realm. But it’s actually, that’s a legal perspective and really should be done through a legal.

So, there’s no legal training in most safety professions.

Yeah, we’re a bit bound up in that. And then obviously some of the other stuff we spoke about, I think that once organizations have got a really good foundation. When I say really good, they’ve got good, basically, hazard and risk management. So good that safety 101 stuff, they understand their hazards and risks. They rarely have surprises and new hazards and risks. They got pretty good stuff. They still have incidents, but they’ve got good Control. They’ve got enough systems, and they’ve probably got too many. Once you’ve got that, the strategies that you’ve been using to do that, you know, you can’t just keep applying them more. And there’s a need to change and. And that’s tricky. I think systems focus is a really attractive thing. It’s reinforced by regulators and auditors, so we get really anchored to that. If I equate it to Hudson’s culture maturity culture spectrum, it’s being in calculative. So, I see that a lot. And then within that, the other thing we spoke about. Sorry, I will get to the point eventually, is that when I go into workplaces, one of the first questions I ask is, what is safety about? And one of the most common responses is it’s something to do with an outcome, preventing harm, preventing injury, which is a challenge.

Going home the same way you arrived. Which it is true, and it should be. It’s just that when that’s all it is in a. At a company level, then that creates problems because it becomes basically, again, whether you got hurt or not, or whether people made it home becomes the quasi sort of definition of safety. And that is a strong anchor that’s hard to break. The irony is it works at a personal level. Like if a manager says it’s really important you all get home, that’s still appropriate because they’re expressing care, which is an input. But when the company basically gets really anchored, and this happens through measuring recordable injury rates. Absolutely all the quantifiable stuff. So, the underlying question that I ask once we’ve surfaced the idea that there’s this really strong anchor, is if everyone gets home for a month, was it safe? And there’s a little bit of silence. You sometimes awkward silence and thinking, and it’s like discomfort.

Right.

And by the way, the answer isn’t definitely yes or no, but it’s like, it could be, but it might not.

Be, it might not be. Right. And this is the part is you measure it. And so many times I’ve seen it where it’s a 10th best year of safety and then something significant happens. Right. Or we’ve had great, great performance around zero harm for years, and then significant events occur. Deepwater Horizon is a perfect example. I think it was seven years of recognition for something that was deeply unsafe. Yeah. By all accounts. But at that point it was called safe.

And there’s this seduction at the company level. And I get why, by the way, they get anchored to love of measurement. I totally. Because the challenge for us is always, well, if not, then what else? Sure. And now this occurred to me, and it could easily be one of these arguments that is entirely in my head. But I think what happened about 30 or 40 years ago when we were recognizing that outcome measures lost time, injury rates, recordable rates were not appropriate. The question that was asked was, okay, well if we’re not measuring that, what else should we measure? And that’s how we came to measure inputs. Now measuring that’s fine. Setting KPIs and setting targets around it, that creates trade-offs, usually with quality, quantity.

100%. Yep.

But I think the question, maybe the question should have been can you measure safety? Like, we’ve, we’ve never asked that question. Question. I mean, I ask it, I’m like, can you measure safety? Well, to do that we’d have to define what it is the most common outcome is. The most common definition is whether we hurt somebody. And we’ve just established that’s not a good measure. So yeah, it’s, but again, nobody’s doing this on purpose. It’s, it’s a, we’re caught up in that desire for measurement. The other reverse question, of course is if somebody got hurt, it doesn’t mean it was unsafe. Correct. And again, there’s this awkward tension of like, not necessarily. And I’m like, correct. Right. So, my thesis at that point is generally once you’ve got this really good foundation, once you’ve stopped hurting people and you’ve gone through reactive, you may need to adopt a more nuanced and unfortunately complex. That’s a definite trade off I’m trying to grapple with, but a more nuanced idea of what safety is about so that the organization has got a more meaningful view. But if we bring that right down to frontline, if I sat with a frontline work team and said, hey, was today safe?

You know, how do they answer? And my experience is they go, yeah.

They give a vibey answer, which is not partially safe.

