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Managing Psychosocial Risks to Build Safer Workplaces with Kylie Long

Aug 20, 2026

Managing Psychosocial Risks to Build Safer Workplaces with Kylie Long

LISTEN TO THE EPISODE: 

ABOUT THE EPISODE

Don’t miss the latest episode of The Safety Guru! Join us as Kylie Long, a seasoned expert in workplace health and safety, explores the critical role of managing psychosocial risks to build safer workplaces. She provides a practical guide for leaders to better understand psychosocial risks, their business impacts, and how they can be effectively managed across organizations. Kylie explores the psychosocial risks that can impact workers’ mental health, including the importance of identifying and addressing aspects of work design and management that may cause harm. She also dives into the significant financial and cultural impacts psychosocial risks and injuries can have on organizations, from burnout, high turnover, and absenteeism to broader impacts on workplace culture and performance. Learn practical strategies for overcoming leadership challenges, managing psychosocial risks, and creating sustainable improvements. Tune in for valuable takeaways on strengthening psychosocial safety in your organization, building safer, more supportive workplaces, and enhancing overall performance and well-being. Listen now!

READ THE EPISODE

Real leaders leave a legacy. They capture the hearts and minds of their teams. Their origin story puts the safety and well-being of their people first. Great companies ubiquitously have safe yet productive operations. For those companies, safety is an investment, not a cost for the C-suite. It’s a real topic of daily focus. This is The Safety Guru with your host, Eric Michrowski, a globally recognized ops and safety guru, public speaker, and author. Are you ready to leave a safety legacy? Your legacy success story begins now. 

Hi and welcome to The Safety Guru. Today I’m very excited to have with me Kylie Long, who is a workplace health and safety and psychosocial risk expert coming from Australia. Kylie, welcome to the show. Very excited to have you with me today.

Good morning from Australia. Thanks, Eric. Thanks for having me.

So, let’s get started with a little bit about your background because you have pretty diverse background that got you in this, into this space.

Yes, I do. So, uh, I’m a registered nurse. I still work as a registered nurse, uh, with over 30 years of experience in that space. But about 20 years ago, I shifted into workplace health and safety, primarily to move away from the shift work point of view, um, and working on a 24/7 schedule availability for the year. Uh, but my focus was always on cardiac where people got better, and then I moved into emergency space where I see the back end of when things go wrong. Um, so I transitioned into workplace health and safety, and I see how workplace systems directly impact people when they’re working under pressure, particularly in the emergency department.

Sure.

So, things that I would often see that really link into the psychosocial space that I work in are things like, I see staff with burnout or chronic stress or fatigue.

Sure.

Bullying, poor leadership behaviors and practices as well, as well as sometimes unclear roles within organizations, and also things around unmanaged workloads, which is particularly a hot topic within the nursing profession here.

I’m sure. I think in Australia, but also pretty much worldwide. I’ve heard a lot of it in NHS in the UK, pretty much every, every part. And same as the shifts, the burnout, very, very common. You touch on psychosocial risk. It’s something that Australia is really leading in, in that space. Tell me a little bit about what it is and what are some of the risks that it presents.

So psychosocial safety is not anything new inside workplace. Um, people tend to think it’s something new that need— leaders need to be doing, and organizations need to be doing. Uh, it’s just that there’s some more structure around it at the moment, particularly in Australia with the legislative requirement. So, it’s basically the legal requirement to protect your workers from psychosocial harm in the same way that we would protect our workers from a physical injury. It really focuses on identifying controlling aspects, um, of work design and management that can cause damage to the mental health of a worker. So, some key hazards or things that you might see in the workplace from an organizational perspective, you might see things like excessive workloads, and we just spoke about that before. Unrealistic deadlines, poor organizational change management. Change management’s a big one in organizations. Not many organizations I see do it particularly well. There are always learnings from change management processes. Intrusive sort of surveillance or poor physical work environments as well. But as a leader, you might see things from a leadership perspective. There might be poor support for your workers. There might be low job control over the tasks they’re actually doing.

Or it might be continued sustained high job demand. So, you know, that continual like working under pressure and, you know, you know, having high output that you need to be doing within the workplace, or really things around unclear expectations and poor communications, a particular one around then. And then there might be individual behaviors that workers might be displaying towards each other or, you know, displaying towards leaders, things like— the typical ones like bullying and harassment, aggression, and then that sort of toxic workplace relationships within organizations, which ultimately reflect the culture of the business.

