Deep Dive into Organizational Learning and Safety Culture with Gareth Lock

Mar 9, 2023

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ABOUT THE EPISODE

“The beauty of human factors is that it’s applicable in every space. It’s just the stories that change.” In this episode, we’re excited to have Gareth Lock take us on a deep dive into organizational learning, decision-making, and safety culture through the lens of human factors. Tune in as Gareth shares practical advice for creating a shared mental model within an organization through prioritizing psychological safety and how to effectively foster a culture of embedded learning and growth.

READ THIS EPISODE

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 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 Gareth Lock, who is the founder of The Human Diver with ex-military aviator who’s taken his operational experience into diving and safety. Gareth, you have a very exciting and interesting story and background, so why don’t you start us there?

Excellent. Thanks Eric, for the invite on to here. So yes, it’s quite a diverse background. So, I spent just over 25 years in the Royal Air Force as a Hercules navigator, transport, aircraft, teaching and operating both low level, high level operational environments. I then went into flight trials, then did some research and development work, like working for an organisation like DARPA, then into systems engineering and procurement. So, I’ve got a very broad view of how systems work and then come 2015 decided I was going to leave the Air Force and set up my own consultancy, which was about bringing crew Resource Management nontechnical skills into high-risk environments. Crew Resource Management is just part and parcel of how military aviation operates. And so, I’ve been a diver since 20 19 99 Is certified and then got back into it in about 2005. And I’ve been trying to bring this view of safety and operational concepts into the diving world. So, in 2016, I set up the human diver. And the goal of that was really to bring crew source management, nontechnical skills, just culture, psychological safety, all the stuff that creates safety or influences safety into the diving space.

So since then, I’ve written a book, put a documentary together, trained probably about 500 people face to face around the globe and about two and a half thousand people online through face to face and online self-paced learning programs. And the interesting thing is people take the materials that I’ve written, the book that I’ve written, under pressure, they’ve gone. This is not a diving book. It’s like no, I know. And that’s the beauty of human factors, is that it’s applicable in every space. It’s just the stories that change. Individuals behave broadly the same way; organizations behave broadly the same way. So why can’t you take stuff from as a general thing from aviation or oil and gas and healthcare and move them into other spaces? And the biggest barrier is that doesn’t apply to me because I’m not in that space and it’s a known bias that’s there.

So, you touched on briefly CRM, which is very common, as you mentioned, in the Air Force, in civil aviation as well. Tell me a little bit more about CRM and how you think it applies to a lot of organizations.

Yeah. So, CRM is now known as Crew Resource Management. It used to be known as Cockpit Resource Management, and it came about from a number of seminal events in aviation, like Tenerife Kegworth, Manchester, where the analysis of flight deck recorders recognized that actually the crew knew that there were things not quite going right, but they were unable to speak up and challenge what’s going on. And it wasn’t until later events that they realized that actually, the back-end crew, the cabin crew, they also had a part to play in building this shared mental model. So, it then became Crew Resource Management. And what that? It started off as communication and assertion skills. Where I’m taking it personally and where it should be is about creating this shared mental model within an operational team. So that could be a flight deck crew plus the cabin crew. It could be on an oil rig where I’ve done CRM work before. Well, you’ve got the drill crew. In a normal business, even if it’s a high-risk business, you will have different perspectives about what’s going on. You’ve got the senior leadership, the middle management, the front-line supervisors, and the operators.

Each one of them will have a different perspective about what’s going on. And the purpose of CRM is to try and align those views as best they can. They will always be different because they’re all have different perspectives. But that’s also part of CRM is the fact that the front-line workers recognize that the senior management have got a different set of problems to solve. They don’t understand what we do. Well, that’s not their job to. But the purpose of this CRM is to share these interlinking circles, like a Venn diagram, that there will be a thread that overlaps. And so, the purpose there of CRM is to increase the overlap. So, we’ve got shared knowledge, but not make it so overlap that we end up with group think and nobody’s thinking outside the box or the circle.

Right. So, you touched on when you were talking about this, you talked to shared mental model. Tell me a little bit more about how that applies to an organization and how do you build it?

Yeah, so shared mental models, the world goes around as our decision making is based on these mental models, approximations of how things will operate. And as we build experience, we gain knowledge, we start to populate that model. And the research shows that the more models we have, the more accurate our decisions can be because we’ve got better, more realistic patterns to match that are there. Now, how that happens in an organization is that it’s done at multiple levels. So, you could have something like a small team debrief an after-action Review, which is about sharing a very local story about how that last event worked and not just about where things went wrong, which is often where the focus is on debriefs. What went wrong? Nothing. Well, what’s the point of running a debrief? But actually, the After-Action Review is about understanding how things went and how do we improve. Then you can start to grow those, and you can get I mean, the US forest Service has got some great resources in this, looking at facilitated learning analysis, where you start stepping up to a bigger group, a bigger team, and then you’ve got something as large as a learning review, where you’re bringing in multiple subject matter experts.

And the purpose of those learning reviews and to facilitate learning analyses is to bring multiple perspectives, conflicting perspectives. And you’re never going to get a unique line that says, and this is what happened, because and that’s uncomfortable for businesses because they want to have one truth. Well, there is no one truth. Each level within the organization will have some interactions and relationships which shape how they view the world. So, organizations need to create an environment where the bad news can be shared, where we can have constructive dissent, where we can undertake these intelligent failures. As Amy Edmondson talks about that we go out there and innovate and expect that okay, failure is okay as long as it’s not catastrophic, because the catastrophic basically means that we didn’t pick a whole bunch of other minor failures up and we’re hiding those.

So, when you mention shared mental model, you bring a lot of examples about organizational learning, which predefined that we’ve had some events that we’re learning from, which any organization does. But is there something that can be done at the front end as you’re coming to start implementing something to define a shared mental model within the organization?

Well, I’ll start off with saying, look, we, we are a learning organization. That means that we’re going to make mistakes.

Sure.

And you know, Timothy Clark talks about the four stages of psychological safety of inclusion learner safety, contributor safety, and, and Challenger safety. And organizations want to have this Challenger safety that the people speak up when things aren’t going right. So, you don’t have to have an accident, but you want to have people challenge what’s going on. But unless you feel included and you feel that actually you can make a mistake, then actually you’re never going to get to the Challenger space. So how do leaders create that environment? That’s about talking about the issues they face. It’s about opening themselves up and saying, you know what, I don’t have the answers and here’s some mistakes that I’ve made. And actually, they are going to model that vulnerability so that people are able to speak up and there are a whole bunch of things that people can do. So, if you talk about mental model as being a culture frame of understanding how this works? Absolutely. You can have a learning culture created within an organization and when people bring ideas to you, awesome. Explore them. That might be they don’t work, that’s fine, but go back to them and say it doesn’t work because of X, Y and Z or yes, let’s give it a go and if we fail, we fail.

It’s not a problem other than there might be some resource, but at the same time you might find some amazing stuff in the heads of the people. And that links me just to something that sort of triggered a thought when you said about organizational learning. Organizations don’t learn. Organizations have memories that are created by individuals within the organization. So, it’s about how do you get the knowledge out of those individuals and share them. And there’s some great work by Dave Snowden talking about the challenges of doing that. Because if you have a common understanding, a common vocabulary set, a shared mental model of what stuff looks like, then actually you don’t have to spend quite so long explaining something to somebody else. But if you go to somebody who’s got no idea about what’s going on, you’ve got to spend time building a framework in which you can start hanging ideas off. Because if you give somebody a whole bunch of ideas and they’re not able to abstract it or convert it into their own mindset or experiences, it’ll just go whistling past and it won’t make sense. So, it often does depend on the audience that you’re talking to and what do they know about stuff.

And it might be you’ve got to tell a whole bunch of different stories, analogies, bring those metaphors in so people can make that bridge. So, it’s not an easy thing to do. I get that it requires investment and that’s often a bit that organizations don’t follow through because they don’t see the value in the learning.

Right. So, what are some of the ways that you’ve helped instill organizational learning? As you said, it’s really the collective memories. You talked about after action reviews, you talked about learning reviews, which are very much highly interactive, team-based reflections on what I was setting to do, what occurred, what can we take away from it which is positive and negative? If you won a battle, you want to know what did you do well? And if something didn’t go as well. So, it’s not just post-mortem, as some people call them, that says basically everything that went wrong. It’s very much constructive being part of many of them. So, tell me about some of the other tactics an organization that wants to embrace more deeper learning can take.

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, reenergize 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, one of the first things that I often do is run through concepts of nontechnical skills, about how you create this shared mental model and the fact that it’s made up of situation awareness, decision making, communications leadership, teamwork, performance shaping factors, that these are interdependent skills. And I’ll go through some workshops. I use computer-based simulations. I get people to fail in a non-professional, jeopardizing way. So, the simulations are used. They’re about flying prototype spacecraft. Nobody can bring any prior knowledge. We can mess around with team dynamics. And so, people who are normally following, they will now lead, and the leaders are now following. And often it’s a great way of showing leaders what it’s like not to have a voice because there might be some equipment failure, which means they can’t talk. And they’re now sat there, and you can see them being really frustrated because they can see a train wreck arriving in front of them, but they can’t say anything. And so, you say, what do you think it’s like to be a follower then, when you don’t have a voice? So that’s what it’s like. So, making it as experiential as possible, making it as unthreatening in a professional context as possible, digging into details and using a structured debris format, which is transportable across any sort of domain.

But it’s looking about creating psychological safety. It’s about learning from what went well and why and what do we need to improve and how. And out of those four questions, the why and the how and the most important observations are easy. Oh yeah, we saw that, we did this, blah, blah, blah. Okay, so why did he go well? I’ve got to think about this and how are we going to make the improvement? It’s not enough to say, yeah, yeah, we won’t do that. Okay, do you understand why you failed when that happened or the improvement that’s needed? And do you know how you’re going to address that? Because if you don’t, all you’ve done is you’ve created a lesson identified. You haven’t done a lesson learned. And that’s a bigger piece as well, is that lessons are not learned until you have identified the thing, put something in place, and measured its effect, because otherwise it’s just a lesson identified. And so, you go into organizations, and you say, we’ve got a lesson learned book. Oh, yeah, we got one of those. We’ll get one at the end of the project. We’ll do a sort of post-mortem.

Who looks at it before you run a project? Oh, nobody looks at it. Right. So, what you’re doing is you’re collecting a whole bunch of data that nobody’s using and you’re not actually feeding forward into the next program, project or whatever to see whether or not it changes that might not it doesn’t work. Well, that’s a lesson learnt too, that intervention didn’t work in that space. Okay, why? Let’s look at these things. So learning is a continual process that requires you to take stuff in the past, match with what you’ve got, project into the future, have a look. Not that in work, right? We learnt something and then move on its. It’s not just collecting stuff at the end of a project in a wash up and say, right, stick it in the register book.

So, an analogy I use often in the safety space, I talk about learning and then embedding of the learning. It’s essentially the same thing because at the end of the day, you haven’t learned anything if you haven’t actually embedded it is there’s a lot of great learnings that come in from events, they get communicated, shared, and then people forget about it and the same event continues to happen. And so, the embedding part is about change. Management is making sure that we check so one is validated, is this the right correction? But in some cases, it could be that the correction isn’t being adopted, followed as an embedding piece. Because if you want a thousand pilots to do the same thing tomorrow, a Bolton won’t necessarily change the behavior.

Absolutely. And the other thing to bear in mind is the number of stories that happen at the sharp end and why those stories are told. And there’s a piece that I’ve just finished reading as part of my studies, just looking at why those stories don’t get told up higher. And it’s often because the front-line operators don’t understand the organizational influence of accidents. So, when they report something, an incident, they look at very proximal social bits at the sharp end and they don’t understand that the genesis is often further up. So, they don’t see the value in sharing. And if they do share, they don’t necessarily draw the analysis and the investigation process often just focuses on fixing the worker when they’re inheriting failures that are within the system. And it’s about how do you best prepare those workers to finish the design? Because those workers always finish the design of the paperwork. The paperwork is never complete, and it can never be complete. So, it’s this bit of how do we close those gaps?

So, touch on another area that you touched. When you went and talked about CRM, you talked about decision making, you talked about communication. There’s a big part of CRM which is how do I make the decisions? And I know you do a lot of work around organizational decision making. Can you enlighten us with some thoughts and insights on that space?