Yeah, it’s, it’s actually quite valid. But you can’t do anything with it. It’s totally useless from an organizational point of view. But if we push them on it and go, well, how do you know they’ll often fall back to what we made at home. And that isn’t a measure. So, while I correct, I’m doing sort of culture is the culture change is sort of the method, the strategy or the methodology? I suppose the strategy is about trying to create that. What’s the middle point? What is safety about? And I think it’s tricky trying to redefine it. So, shorthand is talk more about risk.

But I think that’s an important shift. Right. And I’ve grappled with this as well. I think we’ve made it worse by creating this concept of zero harm, zero injuries, zero incident. People start chasing this goal of zero, which then we know what happens. When you start chasing this goal of zero, it redefines what safety is. Frontline team members, typically when you say zero harm, they say it’s not possible, or zero injury, because they’ll say something could go wrong, equipment could fail, things the environment could change. And I think it’s okay to actually have something that’s not measurable, that pushes you to think about risk or a state of safety, the presence of safety as opposed to the absence of events.

Yeah. The interesting thing is I think we’re actually close. So, when we get to that tension point where they’re like, all right, we get it, stop measuring harm. Right. And it’s like, what else? And I’m like, okay, well, the issue is we can’t just start measuring other inputs because that’ll cause these other trade-offs around quality and quantity. So, 100%. I’m like, well, what if we focused on the things that actually contribute to safety? What are some of the inputs to it? Now that questioning. If you ask a group of frontline workers, give me examples of things that contribute to safety, they do say traditional stuff like equipment and procedures. They’ll actually say rules. But they don’t say paperwork.

But they do say rules. Nobody says paperwork.

Yeah, but they get the rules and procedures are part of it. The most common answer at Frontline is something about themselves, like experience, knowledge, training, skill. And then they talk about other features and traits like communication, support. And they say really cool stuff like trust and care and leadership.

Yeah.

And it’s like. And so, then I kind of. You can play with this and go like, I can ask a group of senior execs, is trust an input to safety? And it has to be right?

Right? It has to be. The research shows it too. But yes. Yeah.

If you want learning, like a prerequisite to learning is being told stuff to be told stuff. People need to have trust that when they speak up, they’ll be 100%. So that’s a prerequisite. So, trust, we know, is an input to safety. It’s entirely unmeasurable. You can’t create it through systems, but it’s still a thing.

And we accept it in business that trust is a thing that needs to exist, and you can’t measure it as well.

And we, you know, we like to measure things like our reputation. But you know, usually when we try and measure it too much, like we do a customer referral ratio and we say, you know, on a scale of 1 to 10, how likely are you to refer you first to a friend, but then the call center operator knows how they get measured and says a score of 9 or 10 is good. Like, you know, they, you give me the system. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. But the concept of it is, is correct. So, it’s. And I have found that it’s been easy for us in safety to kind of say what doesn’t work. But I think it’s up to us to provide that viable alternative. What, what does something else look like that, that can be done that’s practical, even if it’s a little harder. And I think giving leaders some of the context. So, zero harm’s an interesting one in that I, I get how organizations get there and its popular, it’s easy.

You don’t want to. Yeah, you don’t want to put a target of number of people you’ve injured. It’s a very easy one to put.

Yeah. But it causes a lot of dysfunctions.

Well, so, yeah, and I sort of, so I acknowledge why. It’s just that then there’s. And so, my answer is always like, well, I think that zero harm causes more or has more negative trade-offs than positives. So yeah, when I’m doing work with leaders, I kind of say, look, there’s a bit of a grammar that I want us to be able to work with. Trade-offs, compromises, power, trajectory, ethics, these are things that we need to think about. Whenever you’re doing anything, so you’re going to propose something, what are the trade-offs? What’s this going to look like in five years? What does this do to power? You know, these types of questions. And then the tricky bit in there, and this sort of, is part of my other bit, is this idea that a pathway towards safety is risk. So, I see managing risk and risk as the input and safety is the output. And I know there are different views on that, but it’s, it works in that argument. And so, my kind of, my thing is embracing risk is like actually saying, yeah, risk is at the core of what we do.

