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. Welcome to the Safety Guru. Today, I’m very excited to have with me Robert Pater. He’s a founder Managing Director of Movesmart. He’s authored well over 370 articles in safety. Robert, really excited to have you with me today on the podcast. I think we’re going to have an exciting conversation I have.

I’m looking forward to it, Eric.

Excellent. How did you start in safety and into this quest of 370 articles plus?

Yeah. This goes back because I’m not a spring chicken any longer. A long time ago, I was coordinating the Stress Management Center of a Hospital. Let me back up a little bit. My undergraduate degree is in organizational development and Leadership Processes or processes as a Canadian. Then my master’s degree is in industrial psychology. I learned when I was studying industrial psychology about the early ergonomists, Gilbreath, Sam Taylor, and all of those people. I went, wow, this is very similar to what I was doing in my practice of internal martial arts. I was struck by that. Fast forward, so I’m coordinating the Stress Management Center of a hospital in Portland, Oregon, where I live. The occupational health nurse said, hey, Robert, you are doing anything this afternoon. No. I said, well, there’s the Oregon Governor’s Occupational Health and Safety Would you like to go? It happened to be literally walking distance from the hospital. It was like two blocks away at that point. I went there, and this is one of the times you didn’t have to register in advance. This is quite a while ago. I was very, very disappointed in what I saw because people were reading stuff.

They were like, why are you reading? Why don’t you just give it out? The papers and stuff like that. There was nothing what I call innovative there. I went, Okay. I looked at the brochure and I saw who was running it, and I contacted the person after this conference was over and I said, hey, can I do an RFP, Request for Proposal? Because I think I can do something that I might add because I was doing a lot of training at the time. The organization is quite a bit but based on my background. They said, well, do you know we do this every other year? No, I didn’t know that. I’m clueless. He said, Tell me about yourself. I told him, he said, would you like to be on the steering committee? We would love to have higher level training and safety. It was quite a while ago. So, I said, Sure. And I thought that was very impressive, except anyone he could rope in to be on the steering committee, he was happy to get in. I was like, Meat, fresh meat. So, I did this, and we’re sitting around because it’s every other year in Oregon, it still is.

We’re in a bi-annual, basically budget, so it’s a bi-annual conference. So, we’re sitting around, and I knew a lot about the martial art that I was doing then was a jiu-jitsu system, and I was a third-degree black belt in at that point. I had my own views when I was teaching this about what to do, how to prevent fall, how to keep your balance, what to do if you do fall. I said, What about something on slip trips and falls? And all of these corporate safety people were going, wow, I’d love to see something new and different on slip trips and falls. I went, and I didn’t even know it was an issue. I started researching it. Shortest version is I pilot it with an organization I was working with. I got there and I said, well, how many handouts should I bring? I said, I don’t know. Before they knew how many signups there would be. This is all different now. And they said, Bring 15. Well, I was a Boy Scout, and the motto when I was a Boy Scout was be prepared. And my motto was, you could never be prepared enough.

I brought 30 and 300 people showed up. They had to open up the rooms, the dividing rooms in this hotel. I went, wow, and I started getting hired. That’s the short version. My very first article that I ever wrote was published in the June 1985 issue of Professional Safety magazine, a motion training and Analysis for the ’80s. It shows you how long ago that was. I’ve done a reprise on that, and that got me started. I started getting hired right away, and then pretty soon, somebody sent the American Society of Safety Engineers, which is CSSE’s sister organization. Sure. Now, they changed their name a few years ago to American Society of Safety Professionals. But the person who was in charge of continuing Ed back then, contacted me. I didn’t even know who he was. He said, I hear you’re doing stuff on ergonomic-related things. Yeah. He said, we need somebody to do continuing education courses in ergonomics, three-day courses. I said, Well, I’m not a traditional ergonomist. He says, oh, I could get a lot of people to do that. I want a different approach. That’s good. So, they hired me, and I went around North America doing three-day programs on ergonomics.