Yeah, organizational decision making is really going to be influenced by whatever the drivers and the goals and the culture within the organization is. So, this bit about safety is our number one priority. Rubbish. It’s about making profit. So, if you want to create that change in terms of safety decisions? How does it align with the bigger picture that’s out there? And there’s some tools out there and I’ll make a big shout out to the guys at Red Team thinking for the way that they manage a structured constructive dissent program. So, looking at the assumptions, formally validating those processes, you’ve got a strategy document that says, this is how we’re going to do something, or this is what we’re going to do going forward. That document will have lots and lots of assumptions in it. Some of them are explicit and some of them are implied. So, going through those and saying, right, what are those assumptions? How do we know that we can validate those? And what happens if those validations are false? And there are a bunch of tools that you can do that, but the way that most of our decisions made, even at the organizational level, will be done through emotional processes rather than logical.

What we would talk about decision making tools like Toddler, which came from British Airways of Time. Diagnose options. Decide, assign, review. That’s a system two thinking process. Very rarely do people go through that and understand the biases that they’re in because they know what the goal is, right, we’re going to do that. And they’ll look for so much evidence to reinforce their thought process and their path, rather than looking for disconformity evidence and say, why is this a rubbish idea? What can go wrong? And one of those tools is a pre mortem. And that’s a great way of talking about failure that has happened. And you dig into the emotion that people are happy to share stories of failure as long as it’s in the past, but they’re not quite so happy to share stories that might fail on them. So, a facilitator creating an environment that tells a story that says the failure has happened, you’ve now got two minutes to write down all of the answers as to why that thing failed. And because you compress time, people just throw stuff on the paper and then you can go around in a structured way to explore those ideas and then say, have we got this on our risk register?

No. Okay. And it’s a great way of dealing with the emotions we have and exploiting them in a positive way.

Makes sense. So, a lot of very rich topics we touched on CRM, we talked about organizational learning, we talked about decision making. If somebody wants to get in touch with you, Gareth, and get more insights on all of these very rich topics, how can they go about doing it?

So, my website is thehumandiver.com now. It is primarily diving focused, but as I said right at the start, this is just anything that’s out there or [email protected] is the best email address for me. And you can find me on LinkedIn as well, posting pretty much every day and a whole bunch of useful stuff.

And as you said, this is not just about diving. This is about leadership. This is about being safe and organizational decision making.

Absolutely.

Thank you so much for joining us.

Thank you, Eric. I really appreciate the invite.

Definitely. Thank you.

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.

The Safety Guru with Eric Michrowski

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ABOUT THE GUEST

Gareth Lock is the founder of The Human Diver, an organisation set up to deliver education and research into the role and benefit of applying human factors, non-technical skills, psychological safety, and ‘just culture’ in sports, military, and scientific diving. He has published the book ‘Under Pressure’ and produced the documentary ‘If only…,’ both focused on improving diving safety and performance by looking at incidents through the lens of human factors. While primarily focused on diving, he also works in other high-risk, high-uncertainty domains such as healthcare, oil & gas, maritime, and software. He is currently undertaking a MSc in HF and System Safety at Lund University where he is looking at the power (and limitations) of storytelling to improve learning.

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

Book: www.thehumandiver.com/underpressure

Documentary (including workshop guide): www.thehumandiver.com/ifonly

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Workplace Wellbeing Ideas to Address 3 Core Injury Drivers with John Toomey

Feb 9, 2023

LISTEN TO THE EPISODE:

ABOUT THE EPISODE

We are excited to have John Toomey join the podcast this week to offer ideas to combat the three core injury drivers: stress, fatigue, and distractions. In this episode, John shares heartfelt personal experiences that focus on the importance of connecting and showing care for others. Tune in to learn inspiring ways to reduce serious incidents and increase personal well-being in the workplace through an intentional culture of care!

READ THIS EPISODE

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. Today I’m very excited to have with me John Toomey. He’s a workplace well-being thought leader out of Melbourne, Australia. He is also the global chairperson at the Global Workplace Wellbeing Initiative, part of the Global Wellness Institute in Miami. So, John, welcome to the show. Really excited to have you with me.

Hey Eric, it’s really good to be here, thank you for having me on this show.

Excellent. So, we’ve got an exciting episode, lots of themes to talk through. Why don’t you start out talking about your story? How did John get into this topic in this area?

Yeah, look, that’s a fair question. I mean I’m 62 years old and I did my first seminar in a workplace in 1984 because I was actually running fitness leader courses at night, teaching people to be gym instructors and somebody invited me to come and present at their company. I’ve done a lot of things in my life. I’ve worked in high performance roles in professional football for a long time, but I always had this incredible curiosity and I’ve always been one of those people if somebody gives me an answer to a question and it doesn’t land for me, I’ve got to keep looking till I learn. So that takes me to a place where I grasp things and understand them, complex things, and I have a skill to give it back to somebody in a simple way. So, I suppose my superpower of educating workforces in all areas of health and wellbeing, whether it be fatigue prevention, resilience mental wellbeing, all those personal, I suppose self-care topics and I’ve been doing a lot of that in white collar marketplaces. And then in 2008 when the GFC hit, my business evaporated overnight, and it took me a while to find my way into a new realm and that was through safety budgets because they needed the sort of education that I could deliver.

And I found my sweet spot because I grew up in a pub in working class area in Melbourne and I know how to speak to guys in those realms. So yeah, that’s an amazing journey that’s been going on for about twelve years now.

Nobody goes to a pub in Melbourne. I’ve never seen that occur.

No, never done. Never seen how many pubs have been turned into cafes now. Really?

So, we touch on fatigue. Why don’t we start there in terms of the physiology of fatigue and some of the key highlights there because we know fatigue is in a very strong era precursor. If we’re fatigued, we’re more likely to make a mistake. It’s been researched and documented in aviation, but lots of other spaces. So maybe let’s start there.

Yeah, look, it’s a great place to start. And there’s been so much work done really pushing and shoving companies to come up with better off sing systems. And it’s been amazing, the work. And most companies have tried really hard to do everything they can to make it as easy as possible for the worker. Where I focus here on is the personal responsibility of the worker to know what creates fatigue in their universe. Right now, obviously, sleep is one and everybody knows you need to get plenty of sleep and good sleep. And if you’re not a good sleeper, you need to get help with it so that you can master the art of sleep. I mean, I could sleep for Australia, so we help people with that. But there’s a couple of hidden ones. And probably the most significant is dehydration. And this is one that gets skimmed over time and time and time again. And to not go into too much detail around physiology because it takes a bit of time, but basically your body’s trying to get rid of heat all the time and it uses water to do it. Sure, it traps heated molecules of water and those molecules of water end up going to your sweat glands or to your lungs.

Every time you breathe out, you pass out water vapor and all that water’s coming from your bloodstream. And if your blood’s not replenishing, the water level in your blood drops, your blood thickens, which then compromises the efficiency of your circulation. And as soon as that happens, you stop getting adequate blood flow to your brain. And when your brain is not getting enough blood, it’s not getting enough oxygen or glucose. And the very first reflex response that your body kicks into is a yawn because it’s trying to blow off carbon dioxide and get oxygen in. And what happens to most people when they start yawning? They go looking for something to give them a Pick-me-up. So, they might have a coffee or.

A dehydrate or more exactly, or they.

Go those energy drinks, which are even more of a disaster, and they come back to their workstation, and they feel better. But that was because they walked, and the walking pushed their blood pressure up. Now, the challenge for people who are doing manual work, because they’re working physically, their blood pressure is up high, so they can be getting really, really dehydrated and not get that first symptom. And eventually, the second symptom of dehydration is when you haven’t fixed the problem, the body wants to get you horizontally and slow the metabolic rate to reduce heat production. And so, the second symptom is sleepiness. And that’s why people fall asleep at the wheel of motor vehicles. They’re just dehydrated. But again, if somebody is working hard, they can crash into heat stress because they become so critically dehydrated, there’s just not enough water in their body. And to give you a bit of an example of that, I was working with some guys who do road maintenance out in the north of South Australia. And sometimes in the summer out there, the temperatures hover around 50 degrees centigrade.

Just a little bit warm. Very hot.

Yes. For those who are not quite sure what that would be, that’s about 100- and 2223-degrees Fahrenheit. And so some of these guys I was working with, by 04:00 in the afternoon, they were so dehydrated, their urine was dark orange, and they had already consumed 15 liters of water. So, it’s critical. And the tip I give, I mean, I give people a tip that you should drink a liter of water for every 25-body weight per day. But if you’re out working in exposed conditions and it’s hot, you need to drink enough water so that you’re having a big urination every couple of hours and it’s close to watercolor.

Sure.

For some workers, that’s 20 liters of water a day. And obviously, if you’re drinking that amount of water, you also need to supplement minerals. So yeah, dehydration. If most organizations really focused on that one, they would clean up a lot of their fatigue problems.

Interesting. So is this something you talked about, personal responsibility. How do you convey this to an organization? Is it something you train workers to do? How do you touch on it? How do you get into the personal responsibility side?

Yeah, see, the thing is, people are not dumb, right? And when I go into an organization and I give them I’ve got a group of construction workers in front of me, for example, I could have 200 construction workers sitting there in the room, and I take them step by step through the physiology of dehydration, and they recognize the symptoms. They know they have yawning attacks. They know they get sleepy when they’re driving their car in the afternoon. The penny drops for them. And when I give them the instructions as to how to fix it, they just can’t do it. In fact, I’ve had sites where managers have rung me up and said, you won’t believe what I saw today. One of the old gnarly, old blokes, they were loading up the truck to head out to the job, and one of the young blokes turned up and was about to get onto the truck, and the old bloke said, where’s your water bottles? Knocking on this truck without your water bottles? And the thing is, somebody who has been battling dehydration, as soon as they start drinking heat and water, their energy levels go through the roof, so they get instantaneous knowledge of results.

Sure.

So, it’s pretty cool. Yeah. And then it just becomes an easy life habit for them.

Okay, so you touched as well in terms of personal responsibility, how do you drive that within an organization? And I know you’re going to have a pretty incredible story fairly soon from a Melbourne construction project, but tell me about a little bit in terms of how do you drive personal responsibility in an organization?

Yeah, so it’s a really interesting thing, and this is an education thing, and it’s a buy in thing for everybody, and it’s a bit of a process. I’ll give a two-hour seminar on this where I talk to guys through it, but basically anything that shows up in my universe is mine. That includes the response I create to something. So, for example, I could be sitting there, and you could walk into the room and start yelling at me and insulting me.

Sure. Not likely, but we could pretend I.

Could blame you for destroying my day.

Yes.

The reality is the response that I created to you doing that to me, that’s my response. I could also have a compassionate response like, wow, what’s happening with Eric today? I hope he’s okay, but we become reactive, and being reactive is no good because you’re out of control. Then people really get this when you actually stop to take note of how you’re responding to things. Even when you and I use storytelling to give guys examples, I say to them, how many of you have ever had somebody cut you off in the traffic and you decided it was your job to teach them a harsh lesson on why you shouldn’t do the traffic. And of course, they’ll put their hands up, and I said, well, think of a time when somebody got caught up in the traffic and they’ll contemplate that. And I said, how do you know that person’s child just didn’t just die? You don’t know. Your mind jumps to all sorts of conclusions because you’re in a reactive state. And the thing is, just by hearing that lecture, that doesn’t take you out of a reactive state. But in the workforce, everybody can help each other a little bit and go, man, you’ve been a bit reactive at the moment.

What’s going on? And it can be compassionate. It can be done with kindness and friendliness to the point where everybody starts to get better at managing their own universe and not just being swept along by temptation and circumstance which can get.

You are also in harm’s way and in danger’s way the minute you start getting reactive. Because you’re not thoughtful and in tentful in terms of your actions.

Well, you know, I mean, I’m careful when I say this, but how many people are in prison in your country, in the US. In Australia, because of a moment of reactive madness? That’s the bottom line. And so as a society and as a community, it’s a good idea to help each other with our reactivity. Absolutely.

You had a great story when we first connected from football to me, connects really well with us. Maybe if you don’t mind sharing it, because I think it’s about the response that you give at one point in time, if it makes sense to jump into that one.

Well, yeah, it’s a good story and I do tell them about workplaces a lot because it’s a genuine wakeup call, and it was a huge wake up call for me. So, for any of your listeners that don’t know what Australian Rules Football is, pull up YouTube and just watch some highlight videos of Australian Rules Football. It’s the best game on the planet and it’s a very fast game and it’s played on a very big field. The fields about 200 yards long and 180 yards wide and it’s oval shaped and there’s no offside, so the players are spread all over the field. And after I finished working in football, I was in my early forties, I went back to play at a local level. And the thing about Australian Rules Football, it is played all over the place, suburban levels. It’s incredible. Anyway, we’re playing a game one day and the team we’re playing, we’re from a pretty tough working-class area of town. There was a guy on their team, big powerful guy, bodybuilder, and he was running around throwing Haymaker’s king, hitting people and getting behind packs and just throwing these punches, belting people from behind.