We completely accept, in fact that there are unpredictability and uncertainty in everything we do. And that is not always the most attractive and easy thing for leaders to do. To embrace the idea that they don’t know what’s going to happen tomorrow because I think they’ve been told they meant to. Like I think that leaders believe that they have to have a corrective action for every incident and they don’t. But I think it’s a really strong myth in safety. And in Australia if you talk to lawyers, the lawyers will be like stop coming up with useless crappy corrective actions that actually then get used against you to demonstrate what you could have done beforehand. Like, you know, so and same as I think that leaders think they have to prevent all human error, and you can’t. So, you know, so the viable alternative is, well instead of trying to prevent error, what if we said how do we manage human fallibility? Yeah, that’s the alternative in that language. Instead of trying to have a corrective action for every incident, what if we learned first and then decided if we needed to correct?

And in many ways if I think about on the aviation side, it’s been accepted pretty much in the 90s that humans are going to make mistakes, period.

Yeah, yeah.

And so, I can train you on things that are going to increase your probability to make errors. You will make mirrors. Everybody has only one person raised their hand when I asked them who’s never made a mistake. And, and so the guarantee is there so accepted. You can train around how you respond to it, you can prepare for it, but you also have to acknowledge when that error occurs, can we prevent from having a catastrophic consequence? If, if we could. Which is the risk side.

Yeah. If people are going to be fallible so you know, we can focus on in what ways do people make sense of this and how might they be fallible? And that’s a much more proactive way of looking at humans. Then how do I prevent human error? Because yeah, exactly, it’s impossible. So, look, if we want to get into zero harm stuff, partly it’s an anti-human philosophy.

Replace the human. You’d have to have a robot and even then, the robot’s programmed by a.

Human so well just to achieve zero would have to be perfect and humans are not perfect. It’s an anti-human goal. I mean one person I studied with made the comment that perfectionism is a psychological illness. So, I would never go so far as to accuse a group of senior leaders of having that. I would more say I’m just not sure you’re always aware of what you’re saying is you know, the outcomes of it and that that’s why the front line go it’s ridiculous because they feel it. They it’s Never hard to convince the front line that there’s risk in everything, that there’s risk and uncertainty. It’s the weird. That’s why I think leaders almost think they’re meant to do that. That’s why I think they’re meant to go to zero harm. So partly I try and give, you know, he’s a context. So wicked problems is an example of a methodology that I kind of go, hey, let’s talk about problems. All right? And some problems are simple and, and I normally say, what’s the opposite of simple? And they go, it’s complex. And I’m like, well, because I’m being me today, I’m going to put complex in the middle.

The good news is a lot of problems you solve are complex. But what if there are problems that can’t be solved? That’s really as a thought experiment, you know, simples at one end, complexes in the middle. What if there’s ones that they’re actually just uber complex? It’s just a language thing. But these wicked problems thinking came out of, I’m pretty sure the states in the 50s and 60s when sort of when policymakers were trying to tackle big things like health reform and social welfare and these big types of human based problems. And what it comes down to is for me, could we run into issues if we approach an unsolvable problem as if it was solvable? 

Right.

So, it’s actually just a strategy issue. If you have a solvable problem, then you can put parameters around it, you can set deadlines, you can do certain things, you can define success. If you have an unsolvable problem, you have to treat it differently. And because otherwise where do you stop is actually the issue. So, one of the strategies when you have a wicked problem, and I think that safety and risk, by the way, and culture nearly everything with people is a wicked problem. We can’t give up on it. So, one of the strategies is you need to have a declared stopping point, otherwise how far do you go?

But it gets to the point. I love your quote when you or the question you ask people is, is it possible to make things less safe in the name of safety?

Yeah. Yeah. Can we, can we inadvertently increased risk in the name of safety?

Yeah.

And everyone says yes, but, but I.

Think that’s the part of getting. There’s a discomfort because you don’t want to give up. There’s an incident, you want to find a way to say it’s preventable and you come up with an action. The board requires an action. Right?

Yeah. So, for Me, I introduce something like wicked problems. Not as a sort of a tool. Well, actually, it’s sort of a. It’s a thinking. It’s a thought brick sort of thing, a way to anchor to it. So, if we accept that safety and risk of wicked problems that can’t be solved, they just have to be tackled by the way, which doesn’t mean we give up, we have to tackle them. That’s language. And by the way, when you hear people jibber on, like me about wicked problems and hear the word tackle, you’ll now hear, well, most politicians only use that word tackle, because most problems that politicians deal with are wicked problems. And so, they should not promise to fix them, they should just tackle them. But one of the principles is you need to have a declared stopping point, otherwise you keep going forever. The problem with safety is, the problem with the language of safety is if we say what’s safe enough, we get caught in, well, like, no harm.

