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Safety Participation and Worker Involvement: Driving Leaps in Performance with Ken Woodward

safety participation and worker involvement driving leaps in performance

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Ken Woodward was involved in a chemical explosion at work that resulted in the loss of his eyesight, smell, and taste. Rather than talking just as a victim, he embraces what can be learned from the incident that cost him three of his senses. In this episode, Ken stresses the importance of all team members working together equally to target zero damage to people, equipment, products, and finances. There’s not just one driver to workplace incidents; there’s a build-up over time. Tune in to learn how to increase safety participation in the workplace!

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Real leaders leave a legacy. They capture the hearts and minds of their teams. Their origin story puts the safety and 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.

Hello, and welcome to the Safety Guru. Today I’m very excited to have with me Ken Woodward. Ken is going to speak to us about a topic that’s incredibly near and dear to me around safety participation, worker involvement. So, Ken Woodward is an officer of the order of the British Empire OBE onfell of Ayosh, as well as the Safety Council of Australia. He’s worked for 32 years in workplace safety in 89 countries following a workplace incident that took place. So, Ken, welcome to the show, really excited to have you with me today. 

I’m looking forward to it Eric. 

So maybe let’s start a little bit about your incident. I want to get into a lot of the work you’ve done around worker involvement because that’s phenomenal, it’s exciting. But let’s start a little bit about your story and the incident that took place that really got you involved in safety to this level. 

Okay. It was November 1990, chemical explosion, caustic and Hypo. I had both eyes removed. I have no sense of smell or taste. Unfortunately, the burns recovered, and my life was saved by a work colleague. And at the time I was working for a leading soft drinks company. I also investigated the loss of my eyes, how it happened, why it happened, what we didn’t do, what failed, all the lists of whys, why’s wise, but to the workplace for a very good reason. 

So, one of the things when we first connected that you talked about was that everyone could have prevented this. Tell me a little bit more about kind of the whys you went through and that observation around everyone could have. 

Prevented what happened in that investigation. I realized that it was a process that I never attempted before. So, I found the most experienced person to train me to show me how to do it. Now this guy had 58 years experience, but it was inadequate training. We didn’t validate the training, we didn’t validate the competency of the trainers, the risk assessments, the standard operating procedures. We didn’t do any of that because it’s a very simple task, it takes three minutes, and it happens thousands of times every year. So, we didn’t do that. But there was a previous incident two weeks earlier, same task in the same place. There was exothermic reaction, and he burned his face and he had to go to hospital two weeks prior. 

Wow. 

Yeah, two weeks prior. That was reported immediately and investigated by the front-line manager. His condition was operator error. He must have been. So, we have a breakdown of communication and listening. We didn’t communicate with anybody. Eight weeks before that, there was a heating up of hot pipes. There were lots and lots of circumstances where compliance to systems, procedures and processes would have highlighted it all if we’d have adhered to it, sure. But we didn’t. We’re very busy people, lots of pressure to get the job done. Normal everyday occurrences throughout the world. It is no different. 

Yeah. 

Very common.

We manage those that makes a difference. So, there was lots of circumstances. Five different departments, a couple of managers. I just picked five different departments, all of them really? And then there’s a lot of fingers pointing afterwards. There’s a faint mistake because there’s not just one driver to these incidences. There’s a build up, of course. And that build up may take an hour, it may take a year, but the flags are waving. And we had nothing in place. We had no communication of the importance of flagging these up in place. And this is in 1990. If I shared the stats with you, they would frighten you. But nobody knew them. 

Nobody? 

Nobody. I only found out afterwards. 

It wasn’t discussed, it wasn’t reviewed?

No, nothing. If we got to hear about anything that happened on our C-Suite, and you would never find out how it happened. 

Wow. 

So, in that sense, and yet when you look at it, our topic is zero. 

Sure. 

No damage to people. Equipment, vehicles, property, product, environmental, finance. Every single employee around the world manages all of those to a lesser or greater degree. So, it’s in our own interest for everybody to work together equally to target that zero. 

Right. 

But do we know how well that zero is doing? Probably not. And we most certainly don’t make sure it’s happening. 

Sure. 

So, it’s all of those elements I picked up. And I also had to go to a rehabilitation center for a year where I learned the art of communication and listening. More importantly, working together equally as a team and compliance. That’s just for me to be a blind person, to go out into a cited world. There are four major factors. I can never drop the standards as I will get hurt. 

Right. 

Or it would become very inefficient. So, my life is based on those four standards, and I took those four standards into the workplace. 

Okay. 

Now, the best way I can explain this, in 1990, we had 89 reported lingers to the government who want fatality. Ten years later, I spoke to thousands of people that I work with within the organization six major sites, watch long solutions to put it right, how are we going to achieve it, and what support do you require from your management team to do to reach those objectives? Ten years it took to get to no reportable injuries to the HSE? 

None whatsoever. 

None whatsoever. We had 13 lost time injuries. The most was two days. That’s for thousands of people. 

Right. 

We produce more, and we made the most profit we’ve ever made. 

So, tell me a little bit about that approach to worker involvement, because I think that’s a key component in terms of how you get the workforce involved in safety. Tell me a little bit more about tactically, how you went about it. 

Okay. We pulled together the executive board, the vice presidents, and we fed to them the facts. 

Okay. 

We showed them where we think we could get to. So how you can measure us. If you want to make it a KPI, that’s fine. Don’t have a problem with it. But do we have the right management system in place? Did our international safety rating system work? So, we pointed out that you may have thought we were doing a brilliant job, but we put all the facts on the table, and then we showed them how we can start to improve it. And we did say it would take a long time, and we need the full support of the vice president of manufacturing and distribution. 

Okay. 

And we want that support to be personal and on site. We created a workshop with the vice presidents. We wanted them to come up with how they’re going to do it, how they’re going to support us at no cost. We will also have no cost to reach those improvements. We don’t need money off you, because the people that can do it are the workforce. They know what’s wrong. They know the solution to put it right. They know how to do it. But we need your support to achieve it. And it’s got to be personal. So, I don’t want you to pick up a KPI, go out and check it or do an audit, go out and check it. I don’t want any of that. Just want you to go along and say, how’s it going? How’s this work? How’s that working? Keep it calm and quiet. We also put an observation process in place so that we could observe compliance. Now, that’s quite difficult to put into any company because a lot of our employees thought it’s Big Brother. 

Sure. 

Absolutely. We’re being watched. We’re going to get in trouble. So, we had to make sure that we gave an overview to every single employee in this country on why we’re doing it and what to expect. And if you don’t get any of that, here’s the number, phone me, and I will work with you to put that right. 

Sure. 

So, we gave them the support. 

Okay. 

And then after a period of time that started to die away. In fact, it didn’t die away. It started to develop because we then put it into Lucky way of explaining it. If you were to go to anybody on a shop floor and say, your son and daughter is going to do your job tomorrow, what would you warn them about? Open up the gold dust. Let’s hear it now. How would you prevent that? We’re now starting to move to the next level of continuous improvement. 

Sure. 

So, then it became everybody’s job to do that, including the vice presidents. They could do it any way they wanted to. We looked at our audit system and we looked at we asked people, you have audits for housekeeping? They said yes. Who does them? The management. How often? Well, they didn’t know the answer to that half the time. Do you ever get feedback from that? Never. Okay, if you have a VIP visit, do the standards of Housekeeping go up? Well, we’re going to know the answer because of course they do. We cleaned everything. So, we just proved to our senior team that, okay, that’s just one audit, one KPI, whatever you want to call it, that we know the answers because it keeps highlighting them. Every week we do them, which takes 157 managers that do it an hour or two to do it. We’re wasting time. We know the answers already. How do we develop that? And we develop self management teams. So, the areas that they work in, they managed. They also then continuously improved on that, where they would manage compliance. It doesn’t matter who you are, it doesn’t matter if we had the Queen to visit, she had to wear the hair net, the hard hat, if she had to, the gloves and the safety boots. 

So, it really was they were testing us to make sure we meant it and we were managing them to make sure we mean it. So, work together equally as a team. We’re fully unionized, right? So, I asked every member, every convener, every union member, tell me what’s wrong, and then I asked all of them, how many of you ever go across and do anything about it? Right. Not one. So, in all fairness, we’re almost as bad as each other. So, we said, let’s just work together on this. We then asked them later on to set the standards for noncompliance so we could all manage it together, so we could communicate and inform people we have agencies, we have tenants, so that we could actually say, look, you have to wear those, or if not, we won’t produce. We’ll stop work, right? You’re not going to mess it up for us. So, they immediately followed it and they managed each other. So, it became self managed in teams. They then took over the reporting of incidents, hazards, minor injuries. They then set a target to measure 87%, close to closure at source. We didn’t do it.

The workforce did it, right? So, everything became I mean, I can say it now simple, but it took seven years, I’m sure, of running against a brick wall. We had to keep breaking down, going over it, round it and under it to show. We really do mean it, but we could never have done it without the full support of the senior team, of course. And it was tough for them, I’m sure. 

So, you talk about these self managed teams, which is a great concept. I’m assuming that during that ten-year period, there were some leadership changes that took place. How did the approach work through these leadership changes? Sometimes new leaders come in with new perspective, new ideas. How do you manage through that? 

We had a new CEO come over, but during those ten years, there’s a guy called Bob Cameron. He was Vice President of Manufacturing distribution. He was there the whole time. In fact, we both left in 2010, years after we started. We both left together. 