And I said to the umpire, what are you going to do about that? And the umpire said, just concentrate on your own game, which is umpires speak for I’m too scared to do anything. And fair enough, too, umpires are not big people. I thought to myself, well, I’m the big hero in this team. I’m the biggest. I’m 64 and I’m the most experienced. I’m going to have to pop this bloke off to sleep before he hurts somebody. So, I was running around looking for my opportunity to swing one of him and knock him out. And I must have been just starting to mature a little bit by then, Eric, you know, because I started to have second thoughts on that, and I started to think about the consequences of that action.

Sure.

And I realized that that would be a stupid thing to do because his teammates would then react to that, and it would be full on. So, when the quarter time siren went, I ran over to him and I said, excuse me, mate, you got a SEC? He Shaked up to me. I said, hey, I just want to talk to you. And he said, “What about? I said, Listen, mate, you don’t know me, but I’m a pretty good guy. And all my teammates, brilliant guys, some of them are dads, and their kids are here watching. And I said, look, I imagine you’re a really good guy too, and I imagine all your teammates are really good guys. So, I can’t understand why you’re doing what you’re doing, right? And I swear his face nearly fell off. And he looked at me and he said, oh, mate, I’m so sorry, mate. I can be such an idiot sometimes. I said, really? He goes, oh, I get carried away. I can be such an idiot at times. I don’t even think. I said wow. I said, “I’ll tell you what, put your fists away. Let’s have a good game of Fleet and I’ll buy your beer after the game.

And he goes, yeah, all right, mate. So off I trot and all I can hear behind me is him yelling out, Sorry, mate. So, the rest of the game, we had a great game. I can’t even tell you who won, but there’s a few times you’ve run past me and go, oh, well done, mate. Become an encouraging person. And anyway, after the game I was in the social rooms, and he came walking through the crowd with a couple of beers and handed me one. And I said, I was going to buy you the beer. And he said, oh, no, mate, I owe you the beer. And I said, why? And he said, “Because I’ve not enjoyed a game of footy like that since I was a little kid.

Oh, wow.

And he goes, no. He goes, I loved it out there today. And I said, well, you play a good game. Because I had attention on him. I saw the things he did, and I was able to rattle off a lot of things he’d done. I said, you’re a pretty good player. You should play like that more often. Yeah, you probably should. And the conversation went quiet, and I said, but how about that other stuff? How’s that working for you? And he said, yeah, they’re not pretty good. I said, do you have kids? And he said, “I’ve got three. And I said, do you see them? And he said, no, I don’t. And now for me, that’s heartbreaking, right? That is so heartbreaking. And I thought in that moment, what is his football club doing? Because that’s what football clubs are for, right? So, I said to him, I know a fellow who specializes in working with guys like you. Would you like some help? And he said, I probably need it, don’t. I said you better do. So I went through the process, connected him up with my mate on Monday, hooked him up, and about eleven months later I got a text from my mate and the text just said he’s seen his kids this weekend.

Oh, well.

And as I say to the guys in the seminars, not everybody who’s behaving like an idiot is an idiot, right? So, there’s so much care that we can take of people and the ones who are behaving the worst, they probably need the most care, right?

And I think it’s a powerful story because you could have responded first for first you could have been aggressive. You were about to go down that path, just like the person who cuts you off responding, but instead you leaned in, showed care and tried to connect with them and obviously had a lasting impact in his life.

Yeah, well, it’s like, I could have done it, eric and I would probably still be a legend at Red Hill Football Club today, but he’d be dead. Right.

So, I think it’s very powerful story in terms of personal responsibility and the choices that you make, but in terms of how we show care in an organization, 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, reenergize your BBS program, enhance supervisory safety capabilities, or introduce unique safety leadership training and talent solutions, propulo has you covered. Visit [email protected]

So, tell me more about this culture of care, because in safety, we talk about this all the time, the importance of actively caring. You talk about this quite often. You just shared a story around caring. What does it mean culturally to show active care?

Yes. It’s so interesting, Eric, and it’s something that disappears in wealthy societies, and I’m going to justify that. So, if I go back, even if you go to cast your mind back 200 years to where you live right now and think about your forefathers and your four mothers living in those times, there was a lot to pay attention to. Just having water supply was difficult and required constant maintenance. Having a roof over your head that was going to survive when the snow came in, that required constant maintenance. How do you grow your food? How do you manage? How do you care for your crops, your animals, their pens? What do you do with sewage? And so, when people stepped out their front doors in the morning, life demanded their attention. So, their attention went out into the world to monitor, to notice. But it wasn’t just themselves, it was their neighbors as well, the community. You walk down the street, you check things all the time, and when your attention is out in the world, your mind’s not busy, right? But when was the last time you arrived home and put your key in your front door and stopped for a moment and had an anxious thought about the welfare of one of your neighbors?

The reality is, in the modern world, everyone’s okay, everyone’s got a safe place to sleep, they’ve all got food, so we don’t really need to worry about anybody.

Right?

But the problem is, the dangers are different now. It’s not the physical survival stuff, it’s the survival of the self, the mental survival, the spiritual survival, I suppose. Because what’s happening when life’s not demanding your attention, your attention wanders. And there’s lots of people out there working as hard as they can to seduce it. And probably the biggest master of seduction in the blue-collar industry are the betting apps. The gambling apps, sure. The thing is, when I was growing up in Collingwood, if you wanted to place a bet, you have to walk out the door, walk down the street, round the corner to go into the bedding shop, so everybody knew you were having a bet and if they got close enough, they could see how much you were betting. But the reality is, you could have placed a bet while I’ve been talking, and no one would know. So, there’s all these things and Shaquille O’Neill and all these other luminaries are, you know, getting paid huge amounts of money to seduce young men and young women into gambling. And the problem is, they get themselves into trouble and then they try to hide it.

And so now they’re living life, all their attentions back in their mind, gnawing over their regret for their losses and how they’re going to get out of it and have a hidden problem from their partner or whatever. And so they’re stepping onto a worksite and none of their attention is on.

What’s going on around them, which then gets you at higher risk of an accident, because your attention is not on the task in front of you, it’s distracted.

Yeah. And even if you haven’t succumbed to any of those things, most people in the modern world, most of their attention is on themselves. They become very self-absorbed, then they focus on my rights, my rights, my rights. But we actually all have obligations as well. And so, what I’ve been teaching the workforce to do is to relearn how to live in a more virtuous way. Now, I’m not talking about being religious here, I’m talking about bringing kindness back as one of your tools of life. Bringing back encouraging others, acknowledging others, being grateful, you’re practicing all of these things. Because what happens is, you see, if I walk up to you and I’m really kind to you, I’m likely to reciprocate, but I feel good about who I am.

Right.

Like, I was just sitting on a plane in Perth, waiting to take off to Melbourne and there were people loading onto the plane. You know how some people can be very slow getting into their seat?

Really?

And there was a woman, I think it should be a subject at school, actually, how to get on a plane and get off the plane. But anyway, this woman was standing next to me, and I could feel her frustration rising.

Sure.

And she was obviously tired. It was the end of the day, and I could really feel her start to get really agitated. And I just looked at her and I said to her, “That is such a beautiful blouse that you’ve got on. And it was a beautiful blouse. And she goes, oh, thank you so much. Your favorite, isn’t it? And she goes, there it is. I really love it. Immediately. Right? And the guy next to me who runs all the indigenous employment affairs for a company that’s got 8000 employees, he just nudged me, and he goes, that was really cool. I saw what you did there. I feel good, she’s calmed down, she feels better. But when we do those things for others, yes, we give them something beautiful, but we can’t escape the fact that our own self-acceptance rises a little bit. And most people who have got mental health conditions, they’ve been in big time self-deprecation for a long time.

If you don’t mind, let’s pivot to your story about Melbourne. It was a Melbourne construction project where you brought in a culture of care, and I think it was a very powerful story. Can you share that story similar to your football story? I think this is very important.

One to COVID Yeah, sure. We can give people a link to this. I actually published this on Huffington Post, but yeah, see, Melbourne has had a huge program going for the last eight years or so, because Melbourne seven times the world’s most livable city. But its Achilles heel is level crossings. Train crossings where boom gates come down and stop traffic so trains can go through. And so, Melbourne’s train network hit usable peak 30 years ago. And they couldn’t schedule any more trains in the rush hour, peak hour, because if they did, it would send the city into gridlock. And so, we’ve had a very efficient train system, so the only thing that could be done was get rid of those level crossings and there’s over 200 of them. So, this program started and so some of the level crossings, they’ve gone over and some that have gone under. And on this particular project, there were three level crossings. And they call this a package. And so in this job, they had to do all the preparation work, get everything ready, so much to be done. Probably took 18 months to do the preparation work. And then they have what they call an occupation, or effectively known as an Akko, right?

And in the occupation, they close the train line, and they go to, and they do the work. And so, in this occupation, they had 63 days to tear up the train lines, tear down three train stations, dig a valley that amounted to the biggest removal of earth in urban Melbourne history. They had to turn three roads into bridges, they then had to lay new train lines, new overhead cables, and build three new train stations, basically underground. And they had 63 days to do it. And there were going to be a thousand people working on site around the clock. Anyway, I was going past the site office, and I thought I would drop in because I’ve done some seminars for them, and I dropped in. I wanted to see the safety manager and he’s busy. So, I was just walking around chatting to some of the guys and you would have sworn that they’d been told they were going to be facing the firing squad. They were anxious, they were stressed, they were agitated, very reactive. And each one I went to, I thought, oh, my God, this is a disaster. So, I went and knocked on the project manager’s door.

Steve is a beautiful guy, really competent, great leader. And he looked up and he said, John, come in. So, I walked in, and he said, “what’s going on? I said, Steve, somebody’s going to die on this project. And he looked at me and he said, “What do you think? And I said, I’ll bet money on it. And he said, why? I said, because they’re all so stressed out there, you can’t go into this project with them like that. And he said, yeah, I know. What can we do? And I said, you need to get him in a room next week. I want to talk to him. So, we got hundreds of guys in, and I got up and had to talk to them. And I talked to them about what makes a great city. And really the fundamental, the skeleton and the circulatory system of a great city is its infrastructure. We talked about roads, and we talked about sewerage and electricity, and then we talked about train lines, and then I talked about how Melbourne’s archeries are blocked because of these level crossings. And the vital nature of this work was to unclog the arteries of Melbourne. So, I then started to paint the picture of what things were going to look like when these guys finished their job.

And I said, all those people who are stuck in commuter traffic in the mornings, they’ll be able to get on the train and they’ll get a seat on the train because they’ll be able to run trains from the major destinations every two- or three-minutes during rush hour. I said, that means they’re going to get to work quicker, they’ll be more refreshed, they might have been able to knock off some work on the train. I said, they’ll get home quicker, and they’ll be home earlier, which means they get to spend more time with their kids. It means that they get to get more involved in the community sports clubs, so more adults nurturing more kids, and that creates more stable families. And I just kept painting this picture and those kids are going to be able to grow up and live in that area and raise their families as well. And it’s going to create this beautiful, amazing city of incredible communities because people have got more time and they’re not stressed and they’re able to move around the city more quickly. And I said, so you guys are laying the foundation for one of the most incredible cities the world will ever see.

Now, it took me an hour. To paint that picture and take it on that journey. But by the end of it, they were all up on their feet, like, can we start now? And they were so filled with purpose. Anyway, the project started and why it went. It became the biggest tourist attraction in Melbourne for the next couple of months. There were people queued up five deep around the fence watching the project. There was not a single accident, there was not an hour lost for anything. And the only two complaints were two slightly negative tweets about the bus service that was replacing the trains. And they completed it in 61 and a half days under budget.

Wow. And it’s all by painting a picture of purpose, creating pride in the work in terms of driving that impacts very powerful stories. In the last little bit, you’ve talked to us about three of the main drivers of injuries. Stress, you’ve talked about fatigue, and you’ve talked about distractions. And all bring themes and ideas from well-being, but that ultimately impact recordable injuries that ultimately impact serious incidents, because we know that those three drivers are two very important drivers of safety outcomes. So, really cool ideas, principles here. I’d love to pivot to your book. You’ve published a book in it for the long haul. Tell me a little bit about the book, the story, and why somebody should pick it up on Amazon or whichever retailer you use.