It’s uncomfortable.

Yeah, right. So again, the language of safety is not as useful as the language of risk, because if we anchor to risk and say, is there a stopping point? How much risk are we meant to manage? Well, it turns out most companies already have that written down in their policies. They usually have a risk statement of as low as reasonably practicable or as low as reasonably achievable. Some sort of statement that says, we will bring risk down to this level, but we accept that there’s going to be some residual risk.

Right.

And in Australia, our legislation says that. Our legislation doesn’t say, keep people safe, it says, manage risk as far as reasonably practicable to keep people. And so, there’s an irony in that most companies that have a risk policy and risk structure and risk systems already have that functionality built in there. It’s just that safety comes along and then says, no, no, we have to prevent all harm. So, again, one of my arguments I put forward is by embracing risk and saying the best we’re ever going to do is manage risk as far as reasonably practicable, and also then being able to say, actually, if we embrace risk as being part of what we do, that means there’s opportunity in risk, there’s innovation, there’s learning. But in safety, if I say, is risk good or bad? The immediate answer is nearly always like, oh, I think it’s bad, isn’t it? Aren’t we meant to get rid of it? And that puts it at odds with all the other people sitting around the leadership team. Like, if I talk to the commercial person, risk is Opportunity. It’s how they make their money. And you’ve got the safety person going, no, no, no, we have to get to zero.

We have to eliminate all risk. And I think that’s one of the issues, is it. It puts them at odds. And so this idea of framing everything around risk, I think it simply provides a more meaningful grammar. And then. And then what we sometimes end up doing in companies is to give it a bit more structure. We develop an artifact or a new model where we take the output of this question, what keeps you safe? Get all of that. There’s lots of things said. Distill it down to about five or six things and turn that into an artifact or a model to anchor to, if you will. And then that becomes a central focus for, you know, if we said, well, what’s safety about? Well, safety is about having the right people and the right systems and communication and care and listening and trust. And risk is still. Still. So, it’s a roundabout way. And then, of course, you got to make sure your leaders have got the capability to engage and influence and have these curious conversations and. Sure, that’s the tricky part.

Well, a tricky part, sorry, part. But I think it links back to what you started out with, is safety is actually multiple different disciplines. It’s more complex than just you have one safety person. Culture is very different than engineering at Risk as an example.

Yeah, it’s a throwaway line, is sort of like, don’t ask me to design a guard, but, you know, don’t ask an engineer to change culture. Like, ironically, though, I could design a guard. It just might not be good. But I will say engines can change culture because also, like, you know, what do we mean by culture? That’s part of this conversation. But people do change culture by being part of it, obviously. But the intentional design, that’s the bit I’d say to leaders. I’ve had people ask about, you know, we want to. It’s pretty loose language, but, you know, we really want to get a safety culture around here. And I kind of go, do you mean, like, you’ve already got a safety culture? Do you mean you want, like, a different one or a better one? You know? 

Right.

But then there’s debate within some areas of safety about whether safety culture is a thing shouldn’t just be culture or shouldn’t it just be. Should it be climate or should it be just how works done? And I don’t disagree with that. But it’s a good example of how fragmented we are, as I think we can do Better at being clear on saying, here’s my approach and this is what I’m talking about. And this is the little bit that’s good 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 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.

So, so let’s go there. In terms of culture and culture change, you propose that rather than talking about harm, we are talking about risk. How does that change the language around culture?

Yeah. Cool. So, I mean, effectively for me, language is almost sometimes used. The sort of idea of language is kind of the currency of culture in that you can. Well, first of all, it’s what is culture. So, I use edge’s definition and model basically like shared beliefs and assumptions learned by groups as they tackle problems taught to others. So yeah, like to shift what people are thinking and doing. Language can do that. So, an example is, is this shift towards risk. And so I, at a leadership level encourage leaders to literally talk more about risk than safety. And there’s. I’ve got some models that I’ve been working on to sort of try and define what that looks like, even to the point like embracing risk, which is just sounds a bit like what does that mean? But you know, a lot of companies manage risk, but I think manage implies you’re still treating it like it’s something that’s external. And then I think some companies reject risk and I think that’s what some zero harm companies can feel like. They just reject the very notion of disruption and events and incidents. Whereas.