I said, this is what I know about. This is what I don’t know. I was like, Shit, we’ll talk about this. But ergonomics is, and I’ve learned a lot more since then, as you might expect.

Yes. So, let’s get into what is ergonomics and why is it so critical?

Okay. Well, ergonomics to me is basically you’re dealing with among the most common injuries that people have. Predominantly musculoskeletal injuries, strains and sprains, whatever you want to call it, call different things, a communal trauma disorders, different things, but they’re super common. Even though they’re not usually considered a CIF, serious injury fatality, to me, it’s a serious injury because of the numbers of injuries. If you look at the hit parade of every organization that have charted the most costly compensable injuries, workers’ comp or WCB or WSIB, if you’re in Ontario province, injuries in the United States, anywhere, you’ll see soft tissue injuries are at the top of the It is the leader on the hit parade over and over again, and people who try to do all things. So, one thing, cost money. Two, organizations are working thinner, which they are nowadays, it reduces productivity. Organizations are turning down work because they can’t cover it. Some organizations, they can’t hire enough people to do that. It affects not just people, which is a fallacy. People often think binarily where they think, well, you’re either injured on a claim or you’re Okay, you’re 100%, like a life switch.

But this is more like a dimmer switch where people have varying degrees of impairment. People have been working for a while, especially as they get older, and especially in Western Europe and in North America, the workforce has been statistically aging. The longer you’ve been working, the longer you live, the more likely there’ll be cumulative trauma that wears you down. There are people who work, and it’s not a question of doing this because they’re out of touch, but they basically are working impaired. They might be working 75% or 60%. That’s the top, like a battery as it ages, as it wears down its maximum capacity. There’s a lot of factors about productivity, about all of impairment, and it affects other people. Co-workers have to pick up the load. So ultimately, this is a major injury source. So, what we deal with are three types of injuries, personal injuries. Soft tissue injuries is the number one thing we deal with. Two, slip trips and falls, and three, hand injuries. And these are all movement-related injuries that are intimately related in our mind.

Excellent. So, tell me a little bit about I know when we talked, or initially, you talked about how this space has been hijacked. Tell me a little bit what you mean by that and how you look at improving the fit between people and the work that they’re doing.

Okay. To me, hijacked is, you’re right, I did use that word, and that’s a little strong. I think it’s going to be people offended by that. What is the expression, if you have a hammer, the world looks like it’s filled with nails? A lot of people, if you look at the early ergonomists, around the turn between the 19th and 20th century, there were people who were focusing on movement, as I said, Frederick Taylor, Frank and Lillian Gilberts, and all of that stuff, and many others. But ergonomics really came to play. If you look at the history, During the War II and cockpit ergonomics in the Korean War, and it became an issue of design, which is really important. To me, what many people call ergonomics, they default towards designing the workplace and the workstations and tools to fit tasks, workers and the tasks that they do. I agree with that. That’s one part, though. The thing that I take issue with is that that is not the only part of ergonomics. If you look at ergonomically certifying organizations, they acknowledge that now at this point. I define ergonomics, and the word ergonomics does not mean design.

It means literally ergo, which means energy or work, I think from the Greek, I believe, might I say it might be the Latin, I think it’s the Greek. And nomics means study of or science of. And so, it’s a study of work or energy. It’s not design. I define ergonomics as improving the fit between people and their tasks, at work or at home, whatever it may I believe there were three ways, three strategies to do that. See, if you define that as design, all you can do is design things out, buy new tools, that you have no other actions in your toolkit. Whereas This way, the first thing always should be designing out risks that you can design out. I absolutely agree with that, but that’s only the first step. The reality is, what do you do when people are working from home or they’re working on a client’s surf or they’re walking in the parking lot where you can’t cover the entire parking lot and stop it from raining and being wet? To me, the second aspect is that the first aspect is bringing work closer to people by, again, design and purchasing, basically.