Okay. 

See, I left Coke in 2001. Of the reasons we left was we were making much better profits and everybody was going home alive and with their bids. 

Right. 

And I was getting invites from major companies in the UK. I went over to America in 97 to lay out the pathway that we’ve taken, because they’re really interested in how we do it. 

Sure.

And what I got at the time was where our culture is different. It is not different. We all go to work to earn money, to support our families and our hobbies.

Right. 

We all do it worldwide. We can make excuses that makes it different, or we can make assumptions that our people are different. No, they’re not. 

Right. 

Once we raise the understanding of why we’re doing it and the simplicity of it, it’s so much easier. 

Right. 

But it is important. And I’m glad you’ve mentioned that now, because within this week, I found out now there’s new people there, and it is incredibly different to what it used to be. It is very easy to spoil it because people have their own ideas. 

Exactly. And they’ve seen something that worked elsewhere, and they think it’s going to work, and sometimes it doesn’t make it better. You talked about the ten-year journey, the first ten years. 

Yes. 

What about the next ten years? So, you left in 2000. What happened in the next ten years? Because it’s still endured. 

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Yes. I went back about 20 days for quite a number of years. 

Sure. 

It just improved. And then we got major companies in the UK going to see our companies over here. How are you doing it? We used to issue them with little booklets that said, as we take you around our sites, we want you to look for things that are wrong. Please write them down and give them to the director of the site. Right. But we want you to manage it straight away if it’s dangerous. Right.

Even a visitor, somebody who doesn’t know. 

The plan this is near the sites at all. 

Love it. 

So that’s what they did. And that has been kept up now for decades and it’s done by the workforce. We have contractors coming in and we would manage filler operators and line operators to manage the permit trees because it’s happening in their area. So, if they haven’t got their correct PPE on, they would give it to them. The supervisor will put it into the system and Coca Cola would charge the company for the personal protective equipment that they didn’t bring with them. But that was all done before they arrived. They knew that would happen. 

Sure. 

That’s part of the agreement. So, they managed them. And if they wanted to do anything or go anywhere, that was the agent for that contractor for that amount of time that they were there. So, everything went through the operator.

I love the fact that this endured well over ten years after you’d left. You’re still coming in and out, but the ability for this to be sustained on an ongoing basis is the hardest part. 

Yes. How do you get better and start managing our road footage? You start making sure that they don’t use their mobile phones. They put them into boxes underneath the car seats and that’s the only way you can start your engine, so the phone is locked away. 

Sure. 

You make appointed times that you go to stop, take the phone out and make the calls. Does anything come up? Do I need to go anywhere? These are all designed by the workforce. 

Sure. 

Simplicity and efficiency. And I don’t know the answers, but I know we can go to find them. 

Right. 

We got those answers. We cascaded into the workforce for their agreement. So, when we rolled it out, no pushback. 

No surprise there. I’ve had guests share. Dr Josh Williams came and shared a little bit about how an observation program designed by the workforce had seven times more participation than one that was designed by a consultant coming in to say, this is the best way to do it. And some additional examples where workers were involved and consulted in how to run a tailboard. Significant more involvement in participation because it’s theirs. So, time and time again, the numbers, the stats show that self employed participation and safety is so critical but often miss. What you’re talking about is really total worker involvement in participation in safety, which is phenomenal. 

I was asked by a world leading company once it’s out in the Far East. He didn’t believe the safety stats on some of the platforms under, so he asked me if I go out. I had to get paid in the dunking of the helicopter and all that to get my ticket to go out and I went straight to the rig and started to lost the workforce. And that CEO in that country was absolutely right. His instinct was something’s not right. Sure, the facts, they genuinely were not right. But why? I’ve just mentioned that it’s not because of that. We can manage safety as long as we raise that awareness and understanding of why we’re doing it. We want you to return tomorrow with your bits, we want you to retire with those bits and enjoy your pension. And more importantly, you will be secure in the future of a new people joining you, because that’s where the experience is. Yeah, but what have I learnt on that rig? A guy came up to me and he said, this isn’t safety, but do you mind listening to me? I said, no, not at all. He said, I checked the valves, I’m the supervisor and I have a team of four, and I check all the valves and the ones rusting up. 

I have to with a wire brush, brush off the rest of the valves. Now, there’s thousands of these valves on a rig, so it’s a constant process. It’s like painted a bridge, it never stops. And then painted a different color so that the painters could come round and paint it. So, I said, yeah, okay. He said, well, why can’t I paint it? And I said, It’s a very good question. Why can’t you paint it? He said, well, the painters are contractors, they won’t let us touch the paint. So immediately I thought, all right, can we get a training program so we can train some of these people up? Now, I know this means the painters aren’t going to be too happy about it, but we have a far more efficient way of doing it, because the longest was three years before it was painted. 

Wow. 

So, it’s inefficient, of course. So, they did it and they saved £2 billion that year and reduced risk, in all likelihood, that came from I know it’s nothing at all to do with safety. Yes, it is. It gives us a chance, it gives us money to improve things, so we move on. We don’t want all of it. We want what’s right. 

Yes. 

And we need to tackle that workforce and get them to understand we’re going to listen to you. 

Yes. 

We can’t do everything called wando. It will take time, but we’d like you to prioritize. And we found lots of skilled people that we didn’t know about. They were in a previous life, they were a painter, let’s just say. And we started to look at this and we said, would you like to do it? I put yellow lines around that palletizer, so no forklift truck goes in it without your permission. And it just jumped for it. 

Right. 

So simple stuff, the big stuff. We put in an RFA to the States to get a mezzanine floor across the whole production floor with five production lines on it. I can’t tell you the speed that they travel at, and they have drop down points for the workers. That eliminated for the truck impacts, but that cost 170,000 pounds.

Right. 

But it eliminated all impacts because that 170,000 was just one incident that happened. 

Sure. 

And that’s what it cost the company without the loss of production in the investigation. So those simple things we managed to get done. But they designed it. The people on that site designed their mesome floor. 

Sure. 

And if we had a breakdown in machinery, the site director used to stand on that missing floor with his arms behind his back, telling everybody to get it fixed quick because the workforce told me, so I had to phone him up, say, please don’t do that. They will do it as quick as they possibly can, but I understand why you’re doing it. So, we work together, we spoke to each other, and that is the most powerful thing I have found around the world, no matter what country, what conditions, different priorities, but the same issues. 

Sure. 

How wonderful is that? It’s just managing people, listening to them. 

So where to from here? So, you’ve driven significant improvements sustained for the following ten years. What’s the next level? 

It’s a campaign that’s now probably eight months into it we go 1% more. We’ve got the figures from the UN and from OSHA and HSC and all around the world that have been recorded in fatalities in the workplace, and statisticians have worked out what I’m going to show you now. It’s quite perfect. If all of us worldwide did one thing personally in the next twelve months to improve safety in the areas that we work in, 27,000 people would go home alive. 

Wow. 

I find that quite profound because that’s probably a million odd people attached to all that that are not going to be affected. 

Right. 

We have to go to the workforce now and what I’m going and working with at the moment is the leadership team and the CEOs and the MDS and everybody across the board to let the workforce come up with a remit re improving safety for the next two years. 

Right. 

For a member of the workforce to present it to the board for their agreement, that will show which systems it will fit into. And don’t worry, if the reporting goes up, all we’re doing then is getting honesty. 

Right? Absolutely. 

And how are you going to support them in achieving it? So, we get dual agreement and then that is communicated to everybody in their wage limits so that they know exactly how well we’re doing. 

Right. 

Or if you like, online, so that they get it personally. 

Sure. 

Within that, we’ll be praised for success. No blame for failure. 

Right. 

Because if we have to blame somebody for the health and safety issue, we have all failed. 

Agreed. 

So, Ken, thank you very much for sharing your story. I think incredibly powerful in terms of the work of participation, in terms of self managed teams, incredibly important topics. I love the changes were sustained for significant period of time because sometimes I’ve seen it work for short periods of time with a leadership team that buys in for a period of time until the next one comes in. I think it’s a very powerful story. If you’d like more details, you can go to Ken’s website. Kenwoodward.co.uk K-E-N-W-O-O-D-W-A-R-D.CO.UK Thanks. 

You very much for asking me. It’s been the first time for me and a real pleasure. 

Thank you, Ken. Have a wonderful day. 

Cheers. 

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 powerful or by Propulo Consulting.

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ABOUT THE GUEST

Ken Woodward was working for Coca-Cola Schweppes Beverages (CCSB) in November 1990 as a production operative when involved in a chemical explosion, which resulted in the loss of his sight.  With enormous support from CCSB and following months of rehabilitation and re-training with the Royal National Institute for the Blind (RNIB) Ken eventually returned to work.

In 1996 Ken was invited to appear in a Health & Safety Film – ‘Fighting Against Chance’.  As a result the video ‘1 in 1.6 Million’ was also produced and this proved to be a valuable tool in Behavioural Safety training.  The Film was included as part of a training package for CCSB and this, together with Ken’s presence at all training workshops, enabled CCSB to dramatically improve their safety performance over the following few years.

In 1997 requests were received from other companies for Ken to make personal appearances and on each occasion the video ‘1 in 1.6 Million’ was shown.  Since then Ken has evolved into a motivational speaker on Behavioural Safety.