Right.

If leaders can sit with it and go, we understand there’s uncertainty in everything. When an event happens, they’re not happy with it, but it doesn’t freak out everybody. They understand that errors and disruption and variability and these are, these are normal things. And in fact, like is an incident information or is an incident, you know, the enemy? And so, you can see this happen when an incident happens? Well, actually the opposite. When an incident doesn’t happen, more mature organizations get more worried, like their incident rate drops way off. More mature organizations are going, hang on a minute, are we missing something here? Less mature organizations start celebrating and then next minute chaos happens. At some point something bad happens. And so that’s pretty high level. My example I’ll give if I can Share one at a really local level is the practicality of talking about risk over safety. So, one of my clients is a fuel transport business, and these drivers go out to customers, including farms, and they have to deliver fuel into tanks, and the farmers own the tanks. And the traditional sort of prescription or instruction was, you know, only fill a tank if it’s safe.

Sure.

And I guess, and often straight away, when I share that, people kind of like, oh, hang on, what’s a safe tank? What’s a safe tank? Now, in saying that, you can define it through some procedures, you can say it’s got to have an external ladder with a cage, it’s got to have a bottom fill kit. It’s got to have a sight glass. It has to be labeled. So, you can. You can set some binary things. The challenge is stability. And rust or corrosion is essentially impossible to write a procedure on. Now, when I’m working with the companies, I often frame up, I’m like, how many risk decisions are being made every day in the business? And there’s obviously thousands and thousands being made. And so, these decisions are currently being made. They’re just being made against the background of safe or unsafe. And the issue is, it’s sort of like, is that the way it works with a tank? Is rust safe and unsafe, or is it like, in this gray area in here? So, we just simply change the language with the drivers to be, you know, don’t fill a tank if it’s too.

If it’s too risky or unless it’s an acceptable risk. It’s still the same process, but the language matches what they’re currently doing, which is they’re thinking, they’re doing a little mini risk assessment.

Sure.

And then with the leaders, one of the challenges, again, I guess I try and talk to leaders about is you’re already trusting them to make these thousands of decisions. That’s the current case. So what if instead of this thought of we need to keep them safe, what if our goal was, how do we help them manage risk? So, it shifts the focus. Well, it puts the focus on the human, but it’s not the human as the object. It’s the human as the subject. It’s how do I support that human? And it’s actually empowering them. So, when we go back to the power conversation, I think a lot of people feel disempowered because they feel like the company’s just telling them how to be safe. They get held accountable if it goes wrong, but they don’t have any responsibility to make the decisions. So, this idea of that’s a philosophical thing. Your goal isn’t to tell them how to be safe. Your goal is to help them be safe, help them manage risk. Now, sometimes we’re going to give them procedures, but in this case, when we said, how do we help them decide whether a tanks too rusty?

And so, we got a bunch of expert drivers together and we’re like, what do you reckon? And they. They start telling stories and they show photos and them. And we do videos and we, you know, basically if somebody came and said, well, how do you make sure they know what, you know, what too much rust looks like? We go, well, we do this and it’s pretty loose. But we think it’s as best as we can do in this circumstance. And they were already doing it before. We’re just trying to help them do it. And so, the language matches what they’re doing. And then the final bit of that is this is more of an end thing. If they. When they’re talking to the farmer, instead of saying to the farmer, I can’t fill that tank, it’s unsafe. Which will usually get into a fight. Like, farmers love being told their tanks are unsafe, I’ll tell you. Yeah, exactly. Right. They’re just not happy about it. So, the language is, I can’t fill that tank. It’s too risky. And of course, the farmers aren’t happy, but their first question is going to be, what do you mean?

And then the drivers are, well, when I look at the corrosion or when I look at the stability or it doesn’t have a bottom fill kit. And they can be like, oh, but, but, but it’s fine. And then the drivers can be like, well, look, it’s too risky for us. It’s an unacceptable risk for our business. You can’t argue with that.  

You can’t. Right.

And I think the only reason we’re doing that is to make the conversation more meaningful. But it’s partly because safeties broken. Because we talk about safety as this binary on off thing. It’s safe or unsafe. We made it home or we didn’t make it home. And that might be true sometimes, but it’s not true all the time. And that’s the tricky part. That’s complex.