Mm-hmm. And some of these are quite self-evident, but what would be some of the business impacts for organizations when they’ve got presence of these psychosocial risks or even on workplace culture?

So, if you’re looking at the business impacts, there’s things that are from a financial perspective, but also from a cultural perspective. So generally, Generally, when we look at sort of the data in Australia particularly, and I’m assuming it would be across, you know, globally as well, the psychological injuries actually cost 4 times than the physical claim injuries. And workers who sustain a psychological injury generally can take 5 times longer to recover, and they might be 5 times longer away from the workplace than physical injuries themselves. So, there’s a huge financial impact to a business there.

Sure.

If it’s not a claim that goes through, it might be things like increased absenteeism, but it also could be presenteeism as well, where we talk about that sort of silent sort of resignation that you’re just going through the motions. You haven’t resigned, but you’re just going through the motions and doing what you need to do on a daily basis, which really impacts the team performance, but also the productivity of the team as well.

Right.

You might have also see if there are people moving away from the business, you might see like high turnover rates, which then would ultimately cost businesses because they have to go and recruit, onboard, and train people. Or they might need to look at their succession planning when people leave. Like someone’s got to— if they haven’t got good succession planning in place, then there’s a gap there for a period of time. Um, there’s— if you’ve got burnout and disengagement from your workers, that can lead to things like slower decision-making and increased errors. So, I know that particularly from a nursing perspective, you know, when you do have that burnout, that there is increased risk of errors, particularly, you know, medication errors, those kinds of things. And I guess if you’re fatigued or you’re at, you know, stress levels increase, you are more prone to make mistakes, and you might need to rework things as well, which obviously costs businesses as well due to that time delay. And then if you do have that toxic sort of work culture, you might have an increase in conflicts or complaints coming in, or there might be things like blame behaviors and that disengagement again.

Yeah, so generally people feel like they can’t speak up because if they do speak up, they’re like, they’ll be sort of targeted, I guess, is the concern that they had, that the workers do have. 

Sure.

And then I guess from a leadership perspective, leaders might feel burnt out, or they might feel like they’re just doing firefighting decision-making, where they’re just doing that sort of reactive decision-making. And then it’s, you know, disruptive to the organization as a whole. So there’s lots of different things that sort of can come in, even if someone doesn’t put in a psycho— psychological claim. There’s sort of the other flow-on effects for the business.

Sure.

I guess a team that sort of functions in that sort of survival mode, they’re not sort of looking— they’re not sort of functioning in that sort of innovation and continuous improvement model which businesses want to focus on. So, it really does have There’s lots of impacts that it has on a business from not only an organizational perspective, but it flows down to leaders and workers as well.

Yeah, and ultimately the bottom line, if you’re not innovating as what you’re describing, it frequently has a bottom-line impact, but also, it’s an impact on physical safety. Because if you don’t feel comfortable speaking up, you’re also more exposed to one, make mistakes, but also, uh, to get into harm’s way.

Correct. Yeah.

And so, what are some of the best tactics an organization can take on to address and improve on the psychosocial risk?

Uh, so the, so from, from a leadership perspective, they can really start looking at some of those sort of key hazards that particularly in Australia that the legislation focuses on. So, identifying the hazards. So, start looking at the teams and start looking at things like, do we have excessive workloads? Or unrealistic deadlines? Do we have chronic understaffing and constant overtime? Like, are people missing their meal breaks? Are people staying back late on a, you know, regular basis? Right. Are people not sure about what their role actually is, or they might have conflicting priorities and they’re not sure what their priorities are for the week or even for the day? Um, so some things, some practical things like, you know, if you notice that your workers are skipping breaks or they’re staying back on a daily basis or they’re looking constantly exhausted, have a look at your workload and have a look at the staffing issues to see if you need to bring in— particularly during, you know, the peak times in retail that we look at, Christmas time— do we need to bring in more staff to cover that area at Christmas time, or Winter, when it’s the flu season, do we need to bring in more staff to cover sick leave rather than working down in the number of staff for that day?

If teams are confused about what their priorities are during, for example, an organizational change, need to focus in on what the change management tactic is that we’re using within the organization. And communication’s a key one as well during that process. So, when things are communicated clearly and consistently on a regular basis during a change management process, people feel less fear and there’s less rumors that go around. So that’s clear, consistent messaging that’s going out to people, so they don’t feel like that rumor sort of starts that’s not actually substantiated.

Right.

Um, if workers stop speaking up or raising concerns, that’s another red flag for leaders. So, um, often psychological safety is linked to a visibility issue. So, making sure that leaders are visible within the organization so that workers can go and approach them and talk to them.