The second aspect is bringing people metaphorically closer to work by helping them make adjustments the best they can. The third is the ideal, which you do both, like two hands clapping together. We believe that the highest-level ergonomics is a combination of first design and purchasing out what you can, realistically, but not stopping there. Our Bailiwick, because there’s a lot of people who are really good at design, is basically helping people make adjustments to areas that are not cost-effective. I could give you lots of examples of that. At home, you can’t design up people’s exposures at home where they may get cumulative exposures and cumulative trauma.

Or even if you think about maintenance repair workers that are going to different sites, utility workers that are digging or doing work above ground. If you’re an electrical utility, it’s not a controllable environment.

Absolutely. Great examples, Eric. We’ve worked with those people a lot. In fact, often have gotten called in, initially at organizations by the maintenance professionals because they have no control of where they have to go in their awkward positions, and they can’t say, well, let’s read it. Well, you can’t shut down the whole facility. To redesign that, it’s not cost effective and not likely or if it is, it’s not within their power. What do you do until then? I agree.

Right, exactly. I have read some of your articles where you talk about the martial art of safety. You talked about your jiu-jitsu background. Tell me a little bit more about the martial art of safety, what it means to you, and how that links into Move Smart. Okay.

For me, there’s different types of martial arts, and this is just my opinion. I’m not saying I’m an expert. I’ve been doing this for quite a while. One of our directors of Move Smart training is, in my mind, a martial arts master. But I’ve done this quite a while, and I’m going to do some things. But to my view is that… Oh, by the way, I’ve written a book on martial arts and leadership that’s in five languages, neither here nor there. I probably out for it. To me, the martial arts focus that we look at is what I call, and not just me, internal martial arts. What internal martial arts deals with is direction of energy. It incorporates both mental and physical skills. It’s not, how do you beat up people? How do you get the strongest, the fastest that you can do? It’s how can I redirect forces? But redirecting forces in internal martial arts starts from within. If you can’t… One of my martial arts instructors said to me once, Hong Chou, Wing Shong kung fu, said, If you can’t control your own temper, you’ll never be able to fight effectively. If you can’t calm yourself down.

So, you have to start within. And that is another quote from that, which is great, which is great. The Philippine approach in martial arts with the guy that studied with a little bit said, I asked my master how to make this world a better place. He said, Develop yourself first. I believe that internal martial arts, as well as highest level safety is an internalization process. It starts by changing people’s minds so that they can be more in control of themselves and their own safety. It deals with mental and physical skill sets, of which I can talk about if you want, it doesn’t matter. But that our people can learn and they can apply everywhere that are portable, that are not based upon working on somebody’s providing for me, but when something unexpected happens, I still have skills I can use and apply Not that it means it’s going to fix everything, but I can do the best I can. We tell people, if you’re in a very poorly designed environment, you’re never going to… With your best skills, you’re never going to make that a great workplace, but you make it less bad. Maybe if you could put the odds 15 or 20% more in your favor of not being injured, that’s the best you can do.

That’s better than nothing. 100%. You’re not a victim. That’s basically what it is, it’s like having better control of yourself. We have a catchword phrase that we talk about is safer, stronger, more in control. So, we’re more in control of ourselves first. Does that help? Give you an idea?

Yeah, very helpful. Yeah, absolutely. I think that also gets into some of the pieces we started out with in terms of the learning and development and how you drive skill sets around this.

Absolutely. That’s one of the things that I feel very, very strongly about. Like, martial arts are not based upon… I mean, you have to start with an attitude, which is, to me, the other word for mindset. You go in there with the right attitude, but you still have to have the skills. You have to know what to do in situations. It’s not enough. It’s critical, but it’s not enough. It’s a precursor. Then you have to have the mindfulness of what’s unique about the situation, and you have to have the skills to be able to deal with that, go, oh, I haven’t even counted this before. What might I possibly do to make the situation better or at least less bad for me, less risky.