And so, somebody could easily say, you’re just changing the language. How does it change context, actions, behaviors? Right, yeah.

Just to be clear, that’s exactly what I’m doing. So, it turns out language changes how we think 100%. Yeah. This is a power that can be used for Good or evil. In this case, we think that it’s adjusting to the language to better meet what they’re doing and how they’re thinking. But again, one of the challenges for organizations, that question you posed before often framed up the front, can we do things in the name of safety that can unintentionally increase risk? I know everyone says yes. And I say, give me examples of how a lot of them are too much. Too many procedures, too many rules, too many checklists, too many signs giving people too many things to think about, that sort of stuff. So, the issue isn’t that we don’t know we’re doing it. The issue is we can’t break away from it. We’re anchored to it. Correct?

Yeah. So, it’s not will, it’s technique for me. And so that’s why I think language can be a useful tool on that one. So, with the how do we break that over correcting. And so, I think leaders are kind of used to this. When something happens, their first question is often, what are we doing about it? And so, I say to them, well, you want to anchor learning first. That’s the strategy, learning. Anchor to learning, then decide. But the language that sounds like is, we might teach them to say, hey, what do we know? So, we’re on the phone. It’s not what are we doing? It’s what do we know? And hopefully there’s enough trust that the person at the other end can say, not enough yet. And they say, cool, let me know when you. Let me know when you think we know enough to even look at it. Because if the person at the other end thinks they’re going to get a phone call that’s going to say, what are we doing about it?

They’ll find something to do.

They’re going to make shit up. They’re going to. Or they’re not going to take the call or they’re going to hide events like, yeah, that. But I get why leaders do it because every leader who does it know that the leader above them is about to ring them.

Absolutely.

It’s why everybody’s got to be aboard. It’s got to be top down. This approach of, well, again, a question I might ask is, could you have an incident and not know what happened? And usually people are like, I guess that could happen. Could you have an investigation and not have any corrective actions? And usually they’re like, oh, I don’t think so. And so, I’m like, right, right. So that’s another strategy here is the systems themselves. Sometimes lock in the process. So, if you do a scam, I don’t know, its scam, North American, it’s an Australian model scam, very well-known Australian investigation model. But okay, I know there’s some variations coming out for those listening who are screaming at me, but, but basically once you start one, you have to have corrective actions. It’s like baked into it.

And so, it’s built into the system essentially.

Yeah. And so that’s in the same way that, you know, monthly board reports, the recordable injury rates baked into it. Right. Like it’s, it’s, somebody’s got to decide to stop and then see what happens.

And I’ve seen it stop, which, yes, is courageous, but then you have to typically replace it with something else. 

Okay, cool. And I acknowledge that he’s like, what else? Yeah. And so that’s why I think too when I say language. It’s a really good comment by the way. I’m just changing language. I’m like, yeah, I know, but the language. And some systems change, I think too. So, we can say, for example, with some of my companies where we’ve done this work, we develop this model of what does a safe day look like. And what that model describes are the traits, features and characteristics of safety in action. And the data from that comes from when we ask them what contributes to safety. So, it’s entirely qualitative, but it’s like, yeah, what contributes to safety is having the right people using our systems care and listening to each other, managing risk. So it’s got these features in there. So that artifact becomes also usable as a tool. And then some of my clients, then you use that as their investigation model. Some of them use it for strategic planning, it becomes the central focus for it. So yeah, that question around like how do you actually do culture change? It is tricky, but language, systems change, you got to have people on board.

Of course, a bit of education. We need leaders to have the capability to do it as well. So, the leaders understanding what we mean by safety, risk and culture. I often do a section on psychology of risk in my workshops which is talking about conscious and non-conscious thinking and talking about biases and heuristics and timing to sort of go, you know, yeah, this is what’s happening. Actually, if I can share another really quick example, this is one of the most difficult ones I know a timing wise. So, the framing of this is about risk trade-offs, which risk is the most important risk to manage. And I’m not talking safety risks. So, I’m talking things like safety, quality, compliance, environment, schedule, cost. So, the framing here is we’ve got a task where we want somebody to do a check. It could be a pre inspection, it could be a prestart, it could be an inspection of an office area. Doesn’t matter what it is. Some sort of checking function which is a safety outcome.