Sure.

That sort of open-door policy, um, and be, you know, up opportunities for that communication and collaboration within their teams.

Mm-hmm.

And if leaders are feeling like they’re constantly firefighting and emotionally exhausted, um, that might reflect on things like poor systems. So having a look at their psychosocial systems and processes, the workplace health and safety systems and processes as well and have a look at what sort of control they can have over different aspects of that, or if they need additional support for themselves in that leadership role. And also have a look to see if complaints and conflict are actually increasing. So, look at what the workload pressure is, is, um, do we have any unclear expectations? And what kind of behaviors do we tolerate? Because that’s another one, like that, just, you know, that just sort of joking, I was just joking sort of, um, culture that we have. So, some things on a practical also point of view that, um, leaders could do, like those daily check-ins with the teams to see, you know, um, what’s making work difficult at the moment, what’s getting in the way of, you know, being able to do our job. Um, regular workload discussions, that really clear prioritization. So, I often take this with it when I’ve worked in organizations where there’s competing demands.

I’ll have a sit-down and discussion with my supervisor or manager and ask them, you know, what’s the focus for this week? What do you definitely need done this week? What can we slide till next week if we need to?

Sure.

And another one, particularly for those large organizations, is that bureaucracy. So that’s that red tape that, you know, we, you know, the hoops that you need to jump through to get things signed off. Um, trying to remove that unnecessary bureaucracy as much as possible for those leaders as well. Yeah. So, there’s some key things that leaders can actually do.

This episode of the Safety Guru Podcast is brought to you by Propulo Consulting, the leading safety and safety culture advisory firm. Whether you are looking to assess your safety culture, develop strategies to level up your safety performance, introduce human performance capabilities, reenergize your BBS program, enhance supervisory safety capabilities, or introduce unique safety leadership training and talent solutions, Propulo has you covered. Visit us at propolo.com.

And I think a lot of what you describe also seems to touch on the system, the system issues that are occurring. I know when we talked about this initially, you talked about leadership training as an example, which is often missing when somebody becomes a leader. The training doesn’t always follow.

Yeah, that’s correct. So often, um, leaders might wait like up to 7 years to actually get a leadership training in within an organization. So, they might be employed for that role based on their technical skills, but they don’t actually have any of that leadership training, um, in place. So, they’ve been managing things like conflict, or they’ve been managing workloads, or they’ve been managing complaints, but they don’t have any sort of formal systems and processes to get that leadership training and follow through what the practical things that they need to be doing. So, it’s often a missed opportunity. And then you’ve already got things ingrained in the way they’re doing things, systems and processes, and then they have to go back and rework that.

And I think sometimes even the frontline supervision is, is often, I find, one of the worst spots in terms of the availability of training. And these are the ones who are impacting the frontline team members typically the most and typically don’t have a lot of training, a lot of background. They were literally the best at the job before, and now they’re supervising a team.

Yeah, correct. So, you wouldn’t place someone in charge of like a high-risk machinery without training them. So why would you put someone in, you know, to lead a team if you weren’t going to give them that leadership development? So, um, and you know, they often work in those sorts of high-risk environments without, you know, little preparation or they don’t have any understanding of, you know, the people management skills as well. Because obviously it’s a practice that people need to, you know, be supported in because not everyone’s a natural leader.

And that’s, that’s an interesting point because in some cases I’ve seen over the years that the leader gets promoted and they see it as that’s what I need to do to get ahead in this organization. But not everybody’s meant to be a leader and sometimes there’s ways to get promoted in expert roles without necessarily having a team that you support.

Yes, completely agree and relate to that. And I am definitely not a person that likes to lead a team just because of all the, the things that are involved, the complexities of leading a team. So, I prefer to be an expert in the field that I’m working in. Yeah.

Right. And typically, how do organizations get started if they realize that they want to address psychosocial? You talked about some of the signs that organizations should be looking for? What would be some of the first steps, uh, and that you typically see?

So, for, from a, it’s mainly focused on a risk management, uh, framework. So, it’s around identifying the hazards, which we spoke about those hazards before. Yeah. Assessing, um, the hazards that you have within the workplace. So, identifying them on your risk matrix or prioritizing them within the business, where they sit, and then having a look at the controls, um, to see what kind of controls that you can put in place and then to manage those risks. So, prioritizing it, focusing on, you know, don’t focus on the low-level stuff like you do with physical hazards around PPE, which would be the policies and procedures. Look at that sort of engineer, you know, elimination and that sort of engineering sort of space about how we can rework what we’re actually doing, how can we design the work differently, what systems and processes do we need to put in place to manage that risk. And then going back and actually reviewing it as well. So, there’s some— the universities here are doing some work at the moment around, well, let’s have a look at where we’re sitting at the moment from a snapshot in terms of our compliance, but then let’s go through and do the work around the risk management perspective.