Actually, I just sold it off my website, actually. But it’s really interesting. In Australia, we call it FIFO. So, it’s fly in, fly out. But there’s remote workshops all over the world. And you said it earlier, Eric. There’s oil and gas platforms all over the world and the mines up in the north of Canada and remote mines in South America and Africa. And people are leaving home, going away for a specified period of time and working remotely, living in camps and then going home again for a period of time. And it’s become really significant in the last 30, 40 years as the world’s demanded more resources, sure, but people have been going away from home to work for a very long time. As I say to the FIFO workers, when you fly across Australia, if you look out the window of the plane, you see that there are roads down there. Have you ever asked yourself how those roads got there when they did that? But anyway, what’s been happening here in Australia? There’s a lot of suicides on fiber work sites and there’s a lot of relationship breakdowns and there’s a lot of stress and mental illness and that sort of thing.

And I’ve been traveling out there delivering seminars and I know the lay of the land and my life as well. Prior to COVID I was traveling 240 days of the year around Australia to North America, and I was living out of a suitcase. So now it’s like to be away from home and anyway, I heard about another suicide, and I just thought, man, I got to do something. I ran a survey, and it was amazing. Like, 60% of the workers who responded to the survey said they went out to start their FIFO role with no plan. It was amazing. And so, I thought, I know how to do this. And so, I wrote a book. It’s a 250 odd page book. And I wrote about all of the things that come into play to teach these guys and their families how to really master the skill of being a successful FIFO worker. To turn it into something really, really good. Because they get paid a lot of money, and if they do it right, they can do it for five years, ten years, and set themselves up for life. So, I wrote the book and the response to it has been great.

I’m really just trying to push some of the big companies now to buy it in bulk and get it to all of their people so that they can really help. The thing is, I know for sure that some guys won’t read it, but they might take it home and their partner will read it. Sure. Somebody in the house gets those skills. And what’s more, the ones who do read it on site will have more understanding and knowledge to help their workmates.

Sure.

So that was the purpose of it. And that’s the COVID of the book there. And it was so interesting. When I got the COVID design, I told the designer what I wanted, a young Indian guy off that website, fiver. And I talk in the book a lot about finding your light at the end of the tunnel, your purpose in your life, your passion. And also talk about taking care of your mates so they don’t go off the rails. Now, I didn’t say any of that to him. He’s come back with this picture of these miners standing with their backs to the light. Some of them are on the rails and some of them are off the rails. It’s beautiful.

Very cool. So, John, thank you so much for joining us. I think you’ve shared some very interesting, provocative ideas, again, against at least three key drivers of serious injuries that I can think of. If somebody wants to get in touch with you, talk about these themes and how do you bring wellbeing, how do you bring some of these concepts to the workplace? How can they get in touch with you?

Yeah, certainly I’m easy to find on LinkedIn and also my website is Wideawakewellness.com Au for Australia. There’s lots of resources there and I’m more than happy to connect in with somebody and have a bit of a chat if they want, because at the end of the day, this is about my whole mission in life, is making sure that every kid on the planet has a good life. That means mum and dad coming home from work and coming home from work in a good mood, feeling good, very powerful.

And remember those stories you shared? I think they’re very powerful. The football story, the Melbourne construction project, and then the lady who is getting frustrated and agitated on the plane. I think we can all think about some additional ways to bring some acts of kindness and care for others. So, appreciate you sharing those stories. Thank you again for joining us.

Thank you, Eric. It’s been really cool, and you do great work, mate. Thank you.

Thank you.

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 [email protected] Come back in two weeks for the next episode with your host, Eric Michrowski. Podcast is powered by Propulo Consulting.

The Safety Guru with Eric Michrowski

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ABOUT THE GUEST

John Toomey is an International Speaker and Thought leader who delivers seminars that inspire, educate, and empower people to take 100% responsibility for their lives, wellness and mental wellbeing. His impressive background in High Performance Roles in Professional Sport, including 7 AFL Clubs, and Culture Development roles in two A League Clubs, and as Coach of an Olympic Gold Medalist, brings richness and depth to his presentations. John holds a Phys Ed degree from Deakin University, did his Masters Studies in Applied Physiology at Victoria University, studied and taught Human Consciousness as an Avatar Master for 15 years, is a published author and has lectured at multiple Universities in PE and Medicine. Currently, John is Global Chair of the Global Wellness Institute’s Workplace Wellbeing Initiative, the world’s premier advisory group on Workplace Wellness. He’s delivered over 3,300 Corporate Presentations, spoken at Conferences worldwide, written hundreds of published articles, and completed 4 National Thought Leadership Tours for QBE. He recently published a book, “In It For the Long Haul: Making the Most of the FIFO Lifestyle,” his effort to reduce the amount of mental illness and suicides on remote worksites across Australia.

For more information:

Website: http://wideawakewellness.com.au

Email: [email protected]

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/johntoomey-thoughtleader/

YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@wideawakewellness

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Sleep Deprivation’s Impact on Safety with Ahna De Vena

Jan 26, 2023

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ABOUT THE EPISODE

Having trouble sleeping or not getting enough sleep? Sleep deprivation and poor sleep quality can affect judgment and mental health, potentially increase the risk of accidents or injuries, and have a negative impact on safety and job performance. In this episode, Ahna shares the importance of quality sleep to improve workplace safety and energize your team. Adequate and quality sleep is a must to keep ourselves and those around us safe. Tune in to learn how you can begin the journey of prioritizing restorative sleep!

READ THIS 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, Ahna De Vena. She’s a sleep expert and consultant, has been in this space for well over 20 years, and has worked across many different industries as well as in her not-for-profit work. And the quote on our website that really caught my attention, was from sleepless to sleep, superstar. Anna, welcome to the show. A really important topic to talk about is sleep tiredness has so many impacts on safety and well-being so maybe why don’t you start out by sharing a little bit about your journey in the sleep space and we’ll take it from there?

It’s great to be here, thank you for having me. I would say that my journey began as a sleepless teenager in my early 20s as a result of lack of sleep for over eleven years I had a breakdown mental and physical and ended up collapsing in public I was taken to hospital and diagnosed with some quiet serious autoimmune conditions, and I did a big review of my life and realized things needed to change. When I was offered meds and told I’d have to take them for the rest of my life I said no and decided that I really wanted to learn how to recover from the sleeplessness that I had endured and just live a really healthy life because I could still remember back to when I was younger and was able to sleep very well and I just knew that I could get back there. And so, I changed course and studied natural medicine mainly for my own knowledge and my own recovery. And after applying that for a few years I fully recovered and then decided I really wanted to help others with this issue where there was very little help at that time. And so, I started in schools because for me when I looked back I thought wow, we’re meant to spend one-third of our lives asleep and yet I didn’t receive any sleep education and that’s the primary reason I got into such difficulty. And so, I decided I wanted to be part of changing that in the world. And I began working with kids and teenagers first, which I did for years, and then adults asked me if I could run courses for them, and then I started working with one-on-one clients more and more and very successful private practices throughout the world. So, I’ve lived in quite a few different places. And essentially the work that I do now for groups, I do still work with people one on one, and I’ve got some products and then I work with groups is really a distillation of all the work I’ve done with individuals over the past 20 odd years. And it’s just very takeaway orientated so people can elicit change immediately. And that’s what I’m about. I can have a five-minute conversation with someone at the grocery store and just tune in and give them that little bit of knowledge they need to make a shift. And so, one of my biggest messages is we all have a natural ability to sleep well. When we can tap into that and support that, then we can shift so much and literally change our entire life. Because when we change our sleep, we change our health, we change our outlook, we change our relationships, our productivity, everything. And so that’s, for me, a very important message for people to get. But it’s not rocket science. But we’re very much out of sync now. We’re in a global sleep loss epidemic. It’s worth every year. So, we really need to be focusing on this.

Definitely. We hear more and more about the impact of sleep. And when we think about in the safety space, there are a lot of safety implications if you’ve got some sleep deficit. I’m thinking also about a lot of the work that people are doing that has high risk and involves shifts, which also has its own impact on sleep and there’s also an impact on executives. Can you maybe share a little bit about the importance of sleep and how we can impact safety, performance, and culture overall?

Well, I think one of the easiest ways to look at it is that when we lose sleep when we don’t get the amount of sleep we need, we’re essentially acting in the same way as when we’re drunk. And so, we have very slow reflexes. Our brain doesn’t make good decisions. All our executive functions are impaired. And we become dysfunctional on so many levels. So being tired, in a way, isn’t the worst thing. It’s really our ability to respond, to recognize where we are fully and what’s needed from us on all levels. So, if you’re operating machinery when I lived in New Zealand, I lived at a port in Nelson and I worked with a lot of men who worked at the port and there were accidents because they couldn’t respond, or they were driving machinery and didn’t drive the machinery well enough. I had one guy who was in charge of a large room full of machinery, and he said to me when he came to me for help, he said, someone almost died a few weeks ago. No, because I was so fatigued I couldn’t see how dangerous the situation was.

And I was supposed to be overseeing all the workings in this room, I think on every level from the person operating the machinery to the people overseeing any kind of environment where there’s dangerous equipment being run. There are a lot of risks and then there are risks, say, for the CEO running a company who can’t keep that long-term vision and perspective when he’s making decisions today. And McKinsey did a study involving 1900 individuals across 91 companies and they found that sleep-deprived brains lose the ability to make accurate judgments which then leads to irrational and unjustified claims and I’m quoting here, such as I don’t need sleep, I’m doing fine with just a few hours of sleep. And so, what happens is the brain is so dysfunctional that the sleepless person can’t even realize they’re sleep deprived, and I think their lives are one of the greatest dangers of sleep deprivation.

Interesting, and the other element is if I think about a lot of higher-risk roles, there are a lot of shifts. People maybe are working through the night, maybe they’re alternating from day shifts to night shifts. How does that impact somebody’s ability to rest and to really recover through sleep?

So, shift workers really have the worst end of the stick in many ways. Matthew Walker talks about it a fair bit. They’re at much higher risk of dying than anyone because their body clock and their brains are just so scrambled, you could say. And I have worked with many shift workers, and I’m appalled at the lack of consideration for basic human needs. Honestly, I’m shocked. And then people like nurses and doctors who are performing surgeries or procedures that are potentially life-threatening and having to make decisions that really impact people and they do not have the cognitive ability and even the physical coordination to be able to function properly. To me, this is one of the most kinds of disappointing and astounding aspects of society really, that we’re not protecting people more and particularly shift workers. Like there are very simple things that they could do for shift workers, which I know quite a few companies are starting to do now. But keeping the same shift for a week rather than doing three different shifts in a week allows the body to at least get some rest in a rhythmical manner. Whereas if you’re doing three different kinds of shifts in a week, it’s almost impossible to get the rest that you need to function properly.

But if you are diligent and you are very careful about how you manage the time your downtime, then you can at least get deep rest. And I think that deep rest isn’t respected enough, and people think if I’m not asleep then it’s a waste of time. But, if we know and train ourselves to rest deeply, that can then turn into sleep. But deep rest is extremely valuable. Back to your question. Shift workers need to learn the skills needed to switch off quickly more than anyone else on the planet. They really need that because their downtime is so precious and so they don’t have the luxury of hours of agitation that they can’t they just don’t have it. They’ve got to be back at work in X number of hours. So, they need to understand how to support their bodies down out of high stress, which is where everybody, and when I say everybody is I mean our bodies go into very high stress and high inflammation when we’re sleep deprived. So, it’s just so critical that shift workers know how to bring that inflammation down and how to bring the stress hormones down and then come into a state of deep rest where sleep is possible.

And you’ve got some other elements that are also mixing into it. For example, maybe their rest time is when the sun starts coming up and all the lights are up, and activity noise is higher because that’s when most people are active. So, you’ve got all sorts of things I’m even thinking about airline crews that are flying all sorts of different hours’ time zones. Jet lag all these pieces really require they mentioned some degree of awareness training in terms of tactics and then.

Carry a kit with them where they can make a room they can rest in because if we just go willy-nilly without being prepared then we could lose that time that we could be sleeping. Where are a pair of earplugs, an eye mask, and some tape? Tape is something that I tell everyone who’s sleeping in hotel rooms or unfamiliar places that they should take some black tape. It doesn’t leave marks on things. So, they can black out the room or cover over bright light shining down on them or out of the wall. Yeah. So just those three things can make a massive difference when you’re traveling and then also knowing how to manage time zones and how to prepare for travel but obviously, that’s a bit different. But although shift workers sometimes are traveling over time zone fly and fly out people.