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When we last connected, one of the things you talked about that was really important is how do you get senior leaders engaged in these programs. You had a cool story about golf and how you use that as a connection point. Tell me a little bit about it, because that’s a big part of what’s missing is I see a lot of programs where they teach something on ergonomics, and then it falls apart.

Yeah. One of the things that we believe strongly is that the best way to develop internal motivation for safety, to internalize safety, is to hook into people’s already existing motivation, as opposed to try motivating them by what you think is important to them or what you think should be important to them as a safety professional or leader.

100%.

And so, this story, and I could give you lots of examples like this, but the story about this was I remember going to a large manufacturing organization. There was a guy there, and we’d done a bunch of move smart training, and the guy came in there and he was angry with me. I was perplexed because it got really good reception, number one. Number two, what we did, and number two, injuries started going down by a lot. People were using it. They could calculate. They could see the leading indicators as well as the trailing indicators. And he said, Come here. And he closed his door, and he pointed to a diploma on the wall, and it was a PhD. He had a PhD in ergonomics. He said, I got a PhD in ergonomics. What do you get? And I said, I just have a master’s degree in industrial psychology. One part of that. I said, you know? And he said, well, how come they’ll listen to you and not to me? I tell them to bend their knees. I said, and what I wanted to tell him was that… Because I am not telling them anything.

I’m letting them discover this and letting them decipher themselves and figure that out and make their own decisions and show with methods that we’ve developed. And I said, But I said to him, it’s like we try to do this so it’s interactive and let people try to figure it out for themselves through guidance that we give. He still wasn’t very happy with me, but he persisted on wanting to be the person who was dictating writing and telling, as opposed to bringing it out from people. And there’s been, subsequently, been a lot of studies in neuroscience that when people have self-convinced, they learn faster, and the learning stays longer. There’s a great article in Scientific American by… Her last name was Solie. She got a PhD in neuroscience herself, and she quoted other studies on this and self-convincing is the way to go. We’ve been doing that for a long time. It’s the basis of martial arts. If it doesn’t work, It’s useless. It’s got to work for you. Even if it works for him and her, it doesn’t work for me. It doesn’t matter. That’s what we focus on. To me, the key with senior management and everybody is hook into their personal, again, existing motivation.

The mistake in my mind that a lot of safety and ergonomics professionals do make is they make an assumption, which ironically is anti-ergonomic, is that everyone has a one-size-fit all motivation system. Every senior manager is only interested in bottom line, how much money do I save? I’ve run into a lot of managers who are more concerned about keeping people at work. I met some who were more concerned with morale when morale was plummeting or It’s productivity, whatever. Maybe it’s not just workers’ comp claims to be reduction. It’s not to the absence of payouts. What we have learned is that if you can find what people are really interested, such as in this particular case, without going into it, finding that a senior manager who could be less interested in ergonomics or safety, frankly, or minimally just theoretically interested. But when I saw that he had a golf club, a driver, and I mentioned that, I said, would you like to see something that might work better for your drive. All of a sudden, he gave me all the time in the world because I hooked into… I was lucky. Just happened to be. Dumb luck.

That is the key. That’s one of the reasons, by the way, we believe for anybody out there, make ergonomics focus not only on work and prevention of injuries at work, but what can you do at home? Not only injury prevention, but what can I get out of it? What are the benefits to me beyond the absence or reduction of prevention of injuries that I may never believe will really happen to me. That’s one of the critical aspects. Then the other aspect, I’m bringing this down, there’s a lot, too, but make it easy for people to change. I believe that… I run an article once; I make it easy leadership. I believe that the key to a successful leadership in general is, one, make it easy for people to change. The less I ask for people to do, the better. The 15 minutes I get with senior managers is better than the 2 hours I really wish I had that I’m not going to get or they’re going to be on their computers. So, what can I do in the time they’re lot of? The less I ask of them, the more they’re likely to do it.