Now an independent consultant, since September 2000 Ken’s ‘Passion for Safety’ has taken him all over the UK as well as internationally.  He has been involved in the production of further health & safety videos   including the bestseller ‘Think What If, Not If Only, [2006] ‘Hindsight’ [updating TWINIO] and most recently [2007] Lessons From a Blind School.

In February 2004 Ken’s work was recognized by The Institute of Occupational Safety & Health (IOSH) in the

UK when he was made an Honorary Fellow of IOSH.

In June 2006 Ken was awarded an OBE for services to Health & Safety in the Queens Birthday Honours.

In 2008 Ken received the ‘Health & Safety Champion of the Year’ at the Health and Safety Awards for his work with Mace at Heathrow Terminal 5.

London 2012.  Very proud that Ken played a small part in the first fatality free construction of an Olympic Park.

Dec 2015 Ken awarded Honorary Membership NSCA Foundation [Australia].

Contact email: [email protected]

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Making Safety Personal with Candace Carnahan

The Safety Guru Podcast with Erich Michrowski Episode 27 - Making Safety Personal with Candace Carnahan

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ABOUT THE EPISODE

Incidents can happen to anyone, that’s why it’s important to make safety personal. Candace Carnahan was involved in a workplace incident when she was at the wrong place at the wrong time. She highlights that everyone needs the courage to care, and to take responsibility for safety to reap the benefits. Candace reminds us that anyone can get hurt and the importance of speaking up to improve safety performance – if you know better, do better! Tune in to hear Candace’s story and insights.

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 The Safety Guru public speaker and author. Are you ready to leave a safety legacy? Your legacy success story begins now.

Hi and welcome to The Safety Guru. I’m your host, Eric Michrowski. Today, I’m very excited to have Candace Carnahan with me. She’s a health and safety motivational speaker and advocate for health and safety based out of Halifax, Nova Scotia. Candace, welcome to the show.

Thank you, Eric. Happy to be here.

So, tell me a little bit about your story and what drove your passion for safety and to become this motivational speaker that speaks to a lot of global companies.

Well, as my story starts, almost two decades ago, I was working at a paper mill in I’m actually from a place called Miramichi, New Brunswick. And the paper mill was the bread and butter of the community, I guess. And I knew as a child of a parent that worked there, my mother, that I would be employed there. And so, I did a summer internship; I guess you would say labor work. And this would have been in nineteen ninety-seven that I started.

So maybe, needless to say, but I’ll say it anyway. Safety training was not really high on my radar, and really something that we were talking about in school training was looked upon as something that was a bit of a pain in the butt and overkill. Again, when you work at a place where your folks work at, you don’t really think that you’re being invited into the pits of danger. I, on my third summer, stepped over the top of a conveyor belt system.

I had been using that method of crossing from one point in the middle to the other for three full years, basically watching other people do it and following their examples and not thinking for myself and really making a choice to take a shortcut, not considering the consequences. And on August 11th, I put my foot down at the wrong place at exactly the wrong time. The margin of, you know, the chances of getting caught were so slim. But I did.

And my foot, yeah, my foot went into the rollers where the belt converged and the point, if you will, and I was stuck there for almost half an hour. Yeah. You know, stuck there while they called the ambulance. And they basically had to disassemble the system, the maintenance crew. Yeah. To free me and get me out. So, it was traumatic, to say the least.

And it’s really unfortunate. And I think it’s too often I hear that story of somebody new to the role coming in, and then something critical happens. And I think what would you talk about is really the importance of caring, having the courage to care to make a difference, the onboarding, training, talking about safety. Like you said, it’s not something that most people grew up in school thinking about safety. It’s just embedded in what how we think for most people.

Tell me a little bit about the courage to care and what that means, and how he could have made a difference.

Well, I think that after I saw the impact that my incident had on the fellows, I worked with, and it was a predominantly male industry and a great group of people. I think what people don’t realize sometimes is what a measure of strength can look like is actually speaking up and saying, be careful and not, you know, moving along with this. Let anything go. Shortcuts are cool. You know, the mentality that, unfortunately, is still very much alive and well in a lot of industries.

It takes courage to speak up and to tell somebody; I don’t want you to get hurt. I know everyone is doing something this way, but you know what? This way is safer, or that way is safer. So, there was a lot of guilt and feelings of, you know, why didn’t I say something? I should have spoken up. Yeah. With the people, I worked with. And in seeing that, it made me realize that sharing my story so that not only me and my family and my friends didn’t have to go through something like this ever again, that also the people that I worked with who were significantly affected didn’t have to go through it and had the tools and the understanding of how they could prevent it.

I think that’s a really important point is to two things, is that too often I hear people just they see something that doesn’t feel right, but they don’t necessarily say something because they’re afraid about how do I say this correctly? What’s going to be the impact if I do it? But the impact from what I remember when we spoke a little while back was even all the way down to the first responders in terms of how they respond and the impact on them.

That’s right. I’m happy you reminded me of that part of the story. Yeah. That the gentleman his name was Dale. He wouldn’t mind me saying that he was my first responder and rescue me. And it wasn’t until years later, I mean, 15, 16 years later, that I ran into him on the river fishing, as people do in America. And he shared with me that he was on a work of post-traumatic stress disorder and largely in part due to my experience and my incident.

And so, yeah, here I am living my life and have no idea what step, you know, impacted somebody else for so many years so greatly. Yeah.

And it’s really the power of telling stories, sharing those stories, sharing a lot of ideas around. How do you convey because what I’ve seen in many cases is a bit like you describe other people then start feeling guilt because they start thinking, I could have said something, I should have said something and not truly necessarily realizing what’s the risk; in front? And different people have a different understanding of risks and hazards. I know the first day, if I if I’d gone straight from school to working in a place like that, I wouldn’t have known what danger is and what I need to do to protect myself.

Well, you know, people say all the time, if you would, you don’t know. Can’t hurt you. And I try. That’s because I didn’t know I could get hurt. I didn’t know I didn’t. The first step in not getting hurt is truly recognizing that you can be you know, if it can happen to somebody else, it could happen to you. And you know something you said earlier just a moment ago about, you know, if I had known better and the people that I worked with, they did know better.

They just became a place and got used to taking that shortcut. And the more you get away with doing something; it reinforces that you’ll get away with doing that something again until you don’t. So, I always say to people, you know, if you know better, do better.

Absolutely, and I think I remember I started on the airline industry, an industry that’s known for its understanding of safety, the recognizing the importance of safety, and so many amazing disciplines around safety. But I remember from initial training, some of the elements of what you got trained and we got drilled in safety over and over and over for weeks before even having access to anything remotely close to a plane.

That’s good to know.

But once you are going to do this. Yes. You know, weeks and weeks of training and you didn’t circumvent, you had to show you understood. It is probably no industry I’ve ever seen other than maybe nuclear puts so much emphasis. And it really training and investing and understanding what that risk and the hazards are. But even then, you’d go on the line, and you start seeing people being slightly more complacent. And that becomes dangerous because if you have a little bit of complacency here and there, that’s where because it starts happening.

Listen, I could jump right in there. I’m going to tell you, as somebody who’s constantly flying to get to work on a weekly, daily basis, what really drives me nuts, and I can’t wait to get that kind of plane to be driven by it again. So, what really drives me nuts is when you’re on the plane, and they’re asking for a couple of minutes of your time, right. You listen. So, it’s not even the employees in the workforce.

It’s the passengers. Oh, for sure. You know, we have a few minutes of your time to let you know what the safety procedures are. And I’m sitting beside somebody on the inside. I’m on the inside. I like the window, and they’re on their phone. And I will say, excuse me, I do politely. Would you mind paying attention? And I had a fellow look at me one day, and he says, East Coast is coming out.

The fellow he says to me, you know what? What do you think the chances are that something’s going to happen? He’s really just joking with me, you know? And I looked at him, and I said, well, I don’t know. But they’re not none, are they? And he said, yes, you’re right. You know, so I mean, again, it’s that mentality of it’s not going to happen to me is just alive and well in all facets of our life.

And it’s if you’re looking for it, as I typically do, and you would also as The Safety Guru you said, you know, and it’s like this people can say, oh, I realize I’m not invincible yet. You know, as we always say, our actions speak louder than our words. So, if you were actually disregarding safety instruction and rules and regulations in any environment, then your kind of contradicting yourself as far as I’m concerned. Right, because you’re saying I actually am above this, and this isn’t going to hurt me.

It’s so, when you talked about that, you see something, and you say something. It’s something that you bring up a lot of your conversations. I’ve certainly had the same conversation with a fellow passenger on a plane who isn’t doing something that’s highly unsafe. Once, it was a person who are taking out their entire laptop just as soon as the flight ends had done the safety checks. And I called him on it very gently and highlighted the risk around why the laptops were gone.

They were obviously has done it as soon as the flight attendant took the safety checks, but it didn’t result particularly well. It resulted in about an hour and a half long flight of the guy grumbling and complaining and moaning about me for the duration of the flight until we arrived at the destination. But he did comply. So, you talk about this theme of saying something, something sometimes that goes well; I’ve had an executive sometimes tell me what it was.

In one case, he was correcting a team member who was doing something very unsafe, working on a ladder off-centre, drilling into the ceiling with no eye protection stuff, flying into his eyes, try to get that person to stop. And it said three times, it’s not always easy. So, tell me a little bit about what your experience has been around sharing stories, obviously saying something and driving the right outcome.