So, it gets a good segue into getting into a little bit of the elements that an organization can do in teams of bringing sleep as part of a wellness or safety program. What are some of the best practices that you’ve seen in this space?

I think that the first thing that needs to be acknowledged is that sleep and work aren’t separate. I think for too long companies have thought of sleep as something outside of any realm that they need to address which, having worked with thousands of people the impact that work has on someone’s sleep. I’ve seen first-hand the number of people who can’t get to sleep who lie there thinking, worrying, or problem-solving in the middle of the night for their job because they’re so committed or they’re so stressed or they’re just so impacted by their work or inspired. I’ve had quite a lot of clients who are just overly inspired to the point where they can’t sleep. So, it’s not always a negative.

Sure.

So, I think companies need to acknowledge that sleep is impacted by work, and work is impacted by sleep length and quality hugely. If their employees are turning up tired, it’s costing them in many ways. And Deloitte Access Economics did a study combined with the Australian Sleep Foundation and the final report was aptly named Asleep on the Job. And they quantified the cost of insufficient sleep in Australia, and this was in 2016 to 2017 and just the productivity loss of productivity costs Australia 18 billion a year. So that’s huge. So, if we think about it, what sleeplessness is costing us professionally and personally, it’s just hard to quantify really, because if you’re living your days feeling exhausted, unable to be present, afraid of making a mistake, or even just making mistakes that have a serious impact, then that’s not really living. So, I think there needs to be a shift in how people view sleep, and any company that wants to help their employees well then needs to come right up to the top of priorities. Because traditionally diet and exercise and weight loss are areas that wellness programs have covered, and sleep has a massive impact on all three of those areas.

If you don’t get sufficient sleep, your diet just goes out the window. You actually don’t have control over what you eat because all the peptides that control appetite are just completely thrown, and you put on weight, and exercise can be detrimental. When we haven’t had sufficient sleep, if we do it in a way that elevates our stress, for instance, or if we do it at the wrong time of day, or it just doesn’t get done at all because we’re so tired, sleep needs to be the foundation of a wellness program. That’s my opinion after so many years working in this industry and its time and I feel that people are starting to wake up to this fact. I’m very grateful for Matthew Walker who’s written the fantastic book Why We Sleep. That’s a great read for anyone because we all sleep. I just want a little warning there for people who read it to be aware that you might become absolutely terrified of not getting enough sleep when you read it because he goes into all the nitty-gritty of what happens to our bodies and our minds when we don’t get the sleep we need.

Definitely, something to read to provoke thinking in that space.

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 propolo.com.

In a wellness program. It sounds like there are elements around teaching people the importance of sleep. Correct me if I’m wrong, but also have some strategies around how to get better sleep and maybe recognize signs of fatigue. Are those the types of themes that typically are covered?

Yes. I think that people need to understand why sleep is important and not just getting sufficient sleep, but sufficient quality sleep. There’s too much emphasis put on the length of sleep we’re getting and not enough at all on the quality of sleep we’re getting. And if we flip that around and focus on getting quality sleep then we will naturally get the length of sleep we need. And that’s something people need to become more aware of you can sleep seven to 8 hours and still wake up tired. In fact, when I do my pre-course survey, about 60% of participants report that they were getting around 7 hours of sleep but still waking up tired. And so, this is part of the epidemic that we’re now in that people might be in bed for that time, perhaps asleep, but the amount of quality sleep they’re getting, the amount of deep sleep they’re getting is way lower than what they need to truly rejuvenate while they’re sleeping.

Interesting. It makes me think that there’s also a need for awareness at the boardroom level in terms of decision-making because there are impacts that the organization creates that have an impact on safety around. We talked about before shifts and shift patterns. The other thing that comes to mind is overtime, which can be a delicate balance because sometimes overtime can be very high remuneration for the employee, and they see it as an encroachment. But if you’re working 18 hours a day or 24 hours a day and getting minimal rest and recovery, it strikes me that in high-risk role, that’s incredibly dangerous actually probably in any role, not just in a high-risk role.

Yes, it is. And I’ve seen a lot of people compromising their health and their well-being and their capacity to perform at an optimum level, taking shifts, doing overtime, or just saying yes because they’re afraid of losing their job. If they say no, that’s something that happens. There’s bullying. People know that they shouldn’t take it, but they’re afraid to say no or they’re afraid not to do it for fear of losing their job. So, in terms of a company culture that needs to be interwoven so that people aren’t afraid, that people are able to really take stock of how they are and make a decision that reflects their ability, not oh God, I better say yes because otherwise, my job is at risk. Sure, that kind of company culture is beyond toxic. That kind of thing just so needs to change.

And I’ve seen it even at a crew level. So, there’s corporate culture and then there can also be team dynamics that create that need to be in check where somebody’s like just do the extra or just push a little bit harder or something like that, that can also be toxic.

Yeah. And if you’ve got a leader of your team who’s doing over many extra hours and kind of creating this we don’t need sleep, I don’t need sleep. So, you shouldn’t need sleep, what’s wrong with you? Type thing wearing a badge almost of being a hero for operating on very little sleep. That’s extremely dangerous. And just on that note, there is a small percentage of the population, 3% of the population have a gene that makes it possible for them to function normally on 6 hours of sleep. And so, if you’ve got them as a team leader, if you got one of them as a team leader, that’s a scary position to be in because then you start trying to exist on the same amount of sleep as one of these people.

Sure.

If you look at burnout now and the prevalence of burnout now compared to even just ten years ago, it’s so much more prevalent. And I think since covert our stress levels are so much higher and there is a direct link to high stress and lack of sleep and those they feed each other. So generally, lack of sleep will start occurring due to some kind of height and stress. And then if we don’t have the skills and the ability to get out of that cycle, then one just feeds the other. Lack of sleep feeds the high stress. The high stress leads to more lack of sleep and then it just goes on and on and-on-and people feel they can’t get out, but they also just start to think of it as normal. And that’s something I try to tell people. It’s not normal. Even though it feels normal, even though you think you don’t have a problem, there actually is an issue here that needs addressing. And so that’s one of the hardest things to get people to recognize there is a problem and it needs addressing.

And I think that’s where the need for as well the organization to bring this at the forefront from a safety standpoint, from a wellness standpoint becomes really important.

Yes.

So let’s pivot to some of the strategies to improve sleep. You shared one around when you’re traveling to have some tape to be able to make sure the room is dark. What are some of the strategies that you teach in your programs to help somebody become a better master at sleep?

Well, the first thing is to see sleep as a must-have instead of a nice-to-have. So, I think people don’t have enough of a healthy perspective on how important quality sleep is. And I would say that the first thing needs to be an acknowledgment of how important it is because once you have that, then you can start connecting with why you want to get great sleep.

Sure.

And of course, those two things are kind of interconnected. But unless we have a strong connection to why. We want to get great sleep. Win the battle with the creature of habit that makes us do the same thing over and over and over again and continue getting mediocre or poor sleep already. Is anyone listening to this? The creature of habit inside you is standing on guard and saying. None of this stuff is going to work for me. Whatever she says, it’s not going to work, or I don’t want to do that even before I speak. And so, you’ve got to be aware that this battle has already started and will be there for a month. As you incorporate new patterns of behavior, even a new mindset, you have to battle. And in order to begin to win that battle, you’ve got to have a why. And I say to people, how do you want to feel when you wake up in the morning? And how do you want to feel as you engage with the people in your life, the people you love, how you are able to perform at work and how you’re able to contribute in the world?

How do you want to feel? And so, when you can get in touch with that and then come to a place of saying, you know what? I want to be fully alive. I want my brain to work as well as it can work. I want super brain powers and I want endless energy. And I want the ability to be patient and to be able to listen and to be able to communicate clearly, to be able to keep a long-term perspective. When I’m making decisions for myself, for my family, for my colleagues, and for my company, we have to really have a strong why in order to make any changes. So that would be my first suggestion. The second suggestion is around your relationship with light. We have a segment of our brain called the super charismatic nucleus. And this part of our brain actually regulates our sleep-wake cycle. And the main environmental cues that trigger the sleep-wake cycle are light and temperature. And so, when we are exposed to full spectrum light, that signal from the environment is read through brain cells that are in our eyes called Retinal ganglion cells. And those brain cells in our eyes send a signal to the super charismatic nucleus and say, hey, it’s time to wake up.

And then the super charismatic nucleus says to the adrenal cortex, start making cortisol. Cortisol isn’t just a stress hormone, it’s an energy hormone. And also, is a regulating hormone. It’s an activating hormone. It’s actually very good for us in the white quantities at the right time. So, we need this signal of light. We also need to increase our body temperature to switch on in the morning and then in the evening, we need the signal of darkness, which is also read by these retinal ganglion cells. And these signals are sent to the SCN, okay, stop making cortisol and start making melatonin. Darkness is the best sleeping pill. I’m going to repeat that. Darkness is the best and really the only sleeping pill. We should use long-term signals to our bodies to start making the hormones that we need to get good quality sleep. And this is true for people of all ages and children. All humans need darkness and then coolness the opposite to morning coolness. The body needs to cool down in order to sleep well. So overheated rooms or overheated beds are just going to make you frustrated, and your body won’t be able to fall asleep.

So, if everyone follows this advice, everyone’s quality and length of sleep would improve. And it’s simple, but it’s tricky because we’re living in a time where our evenings are polluted by artificial light. Now, the amount of sleep we’ve gotten globally has declined since artificial light started polluting our evenings. In 1942, the average sleep adults got on the planet was 7.9 hours a night. Now it’s 6.5 and decreasing every year. The last time that was measured was actually discovered. So, in the surveys, I’m doing, my estimate is it’s down to six already as an average. And we need 7.5 to 9 hours, depending on who we are, the average is around eight. To be well mentally and physically, children and teenagers need much more than that. 90% of teenagers are sleep deprived. This is a problem that is yet to be acknowledged and yet to be addressed. I plan on addressing it in the next few years with my sleep kit for teens. I’ve already got a sleep kit for kids. But yeah, everything I’m saying applies to people of all ages.

Interesting, these are all techniques that people can easily implement, and I think it also links back to what you’re talking about. The tip when you’re traveling is to make sure you’ve got a dark environment, is there something as well about when you’re talking about artificial light? People are watching TV more and more using their computers, which from everything I’ve read, stimulates and also counteracts what we’re trying to do in the hours before sleep.

Yeah, so as I said when we get the opposite cue to what the body needs, so the body needs darkness. And when we have this very bright light being read by these brain cells in our eyes, these retinal ganglion cells, they’re getting the opposite signal to what they need. And so, it confuses everything, and it inhibits the production of melatonin, which melatonin should start being produced quite a while before we go to sleep. Whereas people are taking their phones to bed, right, and they’re sending this light signal. And so, one of the things people say to me when they come to me for help, they say, I just don’t get tired at night. I just don’t get tired. I don’t feel sleepy. I said, well, what are you doing? And so, it’s always something that involves light, whether it’s a screen, generally, it’s a screen. But we need to understand what’s happening physiologically. Not just our screens aren’t good for us, but understand that when you’re doing that, but understand that when you’re doing that, that you are confusing your body and messing with your body chemistry. And so, when you do eventually get to sleep, it’s light sleep.

And yes, there are some things you can do. You can wear good quality blue light-blocking glasses. One of the things that I suggest is setting an electronic sundown time and having that be something that everyone in the house adheres to so that parents are setting an example. So, you have a box, and all the phones get put into the box. Anyone letting a teenager or child take their phone or device into their bedroom, yeah, it’s one of the most disastrous and unloving things that a parent can do. That sounds very judgmental, but it’s true because it’s interrupting their development at such a deep level. And it’s just like sending an alcoholic into a room with a bottle of scotch. They don’t have control and they’re severely addicted, so they’ll tell you they’re not on it, but I can tell you they are interesting.

So, you do a lot of programs for organizations. You coach, work, and people with people one on one. If somebody is interested in learning more, how can they get in touch with you?

Great. So, through my website. Sleep well and thrive. Or you can just contact me through LinkedIn Ahna De Vena. They’re the two best places to get in touch with me. And you can read about my corporate programs on my website. And there are lots of testimonials from different companies that have worked with me, and there’s lots of information there.

Excellent. Thank you very much for joining me today. I think it’s an important topic and definitely one that’s been top of mind with the pandemic. Lots of articles have talked about this, but I think it’s important for organizations to, as you propose, really look at it seriously in terms of their wellness programs, their safety programs, looking at their decision-making, how different decisions around shifts, around overtime, can impact restful sleep, but also provide tools for team members around this. So, thank you so much for coming to share your thoughts on this.