Sure.

Because we’re systemized and we understand that humans are fallible. We’re going to give them a checklist. So, they’ve got a shopping list. It doesn’t make it perfect, but it makes it more likely that it’ll happen. Well, so we give them the shopping list, and we ask them to do it. So now the shopping list is both. The checklist is a safety tool. Once it’s filled out and it becomes a record, it’s now a compliance tool and there’s nothing wrong with that. It now is evidence of something as a record. Unless it’s got some knowledge in it as a record, it’s useless for safety. Now it’s done its job. So cool. We got happy days. Now we imagine that this worker is under a bit of time pressure and they’re going to make a decision. They’re going to make a trade off to either do the check and not have any checklist filled out or to sit down and do a quick tick and flick and. Yep. But not have done the check.

Right. So, the question for senior leaders is which one do you want them to do? Which trade off do you want them to make? The check or the checklist?

The check for sure.

Now the harder question, and this is clunky, I apologize for the way this question’s going to come out. The question when I’m talking to senior leaders is senior leaders is what you think they think you think.

Because you focus on the checklists that you’ve completed and you measure it, every senior.

Leader I’ve asked that question to is like, oh yeah, they probably think we want the checklist.

Right.

Particularly if it’s contractors, even more so.

But we tend to ding people if they didn’t fill the checklist because we assume that you didn’t do the risk assessment.

So, this dilemma of you’ve said you want the check, but you’ve just told me that you know that they probably think the checklist is an example of an unintended consequence. Nobody went out and did it on purpose, but you did it. Now when I ask them how do you think that happened? They’re usually pretty switched on and they’re like, well, it’s all we ask them for, right, so when we come back to this idea of language, its language is there is, there’s words, but there’s also focus. And language has power and energy. So, the absolute asking, hey, have you got that checklist? Have you got that checklist? It’s even worse when we use language like and this. Sorry, I’m about to get a little emotional here. But this language where literally workers will say they’ve heard this, if it’s not documented, it didn’t happen.

Yep.

Oh, yeah, that, that language is so powerful and it is directly responsible for this trade off that senior leaders will admit to of going, we want them to do the check. But I accept right now that they probably think we want the checklist and it’s simply because of the language and the focus in the organization, because that’s what everybody gets rewarded on short term is everyone gets in trouble for not having a bit of paper. Now the good news is, how do we tackle that? Well, we teach leaders to ask about the process first. So, they use their language and their focus to go, how did you pick anything up during the inspection this morning?

Did anything come out of the question?

Yeah, that’s all you’re doing is. So, it’s language change. But language when delivered by a leader is more than just words, it has power. And what we’re doing in that is basically convincing them that actually I’m more interested in the process than the paperwork. It in the same way I tell leaders, be careful of the first question you ask every morning of your team and there’s a way to test this too. Of go up to your team in the morning and say, how are you doing? And then wait and see if they pre answer a question for you. Like, anyway, schedule’s looking good and that’s priming. Right? Or the classic on site with safety people is they walk up to somebody on a construction site and the person’s already reaching down for the bit of paper and they didn’t ask for it, they just assumed that’s what they’re going to ask for. That was done through language. So therefore, correct language and focus is.

The strategy language and systems. Because I think the. Well, yeah, the part I like about the combination is system tends to build it in the process, tends to make it mechanical, repeatable, consistent. Because if we just do the language, then new leader comes in, if they haven’t learned the language. You go back this. I think the two components really key.

Yeah. And I think decluttering would be an example here. Like I’ve heard some people worry about the language, but also like, well, do you actually need that checklist every day? So, in the psychology part, if we break down the way people make sense of the world and things like flooding, bounded rationality and heuristics, it actually could be safer or less risky to use a checklist less often because people, even if they like the checklist, they get used to it. So, this isn’t saying tick and flick. This is just people start guessing what’s on a checklist. So, we might want to have maybe a daily check and then a weekly checklist. There’s no law saying we have to do all these checklists every day. We just made it all up. And I get why, because companies feel more comfortable with it. But then I think sometimes through looking at the psychology of risk stuff and the way people make sense, we can present a case to go. Actually, it could be safer in this case, removing the checklist portion. And the fuel transport business we did that; we got rid of. When they do their pre starts, they have a checklist available, but they don’t have to tick the boxes anymore to create a record.