You know, I saw two of my things. I often say I cheer. If you see something, say something with my audience. And I believe that sharing story saves lives. And so those two go hand in hand. So oftentimes, clients and people I’m working with will say to me, how do I approach somebody and tell them yes or no, do it this way or you know, and that’s when I say, OK, that’s seeing something and saying something.

But it’s also great to share a story and make it personal. You know, it’s hard to argue with somebody who’s saying to you, I care about you. I don’t even know you, but I care about your family. I care about the effect you have on the environment here. I care about, you know, seeing that you get home safe. And I also care about myself and not having to live with the fact that I should have spoken up when I saw you do something that wasn’t safe.

But I did it, you know, so there’s a number of ways I think that we can approach situations. And you know what? They will not always be accepted with grace, but. I think that you know, that the more people, the more often approach the topic of safety and step away from rules and regulations. And because I said so and approach it with because I care, you know, there’s a much better chance, a greater chance of success because people have a bit of a harder time arguing with that.

And how do you get somebody to overcome that question mark that there’s say something that, you know, you see something? There’s a lot of people that that sometimes will say, hmm, but maybe nothing wrong will happen out of it. How do you help people get to the realization of I need to be comfortable saying something almost all the time? Well, we’re all that.

Yeah, for sure. And I think that what you just nailed there, Eric. As soon as you say and there say something like, that’s the sign, you know, don’t even second guess at all because your gut instinct, which in my mind is the most important piece of you have to work with, that’s your gut instinct. So as soon as your gut instinct is causing you to have that feeling, that means action is required almost always.

So, I think also that people when they’re you know, the question is this maybe it’s none of my business. That’s what I hear. Right. Someone told me it wasn’t my business, or I’m thinking maybe that’s not my business. And I always say when it comes to safety, make it your business. When it comes to safety, it’s everybody’s business. And again, you know, it goes back to the fallout of those affected by a workplace injury.

Nobody goes to work alone, and nobody gets hurt alone. So, it is you’re right. It is your responsibility and how you look at it as an opportunity, in addition to an obligation to have the courage to care to speak up, see something, say something, do the right thing. You know, if you know better, do better. There are so many ways that you can put it. And once I start talking about safety, I just get super jazzed of a safety nerd.

But there are so many ways that you can that you can, you know, that you can frame it. But the bottom line is, is that you don’t want to. Somebody’s not going home to their family; the people that you’re really going to work for are the people who are waiting for you at the dinner table, not the company that pays your check. You know, and I think that’s what we also have to keep in mind when we’re actually even ourselves challenging ourselves to take risks that nobody else is asking us to take.

You know, we’re not advocating for ourselves often enough. We should be having that conversation. Well, what’s it worth to me? What’s the risk? Who’s going to pay the price when we’re thinking about taking a shortcut or not bothering with that third step in the safety procedure? You’re not going to get a raise for that. You’re not going to get a pat on the back unless you’re working for a company that I’ve never met before. You know, and at the end of the day, you’ve got absolutely nothing to gain and everything to lose, as does your family.

And I think that as individuals, we need to keep that in mind. I always go back to my incident. I mean, I if I did mention the other people who set the example. Sure. But at fault and blame our words I use; they’re not proactive. I use responsibility. Yes. It was the other people’s responsibility to set a great example, a good example to say, for example, it was my responsibility also to think about what I was doing and to consider the risks in my actions, you know.

So, pointing fingers and placing blame doesn’t bring back a loved one, and it doesn’t make limbs grow back. So, taking responsibility and being proactive is the state that I like to operate from.

And I think the leaders have a huge ability to influence that because they can create an environment where people are comfortable talking about it. They can reinforce the right behaviors that can reinforce that somebody stop work because they felt something didn’t feel right and in a really reinforce that challenging attitude day in and day out. So, I think a lot of that, in my opinion, rests on how the leaders show up and how they create the environment in the culture for the right behaviors to happen and appropriate proper basis.

Absolutely. You know, and I see it with people and the companies I work with every day, those that are demanding that people shut down massive operations. Right. You know, in the name of safety and actually exercising that right to refuse. And then, you know, ExxonMobil, for example, is a company that I worked with here on the East Coast off the label on the oil and gas rig. And I mean, there is there can be a great expense to shutting down, of course.

Right. But, you know, companies that put the priorities and the safety and the well-being of them of their workforce first, that’s where that’s where you want to go. That’s where you want to work with. And at the end of the day, also what I think is, you know, so admirable and that’s such a great example is when these organizations actually take those stories and those situations and make sure that globally they are diffused and shared at all levels so that, you know, an example is being set by that throughout the whole entire world, within the organization.

I mean, the power in that is I mean, I don’t have the words, but it’s really key. I remember way, way back early on in my career, again, in the airline industry, there was one decision, probably my first couple of months, maybe first year in the role. So, it’s very, very green. And I stopped work in this particular case, cancels part of the operation, which is specific flights for what seemed to be a very real hazard, ended up not being a real hazard.

The cost to the business was somewhere between a million and a half of those decisions. But I didn’t get fired. I got promoted not the next day, but I got promoted. It was recognized as the right choice, the right thing to do. And that speaks huge amounts if somebody is willing to take a cost in the millions because it’s the right thing to do.

Exactly. That’s exactly what I’m talking about, you know. And then the more people who share those stories and the more confidence is gained. I mean, you know, I believe that we should be aiming towards a fatality free work force. Obviously, you can’t just say it’s OK to hurt one person who wants to put their hand up for that to be their loved one. No pressure. Right. And so that those are the measures and those are the lengths that leaders and organizations need to go to.

And that, of course, the trickle-down then is that the smaller organizations see you know, that works, that’s getting people home and why these decisions might cost millions, as you know, what really costs millions and millions if we’re talking money, forget the emotional impact is an injury for sure. Right? I mean, so I think that. Always, always looking at anything that you do with regard to health and safety, whether it’s shutting it down, you know, having speakers, new safety programs, do whatever it is that you’re doing, you always have to look at it as an investment and not in it, not as an expense, 100 percent.

So, I want to close off with some thoughts. You displayed huge resilience through the experiences you’ve had. We’re now in pretty challenging times, obviously, with covid and resurgence of it at the time of recording this episode worldwide. What are some of the insights that you can share around resilience through challenging times, like what we’re going through right now?

Well, I’ve been thinking a lot about it, and I think back to losing my leg, right? I think back to actually finding out that the foot would not be saved and I would lose my leg before below the knee, which I don’t think I even mentioned in the beginning, that that that’s what the end result was. And having to figure out, can I wear high heels again? How am I going to dance? You know life is going to throw us insane curveballs.

And I think that when we’re dealing with something like the pandemic right now, I’m grateful, you know, for the challenges I’ve had in the past. And I’m grateful that I have the ability to recognize those challenges as gifts because it allows you the capability and the resilience, and the strength to tackle the next challenge in the next situation that’s, you know, adverse to what you had hoped for it to be. I’ve basically, you know, this year had to as many have had to recreate my career, get up.

And I also think, you know, and I’m not talking about it in a religious way at all, but faith, you know, faith people are doing the right thing and moving forward is something that I draw on and taking everything as I did after I had gotten hurt, literally step by step, literally one day at a time. Because if you look too far in advance, you know, it’s overwhelming. And I think that when we’re talking about safety, if a company has X amount or number of injuries and X number of fatalities, sure, having those go down to zero would be the ultimate goal.

But it’s also really important to just bite off a new piece every day, do one thing safer today. Don’t worry about changing your entire safety program and replacing every piece of safety equipment that you have for something bigger, better, newer. You know, chances are great if we’re using our gut and our brain and our heart thinking about the people at home, actually taking the knowledge that we have and putting it to good work, and trusting our instincts. You know, we’ve got the tools we need to make the safer decisions each and every day, whether that be taking a second glance around your car, making sure that the snow is off the top.

If you live in a place where there’s snow, which I do, you know, there are so many little things that we can do to make moving forward and being better manageable. And every time you see the payoff with these little decisions, you don’t even realize it. But all of a sudden, here you’ve got a big result, right? You know.

Absolutely. So, Candace, I really appreciate you coming on the show, sharing your insights. You’ve had an incredible story, but you’re fighting an incredibly good fight. And I appreciate what you’re doing on that front. You speak to a lot of organizations about safety and speaking up. If somebody is interested in having you speak either at their leadership teams or with them with the frontline team members, how can they get in touch with you all?

They can just look me up. Candice Carnahan Dotcom is my website. I always say I could just pickaninnies with one-legged, and I will pop right up there if you can’t spell my last. And I’m doing, you know; I’m making the moves to do things now. Virtual reality and online streaming, of course, when it’s safe, still traveling in person and looking forward to getting back to that. So, I really hope, you know, I think a lot of people now have gotten used to the fact maybe they are more comfortable with the notion that we have to go ahead and talk about things other than the pandemic, all the things that were still an issue and still needed to be focused on before this happened still exist.

And I think in twenty, twenty-one, we realize now we can actually stay connected. Like, look at us. You know, we don’t need to be in person when we can’t be, but we can still impact each other. We can still share stories and, you know, make the world a better, safer place to be in.

Excellent. Well, thank you, Candace.

Thank you so much, Eric. This has been great.

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 team’s Fuel your future. Come back in two weeks for the next episode or listen to our sister show with the Ops guru, Eric Michrowski.