My pleasure. Thank you for having me.

Thank you for listening to the Safety Guru on C-suite Radio. Leave a legacy. Distinguish yourself from the path. 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.

The Safety Guru with Eric Michrowski

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ABOUT THE GUEST

Ahna De Vena has been a pioneer in the sleep-improvement field for 20+ years. She has extensive experience working with individuals and organisations throughout the world and her corporate program is changing thousands of lives every year. Ahna has developed a unique approach to sleep improvement and stress reduction from observation in her clinical practice and created effective products including a Sleep Cd that was featured on Qantas inflight entertainment for 4 years and a Sleep Kit for Kids that has already helped thousands of kids and families throughout Australia. She’s also the founder of the Sleep & Dream Foundation—a charity that supports children and families who’ve experienced trauma to sleep well and heal.

You can learn more about Ahna’s corporate sleep improvement program or 1:1 sleep recovery package by visiting her website: www.sleepwellandthrive.com or by emailing her directly: [email protected].

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The Lasting Legacy of Poor Safety Leadership & Culture with Louise Adamson

Nov 17, 2022

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ABOUT THE EPISODE

“At the end of the day, whatever you’re working on is never as important as your family back at home.” This Thanksgiving season, we are grateful to have Louise Adamson join the podcast as she recalls the events that led to the loss of her brother in a fatal workplace incident in 2005. Louise accentuates the critical need for safety leaders to possess greater care for their team members than the work product and expresses the life-altering ripple effect that serious injuries and fatalities have on loved ones.

READ THIS 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 is 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 safe legacy? Your legacy success story begins now.

Hi, and welcome to the safety guru. Today, I am very excited to have with me Louise Adamson. She is a workplace safety speaker and a former lawyer. Louise, welcome to the show.

Thanks so much for having me on. It is a pleasure.

Maybe share a little bit about your journey and really the story about your brother that got you really focused on driving change, positive change around the safety space.

Okay, thanks. Well, my brother Michael, was an electrician, 26 years old. He left a home that he shared with his fiancé on the morning of the 4 August 2005, and he did not make it home to Lisa that night. So, what had happened was he originally had come into a job in Edinburgh. He then got a call midway through the day from a job his employer was working on in a city called Dundee. It was an all-hands-on-deck job to get a sports store and a gym complex completed for a handover to a client by the next again a day or else some penalty clauses were going to kick in. So, for a job worth 720 grand for Michael’s employer there is a fifteen grand late penalty clause if it is not handed over by 10:00 the next again morning. Did you know if is Michael willing to go? Well, this is a man who is saving for a wedding. He has been offered over this over time probably right through the night. So of course, he’s willing to go. So, he heads up to Dundee with two of his colleagues. They’ve done pieces of work in the afternoon, and they’ve had their evening tea break.

He then heads back to work at 06:30 in the evening and at that point, he was only to continue working for the next 40 minutes. So, what he was doing, was collaborating with his colleague Jim and they were installing a security system. So, they were needing to connect a cable that was already in place within a ceiling void to one lead pulled in and Michael is on a set of steps. He’s got his head and shoulders above a full ceiling, he cuts a cable, and he throws it down to the gym. And that cable had a label on it on insulating tape just wrapped around it. And written on the label it said not in use, I do as then Michael is stripping the insulating material from that cable, he suffers a fatal electric shock. So, he fell off the ladder, he fell at Jim’s feet and efforts were made to survive them. But those efforts were unsuccessful in the end.

I’m so sorry.

So, it’s a 26-year-old man with his whole life ahead of him to live and he didn’t make it home that night because it’s often said that Michael died because of contact with electricity. No, my brother didn’t die because of contact with electricity. He died because that series of feelings came together and resulted in his death. So, on that site, there was ineffective management and supervision. There was the paperwork that was not put into practice, you’ve got incorrect equipment being used. So, Michael only had a multimeter available to him when he should have been using a voltage tester. There were time pressures being brought to bear. Clearly, with the penalty clauses about to kick in the next day, you’ve also got shortcuts potentially being taken. So, did my brother use what I’m told is referred to by electricians as the bang test? So, did he just try to cut that cable with his snips, wait on the bang to tell him it was life or not? We don’t know if that’s what he did because only he’d be able to tell us, but that’s one of the possibilities that we left with. So, you’ve got shortcuts in the mix, you’ve got a safety on the job.

It was just seen as a tick box exercise. You had a risk assessment that wasn’t a living document. It was dated more than a year prior to their contract start date.

Oh, my goodness.

Dated prior to the contract has not even been awarded because it was one of these generic ones and no site-specific tailoring has been done to that risk assessment. So even at the point at which they energize the distribution boards, so they’re now live working, that risk assessment isn’t revisited. So, it is described by the Health and Safety Executive inspectors as being completely inadequate, so nothing living about that. And it also contributed to Michael’s death. And then I think the sort of final piece, the final hole in all of this is there was a workforce there that wasn’t confident enough to speak up if something was wrong. They were in that mindset of, we could speak up, but nobody’s going to do anything about it anyway. We’re coming to the end of the job. What’s the point if I do speak up? I’m seen as the troublemaker the person dobbin pals, so let’s just get on with it. So, all of these things come together and result in Michael’s death. There was a trial of his employer more than three years down the line after his death, and the outcome of that was that the HSC said that Michael’s death could have been prevented had his employer ensured that safe working practices were being conducted in accordance with the company’s own written procedures.

And that is just you don’t know how hard that is for a family to have to hear and then went on to say that managers and supervisors must be taking active steps to ensure that electricians work safely. Well, for us, it’s not just about electricians there you swap out the word electricians, you’re swapping in the word workers, operatives. That applies to anything that’s going on any site. In Michael’s case, there were charges laid against three senior individuals. So, there was a managing director an operations director, and a technical services manager who were all charged with criminal health and safety offenses along with the employer company. But mistakes were made by the prosecutor and in the end, those three individuals got to leave the court, and walk free from the dock before the case got before the jury. So, the lawyer then for the company is kind of doing his grand summing up speech as you expect lawyers to do. But he’s referring to his client as being the invisible man now sitting on the dock. That being the employer company.

Sure.

So, it was the invisible man that was found guilty of the failures that led to my brother’s death and it was the invisible man that was fined £300,000. But that for us as a family, it doesn’t approach justice and absolutely nothing in the way of comfort. So that’s why I’m now trying to use Michael’s story and to use it to strike a chord with other people, to stop it from happening to other people. That is what now provides my family with the comfort of knowing that positives come from the awful thing that is Michael’s entirely preventable death.

Yeah, it seems incredibly preventable, and everybody goes to work and expects to come back, nobody thinks about injuries and what could happen. And in this case, there are so many elements here that just show woeful inadequacy in terms of how the organization was being run. From a safety standpoint, they’re looking at hazards but not really understanding what they were. The risk assessment to me is something that should be absolutely living, but also something that people review as they change throughout the day. As the conditions change, they need to reassess the houses in front of them. It sounded like there was labelling saying that it wasn’t even a live wire. So, by all accounts, he’s trusting somebody else had done their job. So, it’s a layering of multiple errors and multiple inadequacies on top of each other.

Absolutely going to say in terms of the wire, the plans had changed much earlier in the job, but nobody had up, nobody. So, while the plans changed, the written plans didn’t change. So, nobody documented a change in wiring plans. So that then compounds that failure in relation to the cable.

I see. The other problem is you’ve got multiple crews coming in without it seemingly an onboarding to the job and so there are changes like that that get layered on. So, one topic I hear a lot is the importance of speaking up. And there are two elements that you touched on because speaking up requires two parts in my opinion. One is the employer creating an environment where I’m comfortable speaking up. Leaders recognize, lean in when somebody speaks up, stop work, and says, this is positive, I want to see more of it. And then the other is the peer-to-peer element because that’s also very important. Leaders have an important role in terms of fostering that as well. So, it’s not an abdication. But there are two elements because there are cases where the organization has done really well in terms of encouraging it, but peers think that I think somebody shared a story where they said, are you a man or a mouse when the person spoke up and stopped work. And so, peer pressure also becomes an element of it that the organization needs to drive forward. Any thoughts in terms of that part? Because speaking up is difficult.

I’ve done it once I stop work. And when you know the consequences of it being very expensive, you think about it 10,000 times, is it really the right call? But it was recognized after by the executives that they lose the right choice to make. What are some of the things that you’ve seen to really drive that forward?

I think reflect on him first on the fact that my brother wasn’t a shy, retiring individual. He was a ball she individual who, if something was wrong, he’d have no qualms about speaking up about it. He’d already challenged his employer previously about some work that they’d been doing where asbestos was present. So, he wasn’t off that mindset. So, I don’t understand why he didn’t speak up in this situation. So, I have to kind of second guess it. And I think a large element of it is that whole drive to get the job done, guys, we’re up against it and let’s come together as a team and let’s battle the odds and let’s beat the odds and we’re going to get this done by ten tomorrow morning. Nobody thinks we can do it, but we’re going to get it done. There’s that whole thing going on. I think so. I think the sheriff, the judge in the case, in our sentencing statement, said that there was a male macho, cavalier approach being adopted in that industry at the time. So, in terms of battling that, you do need the MD, the Ops director, whomever it might be, they’re the ones in that situation.

They were the ones who needed to take the step back and say, we’re not going to put our people in this position where they are being made to make these choices. They were the ones who should have stood back and had a grown-up conversation with the principal contractor, the principal contractor with the client. Because I can see that it would be easy in that situation for the men on the ground to be swept up in that. Let’s achieve the impossible goal. And when you’re working in an organization where safety isn’t any sort of core value, it seems then it’s dangerous being an important point.

Because of that desire to achieve a goal, often even in organizations that are fairly good at stopping work and creating that relief valve sometimes a desire of achieving a goal can get people to start straying into forgetting about how to achieve it safely. And I think an example recently was the whole inquiry into the Boeing 737 Max, and it was all a goal to let’s get this plane done because otherwise, Airbus had a superior plane. And at the point in time where the decision was made to progress, American Airlines was going to move most of its fleet on the Airbus side, whereas they had an entirely bowling fleet. So that created this goal of let’s make sure we get this plane done. And then lots of things fell apart in between. Not that that’s the only item, but people then forget about it, we have to do it safely, we have to make sure we know how to build a plane, we need to make sure we’re capturing it the right way, we’re getting the right diagrams, et cetera. And that goal can rally against the right purpose, the right choices. It doesn’t mean don’t have a goal.

I think it’s just a question of how you mitigate that goal. How do you reinforce that the goal is to get this done safely and to pause if we see something right?

Yeah, and I often reiterate that because the Health and Safety Executive Inspector who investigated Michael’s death, I met him just a couple of years ago, and he was saying to me, supervisor level back at that time, and he was quite sure to a degree still today is that their number one priority is getting a job done on time. And I’m always saying that’s not what it should be. It should be to get that job done safely. Safely isn’t that added extra? It’s the on-time part that sure added extra so safely.

And that requires a lot of messaging that really reinforces that story consistently within the organization. Particularly in the case of the production pressure, you’re mentioning, because here there are penalty clauses. Unfortunately, that production pressure seeps in a lot, even in organizations that have good management systems, just, we got to get this done. Have you seen anything or is there any advice that you share with organizations in terms of how to mitigate that production pressure, so it doesn’t impact the choices that somebody makes?

I guess that’s really about explaining to people why they’re there. At the end of the day, the sports store my brother was working on, was going to open regardless of how long it took. They’re up against time pressures, so they’re throwing bodies at that job to try to get this all-hands-on-deck job completed. And in the process of that, they threw an actual body at that job, my brothers. And the goal at the end of the day, whatever you’re working on is never as important as your family back at home. And that’s what people need. They shouldn’t need to be reminded of that. But as we’ve already talked about, there is that whole getting swept up in a certain mentality sometimes. So it is that core value, that leadership. Actually, the biggest thing that they care about is the people that are working for them. Not whatever the product or building or whatever it might be at the end of that, it’s the people that they care about the most.

Yeah. And I think that’s really the message that you share really an organization has to do so much more, has to recognize to create an environment, a culture where people get home every day to their loved ones. And the impact of an event like this, somebody passing away, somebody getting seriously injured, is a life-changing impact for multiple people around that person.

