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.