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ABOUT THE GUEST

Candace Carnahan, Safety Advocate

With wisdom and wit, Candace presents a new way to think about safety. Through the power of stories, she demonstrates how to use your voice – to see safety as an opportunity not just an obligation. Having experienced a traumatic injury at the age of 21, Candace knows too well the impact it has not only on the worker, but also on everyone around them. For 20 years Candace has been taking the stage sharing stories to companies of all sizes – and already more than half a million people have been moved by her personal experience of injury, resilience, and strength. The way she weaves safety seamlessly into storytelling that is relatable and memorable is what resonates and provokes real change in attitude and action. Candace lives in Halifax, Nova Scotia, and is a frequent traveller to clients in the manufacturing, transportation, energy, and production industries. 

For More Information: https://candacecarnahan.com/

 

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Importance of Leadership and Onboarding for Safety with Curtis Weber

The Safety Guru with Eric Michrowski: Episode 25 - Importance of Leadership and Onboarding for Safety with Curtis Weber

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ABOUT THE EPISODE

Safety is important at all stages of a career, whether it is the first, third or last day at work. Irrespective of the job, communication and collaboration during and after onboarding are crucial to ensure everyone’s safety. Curtis Weber is a Safety and Motivational speaker, who learned about the importance of speaking up and building relationships with co-workers through a serious workplace accident that changed his life. Tune in to learn about the importance of leadership and making safety personal during and after orientation.

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 The Safety Guru public speaker and author. Are you ready to leave a safety legacy? Your legacy success story begins now.

Hi and welcome to the safety guru. I’m really excited to have with me Curtis Weber. We’ve met a little while back. I’m going to say it’s probably about a year, year and a half ago, well before covid. So, Curtis, great to have you on the show. Really happy to hear the sound of your voice again.

You better. Thanks. Good chatting with you again here over the last little bit, setting this up. And thanks again for having me on the forecast.

So, Curtis, you speak to a lot of different audiences. That’s how we originally met. You were talking to a leadership team in terms of the importance of safety leadership. Can you share a little bit about your back, your background and how you ended up in the safety space? And I know there’s an unfortunate incident that happened. So maybe if you can share a little bit about the injury, that and really more importantly, how you got to what you’re doing now in terms of really helping a lot of organizations and leaders embrace safety to take it to the next level.

So, I guess before I usually get into the events of the incident, I always kind of share with my groups a bit of a background, especially when we’re talking about safety and try to make impacts and have people buying the messaging. I always kind of share a bit of a back story of where I was going with my injury before I was actually seventeen when the incident happened. I just graduated, had an opportunity to move away from home and live out a dream of playing hockey at the next level and Elberta some junior hockey.

And unfortunately, that wasn’t going to be the case for me because on the third day of what I call my first ever real job, working outside of a family business, building steel green beans on the prairies of Saskatchewan, I had an incident. And I think that’s an important note when I speak to the of being that I was 17 years old, but also being that I was in the third day of my job, we were attempting to make a move to make a lift with a hopper ball of a big steel structure.

We’re trying to put it underneath an overhead power line. And after a brief discussion and a day that went completely sideways for us, it was a day that we were supposed to be done early on the Friday of a long weekend. Our first our first job didn’t go the way we had planned it. So, we found ourselves kind of behind and rushing to get the job done so we could get done before that long weekend. And in doing so, we didn’t have the proper discussions or conversations and myself included, didn’t take the opportunity to speak up and voice a concern.

And as we were attempting to make a move with that pickup truck and back that off the bottom, underneath the power line, we contacted an overhead power line, which was sent through fourteen thousand four hundred volts of electricity through my body and through three separate cycles.

My goodness. And I think one of the pieces I mean, you had such a promising hockey career ahead of you. The part that I remember when we first met is really your positive outlook. And would you decide to come out of it? Can you share maybe a little bit about how you started helping organization? Kind of what triggered that? That’s that thinking? Yeah. You know, I never really thought of a safety role as a motivational speaker role, not as much as me as my mother would have told me when I was going through my recovery and after the recovery, she always said I should you know, I’ve got a great story and an inspirational story with the way that I dealt with things.

But I guess going into this role, I it was really just kind of, you know, fell into my lap. I you know, after the long recovery and the surgeries and amputations and, you know, years of physiotherapy, it came time to figure out what I was going to do with my life after that nearly six years’ worth of recovery time when you take into account the reconstructive and plastic surgeries and physiotherapy and stuff. So, it was a pretty long journey.

And I was looking to get into a, you know, a background in wildlife management that was kind of a passion of mine as well, outdoors and things like that. And I was approached by the Workers Compensation Board of Saskatchewan. So, their WorkSafe department to that, they were looking for somebody who has been through a traumatic experience that’s physically and mentally willing and able to share an experience. And for a long while, I it was kind of a thanks, but no thanks.

It was. Petrified of speaking in front of crowds, I wasn’t a road safety guy. Being 17 when it happened or anything like that. But I think as the years went on and they kept kind of, you know, coming back and saying, hey, are you ready to come and do some work with us? I think maybe you could call it maturity kicked in or the realization that by experience and what I had been through and how I dealt with it so, so easily almost started to creep into my mind to think maybe there’s a reason why this whole thing happened and an even bigger reason why I was able to handle it the way that I did.

And so finally, I, I answered the answer, the call. And, yeah, I had a great almost 10 years with WCP and WorkSafe and sharing my story. And I also kind of turned me into a bit of a safety consultant and trainer. So, I was able to get a good, good amount of experience and background in safety as well.

Sure. And I think one of the things you touched on in your story and you talk about is the importance of speaking up. Can you can you share a little bit about, obviously, in your story, there’s always usually this gut feel that when something happens. Can you share a little bit about the importance of speaking up, but also the role of leaders that how they make that happen?

Yeah, for sure. I think, you know, speaking out when we talk about that in a workplace, it’s so important, it’s likely one of the biggest opportunities that we have to prevent incidents from happening. Actually, we can have the best safety system in the world with all the policy and procedure and hazard assessments and documentation and, you know, our fancy posters around the workplace. But at the end of the day, if we’re not if we’re not speaking up and voicing concerns, are asking questions when we have them, you know, those incidents are inevitable.

And for us that they might not have been just as easy as, you know, speaking up and voicing the concern. There was a lot that went into the day for us, like I mentioned, being rushing in behind and the way that the day’s events unfolded. I think that those that that condition of a hall for them being there and needing to be underneath a power line, that set of conditions was waiting for a group of people like us to come along to set up.

And it was it was waiting for a group of people that were rushing and frustrated and behind. And that’s what happened. So, and when we talk about leaders, you know, lots of times when we think leadership and safety and culture, we normally think of a manager or a supervisor or a director or a VP or something like that. And no doubt we need their leadership and commitments towards developing that culture. But at the end of the day, we sometimes forget that we can and probably already do have leaders who are working shoulder to shoulder with us on site and know as much as much as that management has a role in developing that culture.

I feel it really comes down to the people that we’re working with, because obviously not very often do we find that that director or manager of working shoulder to shoulder with us. It’s usually it’s us working together. And you speak to any senior leadership group of an organization who’s got a very successful safety record or culture. They’ll be the first ones to tell you that it’s really because of the people and how their health care programs are employee driven when it comes down to safety.

Yeah, I would agree with you. It’s the same. It’s got to be that conversation with everything, the set of circumstances you talk about just before a long weekend, your work’s falling behind. There’s that sense of production pressure. And often when I speak to the theme of production pressure, people are expecting this person like lashing out of people go faster. But in many cases, it’s subtle. It’s I set out and this is the goal I set for myself for this day and I’m falling behind.

And you’re trying to find a way to get it done. And that’s often where a step gets missed. Right? Right. For sure. So, the other piece that strikes me about your story is this was your third day on the job. And it’s really even more critical based on what you’re sharing to really think through. How do you drive the onboarding? How do you get people to get to encourage speaking up? How do you make that apparent in terms of what’s the safety culture here?

On the third day, when I speak to a lot of people in the construction space, the challenges, sometimes everybody’s coming on. It’s a first date, second or third day, because often they’re coming in for a job that only lasts a short period of time. Then they go to a different job site. How do you instill that? Or based on your experience, how could it have been done differently so that as you showed up that early on in your in your in your career, somebody would have talked about the importance of speaking up and taking your time, assessing hazards, things of that nature?

Yeah, no, that’s right. Being my third day on the job, I went from working in a family business. My dad had a family business building these green beans. And so obviously, once my brothers and I were old enough to help out, that’s what we did. But from the time we were five years old, you know, he’d be dragging us on site and our jobs were pretty minimal, picking up garbage off the site, running guys tools or just being around.

And so, I always mentioned, when I speak to different groups, is that, you know, my injury happened in an industry that I was literally raised in. I was nearly killed in the same industry that I was raised and doing. But the difference was, is that I went from working in that family business. And just the year before I’m about to move away from home to play hockey was the first year Dad’s business was kind of falling apart.

So, I actually got into a crew with a brand-new crew, which was completely different to me. So rather than just kind of kicking around at home that last summer waiting to go to move away from home, it was an opportunity to kind of keep myself in shape with a pretty physically demanding job. And so, I went from working with a group of people that were very familiar to me, like my brothers and a family friend and a father.

So being that I went from that at such a young age and jumped into a crew of complete strangers who were twice my age, it’s already probably a probably intimidating environment for a 17-year-old kid to start that process. Right. And working with people that have been working together. And so, I think that when we talk about the onboarding process. Like you mentioned, with construction, there’s a lot of moving parts and lots of temporary jobs and things like that, but in orientation, I find is a really great opportunity.

