Real leaders leave a legacy. They capture the hearts and minds of their teams. Their origin story puts the safety and wellbeing of their people first. Great companies ubiquitously have safe yet productive operations. For those companies, safety is an investment, not a cost. For the C-suite, it’s a real topic of daily focus. This is The Safety Guru with your host Eric Michrowski, a globally recognized 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. I’m your host, Eric Michrowski. As we approach the end of 2022, I’d like to take a moment to express my gratitude for all the leaders and executives that tune into the show as you seek to leave a legacy by making the workplace safer. Great news. To start with. We are honored that The Safety Guru has been appointed as one of the Top 40 Best Construction podcasts of 2022. Our podcast wouldn’t be where it is today without your support. You’re the ones that make our podcasting go around the holiday season has a way of reminding us of what matters most in life as we gather and spend quality time with our loved ones. For the team at Propulo Consulting, the holiday season also symbolizes the why behind our work and the drive behind our passion to partner with outstanding organizations and leaders that intentionally pursue safety without compromise to ensure that each team member returns home safe to their loved ones every day. We appreciate each and every one of you for the gift of safety that you have been given to your team members this year. 2022 has proven to be a year of remarkable ideas on the Safety Guru from safety experts, academia and motivational speakers all over the world.

In this episode, I will reflect on the top eight themes and ideas from guests that join the podcast to share their expertise with us in 2022. Here are the top eight themes and ideas from all of our episodes in 2022. Theme number one the impact on families and loved ones I talked about as we enter the holiday season on the impact of why, we focus on what, we focus on safety. We had Bernie and Sheila Inman, Brad and Kayla, Louise Adamson, and Alyssa Grocutt. They all talk to us about the true impact on families and loved ones at the end of the day. As I started with that’s really why safety matters. It’s a reminder of the why. As leaders, we need to drive an impact. It’s one the impact on the individuals that get injured, but also the impact on families. So, I appreciate all of them for coming in and sharing their stories on how safety and a decision can have a lasting impact on a family member. We also had esteem number two key speakers talk about their experience, their personal experience with safety. James Wood from Australia, Dan Plexman, Alan Newey, Ken Woodward all shared very powerful stories on the importance of focusing on safety and what could go wrong. All four are strong motivational speakers that speak to audiences to convey the importance of safety in the choices and decisions being made. One of the things that marked this topic with Dan Plexman was the impact of microcultures, where you can have a great culture overall, but maybe in one location, one region, there could be a different subset of that culture and how that can impact decision making. All very powerful stories. Theme number three, I think, is really critical. It’s a theme of how do you engage at the executive level? How do you drive board engagement? We had Dave Ulrich, an incredibly powerful, respected figure, talk to us about the experience in HR and how HR got to the decision making table at the C-suite. Really, what was the impact that they drove to make sure people could really voice their opinion and the value of HR at the executive table? I think there’s so many great parallels from that episode in terms of what can we do as safety professionals to elevate our conversations around safety, how to elevate the role of safety at the C-suite. Julie spoke to many themes on board engagement, governance. How can a board lean in to make sure that the right themes are being driven? Brian spoke to us about his experience as a CEO and really, after winning a prize on how he leads around safety leadership, shared some great, powerful ideas for executives on how they can show up to influence safety leadership. And then we had Dr. Georgie pop up. He spoke to us, really around some of the key elements of how do you make a business case for safety? Theme number four is really around safety leadership, a topic we’ve talked so often on the safety group is so critical and really is one of the key drivers of decision making at the front line. Dr. Kevin Kellaway. Great conversation. Themes. Very simple ideas, really based on the premise of let’s put in some daily simple habits or weekly habits that were driving greater frequency of messaging around safety. How do we prioritize safety? So, it’s very simple thoughts and ideas for any leader to start thinking about how do I level up my influence on safety today? Dr. Josh Williams talked to us about the impact of safety leadership on culture. Really powerful themes in terms of personal self-reflections around it.

We had John Drebinger talked about communication and the impact of communication and how a leader shows up and communicates the importance of safety. Really powerful stories and examples from a magician turned into a great safety speaker. Six, we had Ron Gantt and Sheldon Primus talk to us about employee involvement. Great stories. Ron recent episode, great conversation where he shared so many great ideas around how you level up employee involvement, how you get frontline participation, and safety to get better outcomes. Such an important topic that probably doesn’t get as much attention as it should. Sheldon shared some examples as well from his time when he was running a water plant water treatment facility and how he engaged with frontline workers to make them feel that they were part of the program and increases safety ownership. Such an important, powerful topic. Martin Royal talked to us about coaching. We talked about safety leadership before and the impact of it. Martin talked about how you leverage a coach that has expertise in safety leadership, whether you’re in safety or in an executive position, to really level up how you show up, how do you drive some daily practices, habits, think about some of your blind spots to drive real, meaningful, impact, tangible stories there.

Theme number seven, we talked about suicide prevention, mental health, two topics that don’t get covered enough when it comes to safety leadership, but really important. We talked about the linkage back to safety in teams of decision making. We had Dr. Sally Spencer talked about suicide prevention, very tangible ideas that safety leaders can take forward to bring the topic of suicide prevention and mental health to the workplace to reduce injuries. And we also had Michael Weston with a very powerful story about a personal experience and the impact of stress and how it can impact mental health in the long term. We got more episodes on this topic coming up in the new Year. I recently recorded a great episode with Denver Fire and really, in terms of how they brought in suicide prevention and mental health in a very concrete, tangible way in the workplace.

And finally, theme number eight is a bit of a concoction of different important themes around safety in different areas that you should focus your safety programs on. We talked about ladder safety. We had Dylan come talk to us about his personal experience and a great invention he came up with to stabilize ladders.

It really made me rethink personally even why am I going up a ladder to go on the roof? And some of the things that you can do, both personally, but also in terms of impacting a ladder safety. We had Anthony Corinne talked to us about active shooter training. Unfortunately, something we hear too often in terms of active shooters, the training component becomes important. How do you have situational awareness? Great tips to be aware of what you should do yourself, but also how can you train your workforce on this important theme? We have Patty Ackerman come talk to us about stretching programs. So important, and a lot of jobs are physically demanding and get a lot of soft tissue injuries. Patty talks to us about some stretching programs, how leaders can reinforce them to make sure that people are doing it on a regular basis. Really, really important part of most safety programs. And finally, we had Cam Mackey and Dan Glucksman come talk to us about heat Stress, a topic that is becoming more and more prevalent. A topic that as global warming continues to increase, we’ve seen this year regions that normally don’t get extreme heat get extreme heat. Like the UK, like the Pacific Northwest, and some very tangible approaches that people can take around both PPE, but also training, awareness, peer checks on this heat stress theme. All themes that should be addressed, all key learnings that came to us in 2022.

Thank you for all of you to join our show. We would like to announce that we will be skipping the episode for the last week of December for the holiday season and meet all of you again in the new year. We have a lot of experts all lined up for 2023. I don’t want you to miss another episode of Safety Guru. Stay safe. And more importantly, happy holidays.

Thank you for listening to the Safety Guru on C-suite Radio. Leave a legacy. Distinguish yourself from the pack. Grow your success. Capture the hearts and minds of your teams. 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.