Yeah, absolutely. And we still hear about new people who’ve been impacted in other ways by what happened to my car. And we’re now 17 years on from his death. But we know about the immediate family, friends, his colleagues who were there at the time. Sorry, we know about the impact it had on them because we see it. We see it day in, day out, we see it. We hold an annual memorial golf tournament for him. So, we hear from his colleagues that kind of the impact that it still has on them and how much they miss him. But then I’ll be speaking at an event, and somebody will come and say to me, oh, I know the first aider who stopped by the C-suite where Michael was working. He just happened to be walking past when this happened, and he helped provide CPR to your brother and he’s still impacted. And until more than a decade after Michael’s death, we knew nothing about this man and about the help that he provided. So, the ripple effect is so wide. I’ve just recently had a colleague of Michaels get in touch and she’s now working in safety as a result of what happened to Michael.

So, there are so many ripples, so many negative ripples, but also, I hope, so many positive ripples are now being created out of Michael’s death. And I was speaking at a new-born graduation on Monday and I’m saying that I hope at some point these ripples all come together and then it’s that sort of ground swell of positivity so that we know that other lives have been saved as a result of what happened to him and being able to talk about what happened to him and getting lessons learned from what happened to him.

Which is so important. Really. For other organizations. Other leaders. Recognize the importance of really leading for safety and for others in terms of the day-to-day choices or making how they show up as a supervisor. How do they show up as a leader? So, Louise, thank you very much for sharing your story. It’s still a very difficult, raw story to share because there will never really be closure. But I think the importance of sharing the story, the message, I think helps make sure somebody else comes home safe to the loved ones. So, I appreciate the work that you’re doing. If somebody wants to have you speak to their organization, how can they get in touch with you?

So, they find me on LinkedIn, or you’ll get me on the website michaelsstory.Net or email [email protected], that would be fantastic. Thanks, Eric.

Cheers. Thank you very much, Louise.

The Safety Guru with Eric Michrowski

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ABOUT THE GUEST

Louise Adamson spent 13 years working as an employment lawyer for a top Scottish firm. However, a personal tragedy led to her attentions becoming focused on the field of health and safety. Her brother Michael was only 26 years old and engaged to be married when he lost his life in an electrical incident which could and should have been prevented. Lessons must be learned and Louise now tells Michael’s story on-screen and in workplaces across many sectors and on major projects. She has spoken internationally, travelling to Australia and widely throughout Europe. And has delivered her brother’s story on-screen to workplaces globally. In the last year alone it has made a positive impact in health and safety leadership, culture and practices from the west coast of the USA, through Central and South America, across Europe and Asia, and on to Australia. She is a NEBOSH Ambassador and has previously been named the UK’s Most Influential Person in Health and Safety by SHP Magazine. Louise is also a trustee of health and safety charity Scottish Hazards, where she is focussed on securing long-term funding for an occupational health and safety advice, training and support service for workers. Her primary aim in all she does is to stop anyone else from losing their life or their loved one in a preventable workplace incident.

For more information: [email protected]

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Scoring a Touchdown with Safety Culture with Dr. Josh Williams

Nov 3, 2022

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ABOUT THE EPISODE

“Improving safety culture is vital to long-term performance excellence.” We are very excited to have Dr. Josh Williams join us on the podcast this week to dive into how to bolster safety culture as he shares his insights into the five core competencies of safety leadership. Forward thinking leaders must continually consider ways to enhance safety culture. Explore ways to improve the effectiveness of your safe culture by visiting https://www.ratemysafetyculture.com/ to complete the safety culture self-assessment uniquely created by Dr. Josh.

READ THIS 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 extremely excited to have with me Dr. Josh Williams, who’s probably one of our favorite guests on the podcast. He’s a great resource in terms of safety culture, safety leadership, and observation programs do a lot of work in this space. Josh, welcome to the show once again.

Thanks, glad to be here.

So, tell me a little bit again about your background and how you got interested and passionate about safety leadership, safety culture, the behavioral side of safety, and so forth.

When I was in grad school, I was getting a Ph.D. in industrial organizational psychology, and honestly Eric, I was kind of bummed out. It just felt very theoretical. There’s a lot of statistical stuff. It was good, but it didn’t feel practical. And I had the chance to work with a guy named Scott Galler, whom many of the listeners may know was at the forefront of safety culture and behavior-based safety. He and a guy named Tom Kraus, formerly of BBS, really started behavior-based safety or at least popularized it. And it was great because we were doing real stuff with real people and I just immediately enjoyed it and the mission of two things, one, trying to keep people out of harm’s way, but also getting leaders to listen to folks a little more when making decisions. It just felt right. It felt like we were fighting a good fight and I’ve been doing it, I guess for 25-something years now.

Welcome back to the show. So, let’s start a little bit by talking about safety culture, why it matters, and you’ve authored a great quiz on safety culture. We’re going to talk about some of the themes within it that allow listeners to reflect, to see how they’re doing around safety culture and whether should they go deeper in terms of understanding how to drive improvements. But let’s start first in terms of why safety culture matter.

Culture is everything. It really is. I’m going to struggle with a sports analogy here. I’m not a huge Alabama fan or a Nick Saban fan necessarily, but you’ve got to respect what he’s established. That Alabama. He comes in and just completely turned around a proud team that had fallen on hard times for many years. They were cycling through different coaches. He came in and it was an immediate turnaround and it stuck. I was watching the game a couple of years ago and I’ll make this as quick as I can, but I was just kind of flipping through channels and I see the score. Alabama beat New Mexico State 62 to ten.

Wow.

And they’re doing a press conference and Nick Saban is irate and he’s kind of containers anyway, but they’re asking him questions and he’s not happy. Why aren’t you happy, Nick? These are his quotes I went through and kind of went back and forth and wrote down almost verbatim. But these were his comments. We didn’t play up to our high standards for large parts of the game. We didn’t get better this week compared to last week. And when you don’t get better, you start developing bad habits and bad habits lead to problems down the road, especially against better opponents. And then his final comment was you’ve got to play to your own high standard every day. And that stuck with me because you know as well as I do, a lot of times we get called in because you have a rash of injuries and all we’ve got a problem, we’ve got to fix it. And people get so tied into these injury numbers and injury rates. The flip side is sometimes you could be doing really good on the injury numbers, but complacency is setting in. The normalized deviation is setting in. We haven’t seen it yet because nobody’s gotten hurt.

But the point I’m trying to make is playing to your own standard, having a culture of excellence in everything you do, doesn’t mean you’re perfect, and it doesn’t mean things aren’t going to go wrong. But you play to your standards and not some number, whether it went up or down last month, last quarter, this, that, or the other. So, I hope that makes sense to the listeners. It’s just that safety is part of who we are and how we operate, and we want to establish that culture of excellence it takes effort, it takes vision, it takes looking in the mirror. Safety culture assessments are big in large part because it gives people an opportunity to see where I am good. Where am I not so good? What’s the plan to get better?

I think that’s a really important element and really getting a good view, talking to people about what was happening. What are the themes, how do we address them it, and how do we drive improvements? So, tell me about some of the themes in the quiz that you authored because I think it’s a good tool for listeners to have a quick scan to say how’s my culture? Not doing an assessment, just doing a quick scan self-reflection in terms of where I could get better.

Yes, a lot of its own leadership, having that ownership mindset at the leadership level, it’s not EHS’s job, it’s everybody’s job but mine as a leader. I’m setting the tone for everybody. Active participation from employees. He talks about employee engagement. That’s the big buzzword. What’s this big mystery? It’s not that much of a mystery. Listen to your people, be responsive, and then advertise improvements based on their feedback. That’s how you get involved. It’s not some secret. It just takes effort and energy. Learning culture with close call reporting, making sure incident analysis is system-focused and not blame-oriented. And then other things like making sure rules make sense, they’re practical, having the right tools and equipment, et cetera. But leadership is really, in my mind, where a lot of it starts. And if I can just let me go through a couple of things really quick here. In terms of leadership competencies, we did a bunch of research looking at what are good predictors of effective leadership. And in terms of safety leadership, five core competencies come through. I’ll go through each R1 quickly.

Sure.

The first one is active caring. And of course, my mentor, Scott Gellard, used the term active carrying many years ago in reference to something that happened at ExxonMobil. People in a room, we’re asking questions. Why aren’t we doing X, Y, and Z ah? Nobody cares. Nobody cares. Then he started talking about it, that people care, but they weren’t doing something about it. So active caring is not just being a good guy or a good person. Active caring is going out and doing something. Quick example, I was working at a steel mill, not at an I was consulting for a company that was a steel mill, and they had an awful plan. Manager, old school, crack the whip, scare people off, rule by fear. It was a mess, and they fired them, which was a smart move. They bring in this new guy named Bob. And Bob’s, the first order of business is to set up meetings with everybody in this facility, and everybody is unhappy. 30 minutes. Meetings called 30 minutes with Bob. And not a sexy name for the meeting, but it got everybody in there, and he just asked people, what do you need? What can we do?

And it was an immediate change in tone and immediate change in culture because this guy comes in and says, I want to hear from you. How can we get better? And so active caring is having the right intentions but doing something about it. Walking to talk, of course, is setting the right example and making sure you’re doing what you say you’re doing. So, for leaders, it’s being out in the field, listening to people, talking to people. Something as simple as wearing your PPE. I’ve seen that too. We’re going to do a couple of stories here. But we were at a facility, and this is 20 years ago. I’m dating myself, but we’re working with this company, and they are struggling. I mean, they can’t even get PPE. People are fighting over hearing protection glasses. So, we’re making some progress. And then they interviewed the CEO who was talking to Morley Safer. It was a big show, like 20 2016 minutes. One of those, anyway, he’s in the middle of operations with four trucks flying around talking about profits and how they were successful financially with no PPE on zero during operations. And we’re like, oh my God, that was it.

All the progress excuses me, with PPE out the window immediately. So, walking the talk is not just having nice corporate messaging. It’s doing what you say you’re going to do. Here’s another example in terms of leadership and listening to your people and how you’re treating them. I’m in a big facility that creates these small little bearings for vehicles. I think I didn’t remember now, but this is again, many years ago, and they had a guy who cuts his head open, and they’re doing an incident investigation, and the plant manager is in there and he asked the guy, why didn’t you have your hard hat on? That’s a requirement. And the guy says to him, I thought I did. I had my baseball cap on it. I followed my heart hat and is telling the story. And the plan manager stops the, quote, investigates, goes on a PA system and says literally to everybody, attention all employees. Baseball caps are no longer allowed in the building. You have ten minutes to return all baseball caps to your vehicles, and effective immediately, they’re no longer allowed in the building.

True.

Anyway, people are like, what’s going on? They go to their cars and trucks and whatever, throw their caps and come back in. They’re not happy. They’re grumbling about it. And anyway, so the next day they come in, and most people, and of course not wearing their caps, but one little section of this big building, this big factory, they kind of did a mini revolt. They came in, no baseball caps, but they had on cowboy hats. One guy had a football, one guy had an authentic Mexican. Sombrero from Tijuana, the little tassels come down and they’re their jobs doing their work. And it was their way of saying, this isn’t right. And the point manager was smart, and he kind of pumped the brakes on that and they had some discussions and made some changes. But it kind of goes to show you people don’t like being told what to do. And oftentimes you have an injury and all of a sudden, what do you do? Okay, we’re going to retrain the employee. We’re going to throw a new rule out there. Then all of a sudden, you got 61 million rules. So, I think you got to be careful with how we handle that.

Again, watch the knee-jerk reactions. Listen to your people, and just be smart about implementing new things and building and living. The vision is the next one. So, you’ve got a vision, you share that vision. People feel that vision. It’s legitimate, it’s real, it’s authentic. Recognition is another part of it. Number four is reward and foster growth. When we provide appreciation and sincere recognition, two things happen. One, I’m more likely to do it next time. That’s why we give our kids allowances. It’s like, you did good, here’s a financial reward. Now the reward and recognition don’t have to be money appreciation. I think the default recognition is not a program, although it can be good. Default recognition is just appreciation. People working hard under difficult circumstances, they got a lot going on in their personal lives. There’s a lot of stuff happening when you see people going beyond the call of duty, in particular for safety, mentoring a newer employee, etc. E. A little pad on the background again, goes a long way. People appreciate being appreciated. So, the last one is driving thinking and speaking. People that are on the job, doing the job know what’s going on.

And if we listen to what they’re saying, it doesn’t mean we’re going to do everything they recommend. But people understand what’s going on and we’ve got to drive that ground-level engagement and participation to be successful. Another quick example is Eric. The same steel mill I mentioned earlier had a problem lockout tag out. They called it lockout tag out tryout. And the challenge was people weren’t doing it. And in a steel mill, if you’re not locking something out, you can get hurt or killed in that area. It’s dangerous. So the supervisor is like, okay, well, we’re going to if we don’t, they start threatening people. One of the employees had a suggestion to get a team together and talk about the issue. Just, let’s just take a step back. And when they did, they found where you were locked out was not in the appropriate place. The rules for lockout tag out were convoluted and hard to understand different opinions on how to do it. By simply getting together, they shortened the process of how it was done. They made everything closer to the person to make it easier to save time because they had ridiculous production pressure.