If we use it properly in an orientation, I don’t mean, you know, an organization having us go through an orientation. And here’s what we expect of you. And here’s how we do things and here’s how you know what our expectations are. But a good orientation would also have built into the opportunity for four new workers to ask some questions. And maybe that’s enough and maybe that’s enough for them to be familiar with the people that’s providing the orientation or maybe the other seven or ten or thirty-five people that are taking the orientation with us.

It gives us an opportunity to maybe develop a little bit of a relationship before we even get onto the site. So, I really think that that obviously helps for me again that day, I think a lot more went into it than just me being in an environment that I’m not used to, like I mentioned before, with that, with how the day’s events unfolded. But really, like I said, that that that onboarding process, having the opportunity to not only give the expectations of what we want through orientation, but also, you know, creating that that that relationship right away in terms of people feeling comfortable speaking up and asking questions with one another.

Yeah. And I think that the part about speaking up is a is a really challenging one, because even if you’re in a place where it’s legislated that you have the right to refuse work, to stop work, things of that nature, even if it’s a legal context and legal right, which is in some jurisdictions, but others still don’t have it as a legal right. It takes a lot of guts to say, hmm, let me pause this right, and often people are talking about we need to get the job done.

There’s all this pressure on getting the work done. It’s not that straightforward is the same. I remember I’ve been on different circumstances. You tell somebody else to stop work or what they’re doing is not safe. Maybe you should think about doing a differently. It’s not that easy. I was talking to an executive in one organization who on a weekend they were doing some charity work, was trying to tell others to say there’s this gentleman on a ladder working above and not like off center drilling into a ceiling right above the stuff flying and his eyes.

No, no, nothing that the ladder was about to tip over, try to make him stop three times and he was unable to do it. And he says, I’m asking my team members to do this day in, day out and I can even get him to stop so that that personal reflection or getting somebody else to think about it. These are not easy things to do.

Yeah, no, absolutely. It’s a pretty vulnerable spot to be put into to, you know, to witness something that’s being done unsafe or not following processes. And it is it’s likely the biggest thing that will hinder the success of us of our safety systems and programs is the fact that getting people to buy into you know, we hear terms like stop work authority. We hear terms like our brothers’ keepers and sisters’ keepers and things like this. And they’re great.

They’re great initiatives. They sound great. But at the end of the day, it’s really hard for people to do that, especially when we’re working in environments where people, you know, blue collar environments, industrial environments where, you know, it’s all go no work, you know, I’ll go no, no, wait to the work’s done type of industry. And it’s yeah, it’s a hard thing to do. And I think, again, it comes back to developing that culture piece and people are good at, you know, as human beings.

We’re really good at identifying what’s right and what’s wrong and what’s safe and unsafe. Everybody knows these things. And in fact, once they’ve been, you know, developed even further background in safety as a as a safety officer in a different job once before. And I a consultant in another role I’ve done incident investigations or I hate determines investigations. I always call them an it’s an assessment, a cultural assessment, whatever the case may be.

But investigations are horrible name.

Yeah, it is. Yeah. So, when I when I did those things very often you would ask, you know, as part of that or it would come up that, that, you know, that worker knew what they were doing was wrong. They knew they were taking a shortcut. I knew that was I knew what we were doing was wrong that day and I still didn’t take the opportunity to speak up. So, I think that’s the easy part, is identifying what’s right and what’s wrong.

The hardest part is, is like you say, is, is to, you know, have, you know, given the opportunity to actually say something or do something. And that goes to you know, when you know my kids, I got young kids at home and they know what’s right and what’s wrong. And they know when they’re doing something that’s wrong, they’ve got to make a cognitive choice whether they’re going to continue to do something after I told them not to or, you know, that it’s wrong.

And, you know, they’ve got to assess what those consequences might be if it’s, you know, touching a hot stove or touching the fireplace. And those are things that that we learn kind of along the way. But it’s hard. It is. It’s a hard thing to do. And it really does come down to developing that that cultural piece. And I was in my presentations, I’ll take it away from work for a second and say that, you know, how many times has somebody been at a restaurant or a pub or a staff function or a Christmas party where we’ve identified that a friend or a co-worker has had a few too many drinks?

And that’s the easy part, is to say, oh, jeez, Eric said quite a few drinks. And, you know, it looks it looks like. Yeah, yeah, yeah. It looks like he’s reaching for it looks like he’s reaching for his keys. And, you know, that’s the easy part to say, hey, he shouldn’t be driving. But the hardest part is to go up to the Eric and say, hey, man, you know what?

If you’ve had a few too many, we want you to get home safe. Let’s take your keys. We’ll call you a cab or just wait for a ride. We’re going to be leaving soon or whatever. But that’s the hardest part because, you know, people don’t want to look like that person who’s the fun stuff or the, you know, the overachiever or whatever the case is. And it’s a really hard behavior for us to, you know, to crack for sure.

Or the person that’s preventing you from getting the job done, because we’re we want to get it done. Like you describe the long weekends there. You want to go and enjoy the long weekend. So, we’re predisposed to say, OK, how do I get this done? Which can get us into trouble. How so? When I met you originally, you were talking to a group of leaders. You also speak to a group, sometimes different team members.

How do you instill this sense to get the right reinforcement across peer groups? Because often, like you said, it’s. Onto the VP, who’s out in the field, who’s going to influence you? They may have a comment, a conversation that matters. They can influence the people day in, day out that around you. But tell me a little bit about how do you drive this at a pure level and drive the right conversations that may need to happen?

Yeah. So, I think that that, you know, that reinforcement from our peers is something that, you know, again, it’s a really hard one to drive because, you know, oftentimes people don’t want to be the stop work authority person who is doing those things. But if we can, again, go back to that cultural piece and it starts really there, if we can create an environment where we all feel comfortable speaking up or asking questions or sharing concerns without being afraid of looking stupid or having a stupid question, I think we’ll start to get there because, you know, at the end of the day, we have all these touchy-feely terms.

You know, our this is our work, sadly, and things. And at the end of the day, that’s really what we want it to be, to be there. If I’m if I’m approaching you and saying, hey, you know, I know it’s the end of the day, it’s Friday, you know, and when we got to, we want to get out of here. But I know we’re not tied off and, you know, we require to wear harnesses and this this type of job or task.

Let me give you a hand. I’ll help you do it. We can get it done quicker. We can get it done properly. And I think the more we can create that environment where it’s an actual it’s a process where people feel like they’re actually cared about as employees, that it you know, that it’s going to make a difference. And for me personally, when I’m speaking, as I use my experience and not only my experience of the injuries and one to walk them through where I was going with my life before my injury and the opportunities, I had with that, just like everybody else out there that, you know, it’s going to work today and tomorrow that has hopes and dreams and goals for sure.

Those were taken away from me and I use that in my presentations to walk through the next chapter of my life, the injuries and what happened there and how long that recovery was. And then I followed that up by making it personal. And I guess what I’m saying is that if we can make safety personal among our teams, it’s going to have so much more impact. And that’s a big part of my presentation, is I use all the bad stuff that I went through and I use my you know, the way that I dealt with things, how you know, this since the day that I remember waking up out of the coma to, you know, two months later waking up in that coma at when I woke up this morning, I’ve never felt depressed or angry or sorry for myself.

And so, I think that making it personal and using those experiences for me to share with them how I dealt with my situation, how I’ve there’s nothing that I don’t do today that I did before my injuries. And I try to inspire people to make changes in the way that they view safety. So, and when I’m speaking on those jobs, when I’m speaking on those job sites, whether it’s a 17-year-old kid, that that needs to be comfortable, go into that 50 or 60 something year old guy that’s got a ton of experience and knowledge, I need to feel comfortable doing so.

And that, you know, 50, 60 something year old needs to be open to having me come to him. Because at the end of the day, if I’ve got a question, even if it is stupid, I might be putting him at risk and his children and his grandchildren are at risk. So really, at the end of the day, you know, we want to make it personal. And on the flipside of that, we want young people to be able to go to experience workforce and learn from then with their experience.

But, you know, we can look at it differently, too. We’ve got, you know, young people coming out of educations that some of these people might not have even had back when they started their careers in terms of training and the way things are done. And so, we’ve also got to be open now as a 50, 60 something year old to be receptive of maybe a 20-year-old coming up and saying, hey, you know, I know you’ve got all this experience and you’ve you figured out a way to MacGyver up that piece of equipment to do the job better or whatever the case is.

We need to be receptive to that, you know, 20 something year old that’s coming in with a different perspective to say, hey, let’s slow down, let’s get it done right instead of fast and let’s all go home. And I think the more you see that from one another, I think that the more opportunity there is for people to continue doing it.

Yeah, that’s so important. Is the leader, the environment, but your peers? Right. If it appears it’s a lot of organizations, I’ve, have I’ve seen where that that 50, 60-year-old is saying, hey, I’ve done it this way, don’t bother me, or even kind of intimidates a person that comes with a question. Well, you’re going to get a horrible outcome if you keep doing this. And it’s everybody’s job to drive safety.

Talk about safety. When we talked about onboarding, the experience you’ve got, I remember first of all, I had the what I got trained for six weeks and then I showed up. This was in the airline industry and it was not it was not exactly the same thing when I showed up on the line the first day because wasn’t doing things. Yeah, yeah. You could cut this corner. And that’s that gets dangerous because that starts at.