Secondly, make it easier for them to help me get better at what I do. Those are really the principles that we operate with, and it seems to work.

I think the part as well is the more you connected with the individual. I was actually just talking earlier today to a CEO who’s comparing two different leaders, very senior leaders, and how one of them was able to get a very strong engagement through and through in safety all the way to the grassroots, the engagement, the involvement, versus the other one is equally committed to safety, but for some reason, they’re still struggling in the middle. The main difference between the two leaders is one is just very personal, makes it their own. They’re both equally committed to safety, but this one connects with everybody, like you said, makes it personal with everybody. It’s personal to him in terms of how he shows up. The result is, lo and behold, in a two-year period, huge, huge shift in terms of people seeing my leaders is committed, seeing their supervisors are committed, and showing up for safety, and they care about their personal safety, whereas it was nothing like those two years prior. It had that impact through the entire organization, just by buying into it, showcasing it, making it real.

Great example, Eric. Seeing very similar things. To piggyback on that even further, the type of injuries that we’re dealing with, again, soft tissue injuries, slip trips, and falls, and hand injuries, are Personal and everybody, I don’t care if you’re a senior manager, everyone is prone, and their families are, too. This is the example that I always find about ergonomics. It is a leveler, a potential leveler in an organization. The type of exposures and risks people have and the injuries that people have. It does not matter if you’re sitting behind a desk all day and have shearing forces from sitting too much or you’re traveling and carrying suitcases. Everyone is prone. Great example, Eric.

What do you do to get those leaders to get personally involved? Because I think in our prior conversation, hopefully I’m not confusing conversations, but you were mentioning I’ve seen multiple programs through and through. They look the same, but some work and some don’t work. They just would go through the flavor of the moment, change it every year or so. But it’s not about the program, it’s about how leaders show up.

Yes, I think that is really important. Now, one of the things that we do differently, and this comes ultimately from my background in organizational development, industrial psych, is that we don’t believe in training, for what we do, at least. When I think that as of training, where one person, a so-called expert, imparts information to other people and expect them to go ahead and do that. The problem with that for us is the type of, again, injuries that we address are based upon people who have long-standing habit patterns. People have lift, pushed, pulled, walked.

The same way forever. Exactly. Use their mouse the same way forever.

Exactly. So, one shot exposure for a multiple exposure injury over years and years and years at a habitual are less likely to make a difference. So, one of the things that we believe is develop leadership internally in an organization. I’ve written on this, too. The only thing we do at this point is we work with organizations, and we train, we call them instructor catalysts, internal catalysts, to first do initial training, then to go ahead and often coach and reinforce this on an often very basis that’s informal. Sometimes we find the best type of reinforcement are in the break rooms or in the parking lot, and the supervisors just talking during the meeting, five-minute meeting, that’s about something else, a different toolbox meeting. Then formally, how do we keep this alive on an organizational level? That makes a huge difference that organizations are flabbergasted by. If you can get people to become committed, excited advocates, internal advocates who actually have skills that people haven’t seen and can do and do something differently, it goes a long way. That’s one thing. But often senior managers will often be extremely excited this, too, because, again, they’re individuals first.

Approaching them as individuals, just like you said, focusing on a personal level is critical and structurally embedding that in the organization. It’s not relying upon someone like me to keep coming back to them. Because we work with huge organizations. We’re small. We can’t keep coming back to United Airlines or US Steel or Hans or some of our biggest clients over a long period of time. It’s not cost-effective. We don’t have the manpower or the interest in doing that. We want to decrease dependency on us and try to create internal dependency, both not only within people, but also within the organizations. Does that answer at all? Yeah, it does.

I think the other part that makes it challenging with ergonomics is the… Like you talked about, there’s a habit that goes on for a very long period of time, but the cause-and-effect relationship between the actions I’m taking, and the result takes a very long time to actually get it. Once you get it, it’s a problem, its pain, and it’s very hard to go backwards.