And then let’s come back in 6 to 12 months to see what, how, what impact we’ve had as a business, um, when we’ve introduced these new systems and processes to manage psychosocial risk. Um, that’s definitely not my specialty because there’s people that work in that space from there is some statistical analysis that they actually do to look at the change management process that businesses have actually been through to see what impact it’s actually had on them from a positive perspective.

Hmm. Absolutely. So why does the topic of psychosocial risk feel difficult for many leaders?

So many, um, leaders think that psychological safety means that it’s about mental illness management for their workers. Or it might be, they think it might be around therapy or managing personalities, particularly difficult personalities, or around avoiding those difficult conversations with their workers.

Yep.

It, it actually doesn’t, it’s not about that. It’s about psychological health that’s always sat within the workplace health and safety legislation.

Sure.

Um, but it’s just changed in terms of with the guidance for it around clarity around the guidance for managing psychosocial risks, but also now what’s enforceable under the legislation as well. So, the word psychological generally will create a fear within leadership and also individuals and teams. The term often triggers some discomfort amongst leaders. Leaders worry about things like, am I responsible for my employees outside of work?

Sure.

Can I still manage performance? That’s another one as well. They’re still concerned about performance managing people because of the implications of that. And particularly in the Australian space, there’s been a little bit of noise around that with large corporations, banking corporations, where someone has been performance managed and then they’ve gone down the line of self-harm. So, there’s been a bit, a little bit of noise in the media around that at the moment. So, you know, they’re concerned, can I still manage my people, um, you know, under this psycho— psychosocial legislation? And another thing is, will every difficult conversation that I have with my team, um, become a claim? You know, will they put a psychosocial claim in, um, against the organization? So, but in reality, its really around psychosocial safety is simply applying the traditional safety principles that we had to manage psycho— psychological harm.

Sure.

Just the same way as you would manage a physical injury, a, you know, physical incident or injury, we need to manage it the same way with a psychological harm as well.

And how does it differ from wellbeing programs?

So psychological safety isn’t really a wellbeing trend. So, it’s not looking at things like engagement surveys and culture surveys.

Sure.

And it’s not about diagnosing workers when you’re looking at wellbeing programs as well. It’s not that sort of quick fix that we need to be focusing on.

Sure.

And it’s not really around creating any new legal obligations as well. It’s really around moving away from wellbeing. It’s around looking at our workplace systems. Yep. How they influence that psychological health. Not just from a physical perspective, but also from that psychological perspective as well.

Sure. And I think to wrap up, what are some of the key takeaways you would have for leaders on this whole topic of psychosocial risk?

Really need to consider it as a core business risk management process. It’s not anything different than what you’ve already been doing. It’s not a new term or new trend that’s come around. And that leadership behavior is one of the strongest psychosocial controls in any organization.

Sure.

And your prevention really lives in amongst how you design your work, what your leadership capability is like within your organization, and we spoke about that in terms of that leadership development, what your communication style is with your workers, and that open-door policy and visibility within the organization. Is getting really clear about the role of the workers within each organization. And particularly, we didn’t touch on it, but around position descriptions, making sure they match what the workers are actually doing, um, and going back and having a look at those and really having a look around, is the workload manageable?

Right.

Um, and do we have respectful behavior that gone are the days of that sort of just joking kind of behavior, um, that we have had in workplaces. Because at the end of the day, when you focus on good psychosocial safety, it will create better performance within your business, a stronger culture. We spoke about the impacts, the negative impacts of psychosocial risk, safer workplaces and healthier workplaces, which ultimately lead to healthier organizations.

Right. And if somebody wants to get in touch with you, Kylie, to learn more about psychosocial risk or, or to explore how to drive improvements, how can they do that?

The best place to find me is actually on LinkedIn where I’ve got good visibility. So, if you just type in Kylie Long, um, and the other place is my website, which is, um, www.support supportandsafetysolutions.com.au. So, if you Google search, yes, Support and Safety Solutions, or LinkedIn for Kylie Long, you’ll find me on that platform as well.

Excellent. Thank you so much for joining me today, Kylie.