Enticing people to do things and cut corners in some instances. So really appreciate you sharing your story and all the good work that you’re doing across organizations in terms of inspiring leaders, in terms of how they make safety personal, inspiring team members, in terms of how they show up is every bit makes a difference and helps make somebody’s life better. So, I think it’s phenomenal what you’re doing. Really appreciate all the work you’re doing.

You bet you. Thank you for having me. And give me the opportunity to be on the podcast and talk to talk safety and culture with you.

Absolutely. Well, thank you, Curtis. And if ever you’re interested in having Curtis present or speak to your group, I’m assuming these days it’s all virtual or mostly virtual. Curtis Weber, thank you. Thanks, Eric.

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, fuel your future, come back in two weeks for the next episode or listen to our sister show with the OP’s guru, Eric Michrowski.

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ABOUT THE GUEST

Curtis Weber, Safety and Motivational Speaker

Curtis Weber comes from Saskatchewan, Canada where he has been inspiring and influencing change in safety behaviours globally for nearly 15 years. Working in safety as a Trainer, Consultant, Officer and Speaker following a near fatal workplace incident, Curtis has been able to develop a unique way of challenging audiences to change the way they perceive safety. Curtis believes that before we can develop or change a safety culture, first we must understand and influence human behaviours towards safety. Using his own personal experience of a near fatal workplace incident, let Curtis take you on his journey and challenge you on the way you think about safety.

For More Information: Curtis Weber Consulting

 

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Making Safety Personal with Kina Hart

The Safety Guru Podcast with Kina Hart

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Workplace Safety is critical for employees to be able to go home to their loved ones each and every day. In this episode we explore the importance of Safety Leadership and effective Safety Culture in the workplace with Kina Hart, an inspirational speaker for Workplace Safety who tragically lost her arm in a summer job workplace accident. Tune in as she shares her insights on safety communication and participation, active caring and the zero tolerance method.

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Real leaders leave a legacy. They capture the hearts and minds of their teams. Their origin story puts the safety and well-being of their people first. Great companies ubiquitously have safe yet productive operations. For those companies, safety is an investment, not a cost for the C-Suite. It’s a real topic of daily focus. This is The Safety Guru with your host, Eric Michrowski, a globally recognized Ops and The 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 Kina Hart, who’s safety speaker, travels all around the country in normal days, but as much in covid times talking about the importance of safety, the impact on families. So welcome to the show. Really excited to have you with me today.

Thank you, Eric. I’m very excited to be here and I appreciate this opportunity.

Excellent. Thanks. So, Kina, why don’t you start up by sharing a little bit about your you got to this space where you’re you speak about safety to so many different companies across the US.

Great. I think that’s a fantastic place to start. I, I actually was injured in a workplace accident when I was 20 years old. I was a sophomore in college, heading to Alaska for the summer to work to pay for the remainder of my at least I thought the remainder of my college, but at least a year. So, my best friend and I decided to go to Alaska and work in the fish processing industry up there because it’s a great summer job where, you know, you can make quite a bit of money.

We got up there, though, and there wasn’t any work happening. We were all sitting around waiting for the fish to come in. I was getting pretty anxious about that because I really needed this job and I really needed it to help me pay for school. So, I ended up going to my foreman and basically begging him to let me work and to tell you the truth, I probably wasn’t going to take no for an answer. And he reluctantly, but he did decide to go ahead and let me work the next day on the cleanup crew.

Unfortunately, I presented myself as somebody who knew what I was doing, and I didn’t, I had no prior knowledge of this industry, I had no experience and we were just cleaning conveyor belts. It was a team of us. There’s five of us there that morning and somebody turned them a conveyor belt on while I was cleaning it. And I ended up getting my left arm tangled into the ANDULA that resulted in a traumatic amputation of my left arm and a complete change of my life.

From then on, I spent a lot of time in the hospital. I spent a lot of time recovering. But all in all, I feel like. Being faced with that adversity, right, so young. I feel like I was so happy and so grateful to be alive, that that’s part of the reason that I recovered so well. It took me about a year to recover. Throughout my life, though, I’ve always wanted to talk to people about my injury and thinking it would be a great maybe a motivational piece.

Now, through all that, I’ve talked to other people and they knew what happened to me and then came along and said, hey, we really story would work well with our business, can you come and talk to our people about safety and what went wrong the day you got hurt? And I said, sure, I’d love to do that. And I did that. And it was so well received that that was the very day I decided to start my business.

And that was 10 years ago. And that very day I started my company and I started speaking and I just asked people, hey, if you know somebody that I could come talk to, please let them know that I’m available and I’m ready to do this. And it has snowballed from there. And I’ve loved every second of it because I feel like this is truly my purpose. It’s my passion. And that’s exactly what I feel like I’m meant to do.

That’s phenomenal. And it’s really amazing that you’ve taken this opportunity to share in the story and really communicate the importance of safety across different organizations. Can you maybe share a little bit about the impact that safety has on families and loved ones and both from your personal experience but also from some of the interactions you had with people as you travel?

Yes, definitely. That’s one of the biggest parts of my presentation, honestly, is that ripple effect that happens when somebody is injured. When I was injured. And who I talk about most in my presentation is my dad. It crushed my dad. And this injury was 30 years ago. Still to this day, my dad, he doesn’t want to have a conversation about it. It hurts him to his core to think his little girl was up in Alaska and almost died.

I was resuscitated three times. But, you know, I’m Daddy’s girl, and he felt so guilty that he wasn’t able to pay for school. For me, that’s the reason was going to Alaska to pay for college. And his guilt comes from I wish that I had the money and I wish I would have just gotten a different job and paid for school for you. So, when I have memories of being in the hospital and having my dad at my bedside crying, I mean, just my strong dad who’s a logger, you know?

Those memories are difficult. And I’ll tell you, out of all my memories and when I think about this injury, that’s what breaks my heart to this day, is other people’s stories about what happened that day and how they felt and how it impacted and how it changed the life. Not necessarily all bad, but most of them are the stories are heartbreaking. It’s my dad, me picturing my dad answering the phone and just. Crying, sitting on the floor, crying after my sister found out he didn’t even know where to go or or what to do, you know, it’s my mom dropping to her knees is the heartbreaking.

So, when I think about stuff like that, it’s still so fresh, even this long, this has happened a while ago. And I hear people when I’m speaking at companies and they come and they talk to me afterwards, they tell me about their own personal story. I am not kidding you when I tell you that one hundred percent of the time, that’s where their heartbreak is to its look at what I’ve done to my family. Look at the people that I’ve hurt because I made a choice that I thought maybe it was OK or maybe I didn’t think it was OK, but I didn’t think about the fact that it would hurt other people.

I think that’s an incredibly powerful message, and in many cases, it may not even be realizing that this choice could have such ramifications, so many people make choices that can get them in harm’s way, not even necessarily expecting what could happen. One of the things that when we’ve talked about when we connected originally talked about that really resonated with me was really this concept of making safety personal. Speaking from the heart, you’re obviously doing that now. Too often I see leaders, executives not putting enough heart, enough making it personal.

Can you can you talk more about what you’ve seen in this front and how leaders can show up in such a way that really does make a difference?

One of the things that I’ve seen traveling too different. Companies, if you can almost feel when somebody has a good safety culture, you can almost feel it right when you walk in through the door, there is a different attitude with their employees and there’s a different attitude and leadership. And so, I’ve wondered along the way, why is that? Why is it that some places seem like they like they have it together, they have it going on, they are keeping their people safe and they’re all on board.

And then you walk into another place and you have. Almost a dissension between leadership and workers, like there’s no teamwork, there’s it’s not a together, it’s not a family, I guess I would say. And one of the things that I’ve seen in the difference is. Those. Very heartfelt, very sincere, very genuine leaders that are really in there with their employees and they’re letting them know every day, hey, I’m here for you. If there’s an issue that’s a safety issue, you’ve got to let me know because I’m not there.

You are. So, you’re the person I’m relying on to let me know that you need something. But then that leader takes it a step further and actually does something about it. When somebody does come to them with some type of complaint or worry or, you know, somewhere where they’re saying safety isn’t a priority. These companies that have safety be a priority. It’s not just a priority with statistics and with numbers and that type of thing. It’s a priority within the people they see.

Their employees are wanting this. They’re not doing it because they have to. They’re not doing it because they’re trying to get a number up or trying to save the company money. They’re doing it because they’re actually finally they’re on board with, hey, this is about me. This is about me going home safe to my family. And my company agrees with that. My company is saying they care enough about me to keep me safe. What I see is that leadership and safety.

It has to be one hundred percent of the time, it can’t be, it can’t be. We’re going to be safe most of the time where our employees are going to be safe only when we’re watching them. But you’re motivating your employees to be safe 100 percent of the time because they’re making it personal. They’re making it about their stuff themselves and really great leaders. Make that happen.

Yeah, I couldn’t echo that more. I would have come to the same conclusion is, is leaders that are great safety leaders have a way to personalize that. They have a story there, why it matters why it is relevant. They’re asking people to do more. And I think that’s so important is it can be something as just about a statistic. It can’t be about making a no bonus. No, it’s got to be something that they hold from the heart and really want to make a genuine difference.