But the solution was made from an employee’s suggestion to change the system. Don’t just come down with a heavier hammer. So, driving thinking and speaking is a big part of getting that engagement and improving the overall safety culture.

It makes a lot of sense, and a lot of focus in terms of leadership as a key lever to drive improvements in culture. What are some of the other things? Leadership obviously really is the key lever to drive change around safety culture. But in some cases, culture can be also a legacy. Could be something that comes from the past. 20 years ago, a CEO did X and it’s still in the present memory and it’s still shaping the behaviors, the choices, and the attitudes of people.

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, reenergize 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.

100%. And the first thing I’ll say is the system. So, if you want to look at it holistically. Big picture. If you’re trying to get more predictable results with your incident rates, it doesn’t fluctuate out of control. If you want to get more control over that and also improve sift prevention, three things to look at are one mindset, and attitudes. Number two, your behavior, what people are looking for. Number three is the system. And for many years, particularly in the house Ion days of BBS, the system was taking a backseat. And if we don’t focus on the system, we have problems. So, systems are things like when things go wrong, our first response should be, where did the system fail? Don’t blame somebody. Where did the system fail? It could be excessive time pressure. It could be we don’t have enough people for this job. It could be we don’t have the right tools and equipment readily available to do it. It could be we got a bunch of boring online training. When I first hired on, I don’t remember any of it, and now I’m throwing the wolves out there. Those system factors are big, and I think organizational leaders are well served to focus on tightening up those systems as a close call, reporting behavior-based safety.

These are systems and when the systems are running smoothly and we’re getting ongoing communication up and down the organization, everything else works better. And by the way, it’s easier for leaders to hold people accountable. We talk about positive accountability. You don’t want to be heavy-handed, but you also can go too far the other way and let everything slide. And when your standards drop, the injuries pop up too. My point on that is, as a leader, if I know my systems are tight and most people are doing the right thing, when you have outliers that are repeatedly not doing the right thing or doing egregious things, it’s easier to punish, quite frankly, because we understand we’ve got our system. It’s not the system that’s the challenge. We’ve got that figured out. So, I think system factors are a big, big part of it, I would say on the other side too. On the behavior side, we know from National Safety Council 9 that 5% of all injuries do in part to add risk behavior. That doesn’t mean blaming people now, but it just means risky actions. You’re increasing the probability of something going wrong, basically. And if we can minimize risky behavior, that can be done in a lot of ways.

One, engage people more behavior-based safety. I just mentioned we did a study with NIOS many years ago. Picture this, Eric, me and a bunch of other grad students are going into this environment doing training with these guys, looking at us like, who are you, youngsters? We’re going and doing this training with two different groups and they’re not either one is really happy, but we do our training, and then we implement a behavior-based safety process. So, you’ve got if you’re familiar with behavior-based safety, folks, the cards, you’ve got various things like proper tools and equipment, body position, things like that. Anyway, one group was given a card and said, go use it. The other group, we work with them to create their own card, how it was going to be used when it was going to be used, and where it was going to be used. That group that had their own card that they created themselves, we call it the ownership group used their card seven times more.

Seven times more.

We were shocked. If we had gotten double, we would have fallen out of our seats seven times more. Said very clearly, employee engagement matters. And I think people want to get more involved, and they want to speak up with each other more too. On one of the surveys, they used to use years ago, one of the questions is, should you tell somebody if they’re being risky? 90% of people are saying, yeah, you should tell them. The next question on the survey is, do you, do it? And it was like 660-something percent.

Wow.

So, to me, that’s an eye-opener. I want to get involved, but our culture is macho. You do your thing; I do my thing. Don’t tell me how to do my job, all that nonsense. So, we want to do it, and sometimes we’re reluctant to speak up. So, I think part of that learning culture we talked about too, is making it acceptable and normal to speak up with each other. It doesn’t have to be a supervisor or safety when they see something that doesn’t quite feel right. So, there are just a couple of thoughts there. Make sure we don’t get focused on one thing. Focus on attitudes and behaviors and the system.

I love that safety culture is something that’s widely discussed and accepted. How do you measure it? The right way.

The wrong way is to give somebody 150 items, as a survey, and everybody goes to fill it out. That’s the wrong way. Surveys are good, but they’re a good tool. But they’re only one tool out of many. So of course, when we do our assessments, we focus on talking to people and interviewing people, whether it’s in groups, whether it’s one on one. But we’ve got questions that we’re asking on important things like learning culture and leadership, things like that. But people will tell you, and we use a survey to supplement that. But that gives us an overall picture. When we do it. We’ve got our maturity model, and it goes from disengaged a citizen, and there are various steps in between, but it shows you where you are, where is your starting point, and what’s your baseline. Because if you’re trying to get better, you got to know where you stand. And those assessments do a good job of that, and it also affects what you can do. So if your maturity is low, you don’t want to be trying to shoot the moon, doing all kinds of crazy stuff. You need the basic foundational stuff to try to get better. If you’re further along, you’re more advanced.

You can start doing things like human performance, or we call it Bhop, behavioral safety, and human performance. Those kinds of things are more achievable if you’re further along the road. So those assessments are really good. The other thing I’ll say on that too, and I’ve seen this with other organizations that kind of do what we do is sometimes that’s the end of it. Here’s your 1165-page report. Enjoy it. Also, if you have any questions, we’re here for you. And that’s it. Of course, we do. Planning all that information you get, all that is ammunition for your plan, like, what are we going to do? And that’s where you get groups together. We recommend getting hourly folks involved, field folks involved, and union folks involved. We’ve got a union at some levels, and we plan it out. All right, so this is good. Got to keep doing that. This is not good. Got to get better. What are we going to do? And line it all out. And sometimes, as you know, we’ll do five-year plans with it. It could be simple, it could be complicated, but what are we going to do?

What are the three, or four big things we got to get done? Who is going to do it? When are we going to do it? Where do we need to help? What potential resistance is there? And by lining everything out, very specifically, going back to Nick Savin. He didn’t roll into College Station to play Texas A and M winging it. Let’s see what works here. They’ve got the plan, and they’ve got contingency plans if plan A is not working. So, part of the preparation for getting better is to understand where you’re at and get a smart strategic plan.

Moving forward, a couple of things just come to mind based on what you just shared. So, one for me is it’s not a safety culture assessment if you don’t have a combination of surveys with interviews and focus groups kicking the tires in terms of how the work gets done at a site level, and then finally, also looking at artifact reviews, looking at how is a culture shaped by system items. Any thoughts on that? Because to me, that’s the part is a lot of people do one part of this and think it’s a safety culture assessment, but it’s only by looking at all those three elements can you really assess the culture. In my mind, 100% a part of it.

That too is talking to executives. Sometimes there’s a heavy focus on field employees, which is good. We’ll do system assessments with executives like we’ll do artifact reviews. You say close-call reporting is good. Show us what you’re doing. I don’t mean that to be challenging. But sometimes reality and perceptions aren’t always the same. So, I think speaking more to executives and getting some tangibles in terms of stuff that you’re doing also gives you a more complete picture.

Okay. The other part that drives me bonkers when we’re talking about surveys is an obsession with benchmarking. I want to compare myself with everybody else in my industry, and I get that, for example, in employee engagement surveys. But because of the nature of surveys in safety culture, I’m not saying there’s no value in it, but my challenge is too often I’ve seen a company that has lower maturity from a safety culture standpoint, have higher scores and a really good maybe have lower scores because as you get better, you start becoming more self-critical. And if you know very little about what you could look like or should look like, you might look very positive.

Yeah, I’m with you. I mean, I think benchmarking is a nice thing to have, but people take way too much faith in that. As I said, I’ve seen the same thing. Some awful organization, they get a bunch of vests and they’re like, oh my god, they care about us. You should have had vests 15 years ago, man. It can be misleading. And sometimes the really, really good organizations are more critical because they have the mindset of excellence, and they may raise themselves lower than they really are. So, I get your point there. I think it’s nice to have, but I’m more interested, frankly, in various iterations of the survey. Like five years ago we were here, two years ago we were here. And I think that’s something that’s smart too for companies. It’s not a one-and-done deal. You do an assessment, see how much you’ve progressed, do another one, two, or three years later. It doesn’t have to be as intent. It can be on a smaller scale, but that to me is more interesting. And also, comparisons between groups, whether, for instance, managers are telling us this, employees are telling us something different, and the scores on the survey may be quite different sometimes the higher you go anyway, so that’s one issue.

And also, different groups. Maintenance is saying this, operations are saying that. And so the scores are interesting when they’re different, but also the comments from the interviews in the focus groups. So again, I think the best benchmarking is within your own organization, and also from the time one to time two to time three.

And I think the points you bring up there I think are important because it’s looking at even between-group differences. You have an overall culture, but you could have a microculture within a particular environment. We had somebody on the podcast that had a serious injury, and he came from an organization that had, by all accounts, a fairly, fairly mature safety culture. But in his specific area, there were a lot of challenges from a leadership standpoint, and people showed up in a very, very different, noncongruent way from the rest of the organization. So, understanding those differences, as you said, I think is incredibly important. The other element is longitudinally understanding how we’re shifting. I love pulse surveys as an indicator of how we’re making progress, even with higher frequency. So, as you’re driving improvements to check or is it landing with employees, are we actually seeing the impact? If I’m doing leadership training, am I feeling my leader showing up in a different way?

100% and that’s hard. I can add more really quick here too, in terms of how our leaders show up. Executive coaching, I think, is a big one. And just from experience, when we’re able to get into higher levels of the organization and talk to people, at the executive level, it’s different and it doesn’t mean it’s always easy, but that sets the tone. And again, I think sometimes with assessments, in particular, we miss the mark as we only talk to the EHS director, which is a very important position, but there are a lot of things that are also happening at the C-suite level that we need to address. So, I think executive coaching, when it’s paired with assessment-type work, is really good because you’ve got a strategic plan, and you need help from the top to get there. I don’t care who you are. So that’s something I think to consider as well.

And it also relates back to your story when you’re talking about Bob, who came into me, is when a new leader comes in and needs to show change, it’s very important to have a good strategy around what signals are you going to share. Because we talked about how culture can be based on something that happened 20 years ago in the organization that’s still in the present memory. So how does a leader come in and send some very intentional signals to show things have changed? I am going to show up differently or we’re going to show up differently.

100%.

So, great place to start. I love your quiz. Ratemysafetyculture.com so that’s a website. No gimmicks, no catches, completely anonymous. It just allows you to ask a couple of questions, 15 questions in total. To give you a bit of a sense in terms of where you’re at, should you consider some improvements, what are some of the areas of focus? So ratemycafetyculture.com it’s definitely not a safety culture assessment, it’s just a personal self-reflection to see how my organization is doing. So, I encourage people to go and visit their website, try it out, and get a few simple insights. And Josh, I’m sure they can always reach out to you if they want to have more conversations about, what does it mean, how do I make improvements, and how do I know where I’m at?

100% and I’ll give you more sports analogies.

So, Josh, thank you so much for joining us. Once again, I really appreciate you sharing yours. Wisdom around safety leadership, safety culture, and again, recommend anybody to go to the website ratemycafetyculture.com. No gimmicks. Just a good self-reflection quiz to say how am I doing? You’ll find links as well to all sorts of other quizzes that Josh has authored that help you look at different facets of safety culture, safety leadership, learning organizations, and so forth to see how you’re doing. So once again, thank you so much, Josh, for joining me today.

My pleasure. 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.

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ABOUT THE GUEST

Dr. Josh Williams is a partner at Propulo Consulting. For more than 20 years, Josh has partnered with clients around the world to improve safety culture and prevent SIFs. Dr. Williams earned his Ph.D. in Industrial/Organizational Psychology at Virginia Tech and is a behavioral safety, human performance, and safety culture improvement expert. Josh is the author of Keeping People Safe: The Human Dynamics of Injury Prevention and co-editor of Keys to Behavior Based Safety. He has published more than 150 book chapters, government reports, white papers, blogs and articles in leading journals. Josh has also delivered hundreds of presentations at leading national conferences and is a highly regarded public speaker. He received the Cambridge Center National First Prize for his research on behavioral safety feedback.

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