And so, which is basically an aviation model too, by the way. Like not, not a maintenance model necessarily. But when pilots do pre starts, they have a checklist, but they’re not necessarily getting a bit of paper out and filling it out every now.

Generally, it’s a physical. It depends on the aircraft. But there’s also a physical component you take off. But the interesting piece is I’ve never seen a pilot not followed because they see the value and the reminders around it. And I’ve seen both engaged with it.

Right.

Because they’re both see.

Exactly. Yeah. We’re talking to truck drivers who are going. We think the pre starts are really important. We just think the bit of paper you make us fill out afterwards is a load of crap. So.

Right.

We. And if somebody comes along and says, how do you know they’re doing it? You go, go and watch them and go and ask them now also we’ve got maintenance records which showed that there were no issues and in fact, if anything minor reporting went up because they felt they had no time to do it. So yeah, that systems change, I think is. Yeah, absolutely. It’s. For me it’s secondary as an example because my philosophy is primarily culture. So, I approach it through does this.

But it reinforces culture. Right. I think it’s the two. The two bring it together.

Yeah, absolutely. It’s all mixed with it. Yeah. And then the risk component is well, if we’re going to declutter, how do we know what to keep and what not to keep? And then the question is, well, if you’ve got this concept of what are the five or six most critical things that are influencing safety or inputting safety, it’s like, well, does that system help that? Because if it doesn’t, that’s a. That’s straight away on the case for is it needed now again, by the way, that’s. Once you accept that humans have a capacity for, you know, they’ve got bounded rationality that I can only look at so many signs or think about so many things at once, then we can layer actually a really solid case for going. We got rid of that because of this. This. But I get that it’s scary. It was. It freaked out that fuel transport business, getting rid of that record. We didn’t get rid of the checklist; we got rid of the record and.

It sure of it. Of it being completed.

Correct.

They were really, Dave, phenomenal conversations. A couple of things that kind of jumped to mind was that this element of safety has lots of different specialties and you’ve got to have different. Like you talked about culture. Culture is not the specialty of an engineer as an example, but engineering out hazards, risks is so really that broader view of understanding. There are multiple disciplines in it. Shifting from harm to risk, I think is a really, key element.

Yeah.

That also changes language. And we talked a lot about language. I think it’s very powerful. It’s interesting because they. A couple years back, a couple decades back, you heard a lot about the power of language in the customer space. Yeah, experience, but not in the safety space. But this whole element of changing the language and I like the other part you talk about in terms of systems. Hugely important. Dave, if somebody wants to get in touch with you, what’s the best way for them to do that?

Yeah, LinkedIn’s definitely the easiest. Or my website, so that my business is people and risk and the website’s www.peopleandrisk.com and yeah. Dave Whitefield under people and risk on LinkedIn. So that’s the easiest and happy to chat and connect. And I’ve got some videos and some articles and papers and stuff.

I’ve written a lot of articles.

Yeah, I try. And it’s a good practice. Right. Is getting your thoughts out of your head into paper. They don’t have to be great; it’s just the practice of getting them out. I think is a really cool thing to play with.

Yeah, awesome. Thank you so much for joining me today.

Thanks so much, Eric. I really enjoyed it.

Thank you for listening to The Safety Guru on C-suite Radio. Leave a legacy. Distinguish yourself from the past. Grow your success. Capture the hearts and minds of your teams. Elevate your safety. Like every successful athlete, top leaders continuously invest in their safety leadership with an expert coach to boost safety performance. Begin your journey at execsafetycoach.com. Come back in two weeks for the next episode with your host, Eric Michrowski. This podcast is powered by Propulo Consulting.

ABOUT THE GUEST

Dave Whitefield helps organizations tackle safety without doing more safety. He does this through a specific focus on improving safety and risk culture maturity, built on an organization’s existing foundation of hazard management and formal safety systems. The framework for this approach has been developed primarily from a social psychological paradigm, and is based on over 30 years of experience across a wide variety of roles and industries, as well as tertiary qualifications in behavioral science, occupational health and safety, and social psychology of risk.  Dave’s work is designed to help people and organizations more meaningfully engage with safety by embracing risk. 

For more information: https://www.peopleandrisk.com/

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/dave-whitefield-3b45501/

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