Think about a new team member. Come on board. How do I make sure that I convey the importance of safety? It’s not about the company because it’s not even about the safety person, because the safety person, it could be a new person that comes in. But you can’t replace the impact that you’ve had on some of these families or loved ones, et cetera.

Right. And if you think about when I’m speaking, it’s one of the things that I say when I’m speaking. And I truly believe that I do not want to go to a meeting and talk to somebody who’s had. I literally am trying to connect with their heart, because if you think about your own memories and your life and things that you’ve done, the things you remember and the things that are impactful to you are things that have touched your heart.

So somehow you make that connection and you can make a connection with safety and somebody’s feelings and somebody’s heart because it’s there. It is that it’s their family. It’s why they would want to work safe, why they want to go home today with both their arms and both their legs and every part of their body connected. You know, it’s those things that we need to put together and there really needs to be. And this can only come from leadership.

I think there needs to be an absolute zero tolerance for any violations in policy and procedures. This has to be there. And to me, putting it there and having that zero tolerance is showing, hey, I care enough about you that I’m going to protect you. And 100 percent of the time, this is going to be the way it’s going to be, period. I like the example of the parenting. And that is if you think about us as parents.

Every time we get in the car, we make our kids buckle your seat belt. Zero tolerance for anything other than you, but the bulk of your seatbelt you don’t want isn’t going to drive the car until your seatbelts on. And that doesn’t change. And if I think about my own kids, this has been from day one in their lives. And the minute they get in the car, they buckle their seat belts. That’s because zero tolerance and why do I do that, because I love my kids so much and I don’t want them to get hurt and I know that that’s something that.

Going to help protect them now, on the other hand, in all honesty. When my kids are out riding their bikes or skateboarding, they wear helmets and elbow parts. But if they’re riding their bikes just around the driveway, I don’t always make them wear their helmet. So, my kids don’t always just go get their helmet when they get their bike, I have to tell them. So why is that? It’s because I haven’t had a zero-tolerance policy on that, I’ve let that slip.

I’ve let them once in a while ride their bikes without a helmet. Well, I’m telling you, kids are going to go ride the bike without a helmet if they can get away with it. Because it’s easier. It’s quicker. It’s oh, I don’t really need it. But doesn’t that parallel us as adults when we’re in the workplace? If we see there’s a place where we there isn’t going to be a zero tolerance and maybe we can get away with it this time.

And gosh, it’s a lot quicker if I don’t have to, you know, I don’t want to have to put my you have their hard hat on or I don’t want to have to, whatever it might be, walk out that machine this time. I’m just going to really quiet, go in there and fix it. And that is seen or noticed by leaders that lets it go. Well, then it’s going to be more likely that’s going to happen again.

Right. And but I think a lot of it also depends on how it’s done, because what you’re talking about is from a product standpoint, it comes with would love you care about the person. I think it gets me to the to the next topic, which is really round actively caring and the importance of actively caring in terms of having safety outcomes in how leaders show up. What’s your experience around this and what are some of the stories that maybe you’ve seen in terms of leaders that demonstrates that active care?

And why is it so important in your opinion?

And, you know, I think you’re absolutely right when you say that because it’s so 100 percent true. It is where you’re coming from. And that’s my point as well as a parent, you’re coming from a place of love as a leader. You’re coming from a place that’s truly, like you said, actively caring for the participants and your employees and the people that are there. And I have seen this in so many different places. And is it actually.

Makes me so happy when I see it. And the funny thing is, too, it makes the people around the leader happy. You can just feel that people are they feel safer, they feel cared for. And the leader that does that and I have some really specific people that I’ve witnessed doing this, they actually don’t just go out on the floor and look for things that people are violating procedures. They look for things that people are doing correctly.

And they notice those things and they make sure they take the time to let them know, hey, I noticed that you were doing this. Thank you for wearing your safety lenses. You know, thank you for having your hearing protection on. But they also asked them what they’re doing. What is it that you’re working on today? Can you explain to me, you know, what you’re doing? Also, is there anything we can do to make this better or to make this safer?

How do you feel? And. Leaders that go out and ask their employees these questions and then stand there and listen, but not just listen, but then go do something if a change needs to happen. Those employees feel valued and they feel like, wow, they actually do care about me, this isn’t this isn’t about money and it’s not about numbers. My leader actually cares about what I’m doing and what my job is. And they maybe even ask about my children and then remember to ask if they said, yeah, Johnny has a football game tonight, that leader would remember the next day to say, hey, how is the game?

Because they truly are there in the moment and they truly are caring and they’re actively caring, like you said. And that makes so much difference to people. Even if you think about just work as just normal everyday relationships, people can tell when you’re not sincere. People can tell when you’re, you know, their B.S. meter goes all over the place. So being sincere and heartfelt and genuine and earnest in your job as a leader. I think it’s one of the most important things you can do to help people feel like, OK, this is a place I want to be on board with this program and I’m going to do everything I need to do to make this right and to be safe not only for myself and for my family, but for this company.

I couldn’t agree more. I think one of the themes that I remember going to a mine site and there were two leaders down the same pit, and one of them came from a position where every day he would go and scold people. What did you do? What you did not do? The other person knew everything about each individual care, and you were asking them what was top of mind for each team member. And I think the element is actively caring as a standalone won’t solve safety issues, but without it, it becomes very, very challenging to get to the right outcome.

So, this other leader, he would, as he said, talk positively reinforce the right behaviors, but knew the individuals made it very personal from the importance of safety and the link back to the families of the individuals and the choices that each person was making. So, I think this is an incredibly powerful and important message for four leaders and really appreciate you traveling across the country to share the story, to get people really thinking about how are they showing up as leaders, how are they sparking people to really make safety personal?

Yes. Thank you. And I appreciate this. And you are able to connect with people throughout the country with your messages. And I completely agree with you. And I’m so happy that you do this podcast because I think leaders, they have a hard job, but most of the safety managers and any of the safety of theirs I’ve met their heart is in the right place and they’re working their darndest, like they take this home with them at night every night, and they worry about their workers just like they were their own family.

And they care about them and they want to do the right thing. And I think anything that I can do, anything you can do, anything we can do together as a community to support that, to support each other and just say, keep going, keep doing your best. And, you know, we know it’s a tough job and we just are I’m very grateful for the people that are willing to take on those positions and work hard to keep people safe every day.

Yeah, I think very well said. And I think the other element is a lot of people have their heart in the right place but don’t necessarily connect and explain it in a way that that shows that I’ve worked with some executives that deeply, truly care team members. But when people hear their story, they they’re hearing about darted raids, target numbers, and it becomes devoid of the connection to why they’re actually doing what they’re doing, which is to help people come back home to their loved one’s day in and day out.

So sometimes it’s even just changing the form of communication and how I’m sharing something.

Absolutely. And I’m glad you said that, because that is one of the things that I talk to about other people with other people. And what I try to tell them is. Just have a conversation, maybe take a step back and simplify it a little bit, it put yourself in the position of your employer. How would you best take this information if you’re standing up there and just handing out policies, procedures and this what you have to do and you better do it this way.

And always these are the numbers. After about five minutes, they closed down. So, it is about that even training your leaders and your managers on. OK, we have this very dry information that we have to teach. Nobody wants to be here, including us. So how do we teach this in a way that’s actually going to get through to somebody and actually connect with them? And you’re right from the very beginning, you really have to make connections and you really have to make it personal and you have to do your due diligence and just learning how people learn to read.

So, again, thank you for joining me today on the podcast and for sharing such an important message.

The good fight. Thanks so much, Eric. I appreciate it.

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. Fuel your future. Come back in two weeks for the next episode or listen to our sister show with the Ops guru, Eric Michrowski.

To learn about Safety Leadership Commitment: https://www.propulo.com/safetycommitment/

The Safety Guru with Eric Michrowski

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Eric Michrowski: https://ericmichrowski.com

ABOUT THE GUEST

Learn about Kina and Her Story

Kina’s fight for survival began when she found herself caught in a moving conveyor belt. The fact that Kina is alive today to tell her story is a living testament to her strong determination and fantastic attitude.

Although she had lost her arm due to her accident, she didn’t lose her incredible zest for life. Kina leads a very productive and fulfilling life, with an attitude that keeps her thriving in her world without limits.

Kina’s Powerful Message about Safety

Kina’s message is about encouraging workplace safety responsibility. The day that changed her forever started like any other day. She didn’t plan or expect an accident. Now, Kina uses her workplace injury to motivate and teach.

Kina has a significant and unique opportunity to educate employees and workers on the importance of building a safety consciousness. She is dedicated to reducing occupational injuries by raising awareness about workplace hazards.

But just knowing about safety isn’t enough. Kina can help your company by speaking about workplace safety from her perspective, which creates an impactful and inspiring message.

Kina’s Safety Presentations:

  • Grab attention and make a lasting impression on staff

  • Change lives and help reduce occupational injuries

  • Inspire and motivate audiences to make safe choices

  • Show audiences how to turn adversity into success

The Program: It’s Your Safety, Don’t Give It Away

Experience personalize safety through Kina’s story about the tragic loss of her left arm. Kina will speak about how a lack of knowledge and lack of training contributed to the day that forever changed her life.

She advocates that you are your last line of defense. Kina encourages active participation in safety. She also covers the effects injuries have on friends, family, and co-workers.

With witty wisdom, Kina will impart a message you can reflect on and share – a message that shows you how to be present, aware, and safe.

To contact Kina Hart:

Email: [email protected]

Phone: (509) 999 -1323

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