Great example. Can I hook up on that a little bit? Yeah, please. Okay. What we often, I even talk about that often these injuries are the straw that broke the camel’s back. You’ll hear and see people, maybe it’s happening to people listening is that you do something that you’ve done thousands of times before. Pick up a shirt off a bed or a piece of paper on the floor and you, quote, throw your back out. Well, it’s not because of the weight of that, it’s the compounding motions of the again, straw that broke Campbell’s back. It’s cumulative trauma. There are studies on this that show a lot of soft tissue injuries are cumulative trauma based. So, think about the positive aspects. Why instead, if I found ways to make these motions in a safer manner so it didn’t build up over time? Well, the problem with that, just like you’re bringing it up, is that it’s not reinforcing to say, I’m going to do this to be safe. What we focus on, do this so you feel stronger. You can feel more balanced. You have more energy, again, emphasizing the benefits that people can really feel very, very quickly.

And so, they are self-reinforcing. When people are self-reinforced and they go, I’m very pleased. That felt good, they’re more likely, we think, to compound those motions again. And that’s what we base what we do upon.

And very linked to some of the work on habit formation and in terms of you need to get a shorter term, near term, recognition reward from doing it. And so, the injury is something in the future you don’t expect to have. But feeling stronger, feeling more energized is something near term.

More about absolutely, fully, totally agree with you. And in fact, we believe, we’ve created demonstrations where people feel immediate dramatic improvements in their balance and their strength and less force transfer to small of the back, for example. People go, Wow, it’s amazing. It’s incredible. That’s what we hear all the time. We’re used to it. But now we have to train and say, okay, how do you really use this? We in real life? I agree with you. Again, it goes back to the less you ask of people, the easier you make it for people to feel the difference, to make a change, the more likely they’ll continue to do that.

And that last piece you just mentioned gets me to Eureka Moments. We talked about that as well. If you feel instant gratification, recognition, tell me about the link to eureka moments and some of the research from Duke around the neuroscience of it.

So, we’re doing this in June. And recording this. And the, what do you call it, in May, so a month ago, Duke University came out with a study that was in Neuroscience News, which I subscribe to. I invite everyone to subscribe to that. It said, Here’s the title of it, take a Moment’s double memory by rewiring the brain. Basically, the study showed that so-called aha, where that insight, those moments of exciting insight, starts creating a massive change where people remember it and they will duplicate that. Again, according to Duke University quotes, rewire is the brain. That’s what we’ve been doing for a long time without those studies because we know it works. It’s human nature. A lot of studies come out and prove scientifically what a lot of people knew for a long period of time, experientially. That’s what we believe, and that’s where those immediate—that I talked about earlier about those immediate improvements in balance and strength and reduction of force and tension in areas that are uncomfortable come from. We’ve doing that, that really gets people’s attention from anywhere, from senior CEOs of companies down to people working offices all the way throughout.

If somebody wants to get in touch with you, so you’ve shared a fair bit about Move Smart and how you bring the martial arts to safety, how you engage your leaders to get better traction on programs, what’s the best way to get in touch with you to get more discussion, more conversation on this topic?

Probably easy as two ways, there are movesmart.com is our website, or look at me in my LinkedIn profile. I have a lot of… If you connect with me, I put all my articles on there as they are published, and I’m constantly writing. I’m in graduate school perpetually, always writing. That’ll be another way or contact me in any way. But I’m hoping that this is of value to people. The principles are not something that are germane only to us. We have worked this and refined this over almost four decades, three plus decades, but I believe they can be used by anybody, anywhere, to make significant and lasting changes.

Excellent. Well, thank you so much, Robert, for joining me today. I appreciate the conversation. We’ve covered a lot of ground.

Thank you very much, Eric, for having me.

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.