Thanks, Eric.

Thank you for listening to The Safety Guru on C-suite Radio. Leave a legacy. Distinguish yourself from the past. Grow your success. Capture the hearts and minds of your teams. Elevate your safety. Like every successful athlete, top leaders continuously invest in their safety leadership with an expert coach to boost safety performance. Begin your journey at execsafetycoach.com. Come back in two weeks for the next episode with your host, Eric Michrowski. This podcast is powered by Propulo Consulting.

ABOUT THE GUEST

Kylie Long is passionate about creating safe, healthy, and thriving workplaces where people feel valued, supported, and empowered to perform at their best.

As the Founder of Support & Safety Solutions, Kylie brings over 20 years of experience in work health and safety, psychosocial risk management, and workplace wellbeing across industries including resources, mining, construction, healthcare, rail, manufacturing, education, and government.

Her career began as a Registered Nurse, where she saw firsthand how health, leadership, and culture shape safety outcomes. That experience now underpins her consulting approach, helping organizations go beyond compliance to build workplaces where people genuinely feel safe, respected, and engaged.

Kylie is known for her calm, strategic, and people-centered approach, as well as her ability to translate complex work health, safety, and wellbeing requirements into clear, actionable steps that make sense in real workplaces.

For more information: www.supportsafetysolutions.com.au

LinkedIn: www.linkedin.com/in/kyliealongsafetysupportsolutions

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Ergonomics Meets Human Factors: Building Safer, Smarter Workplaces with Dr. Era Poddar

Aug 6, 2026

Ergonomics Meets Human Factors: Building Safer, Smarter Workplaces with Dr. Era Poddar

LISTEN TO THE EPISODE: 

ABOUT THE EPISODE

In this week’s episode of The Safety Guru, we’re joined by Dr. Era Poddar, who shares her extensive expertise in ergonomics and human factors to explore what these principles are, why they matter, and how organizations can proactively integrate them into workplace design to transform safety outcomes, boost productivity, and build safer, smarter workplaces. She discusses the wide-ranging benefits of integrating these principles, including better decision-making, reduced cognitive load for employees, fewer errors, a lower risk of serious injuries and fatalities, and measurable returns on investment (ROI) through improvements in quality, productivity, and overall safety performance. This insightful discussion also highlights how leaders can champion ergonomic improvements, leverage emerging technologies that are reshaping workplace design, and foster a culture of continuous learning and improvement. Tune in to discover how ergonomics and human factors work together to build safer, healthier, and more productive organizations. Don’t miss this episode!

READ THE EPISODE

Real leaders leave a legacy. They capture the hearts and minds of their teams. Their origin story puts the safety and well-being of their people first. Great companies ubiquitously have safe yet productive operations. For those companies, safety is an investment, not a cost for the C-suite. It’s a real topic of daily focus. This is The Safety Guru with your host, Eric Michrowski, a globally recognized ops and safety guru, public speaker, and author. Are you ready to leave a safety legacy? Your legacy success story begins now.

Hi and welcome to The Safety Guru. Today, I’m very excited to have with me Dr. Era Poddar. She has a PhD in industrial ergonomics, an MBA from UBC, does a lot of consulting work in the ergonomic space, and is also an adjunct professor at the University of British Columbia. Era, so happy to have you with me today on the show.

Thank you, Eric, for the introduction. And I would like to just— mini-MBA.

Mini MBA?

Yeah, it’s not the full MBA at length, but I will reflect on that a little bit. Okay. Why I mentioned that. Yeah, thank you. I’m really glad to be talking to you today.

Absolutely. So, tell me a little bit about how you got started in ergonomics and the passion you’ve gotten for safety and ergo.

Right, it’s a very interesting question, and I, I have been asked about this for so many times. I remember talking to in one of the platforms in my previous employer, some people were talking about different epiphany happened to them, and that’s what they came. To be very honest, I never had such, such incidents, or I would say positive incidents, but what I had in the— I first, to, to be very honest, I learned about the subject when I went to the university to do my master’s program. And so, it’s a human physiology master’s from University of Calcutta. They had a specialization in ergonomics and human factors. So that’s where first I came across the subject. No one knew about this. I was pretty intrigued about the subject because it has direct implications on human life. Like, of course, industry to design and everything. So eventually, I got to love the subject, and I became passionate about it.

And it’s taking you all around the world. And so that gives you fairly unique perspectives as well in terms of how you’ve applied ergonomics in that space. Maybe let’s start with what is ergonomics and why is it so important?

Right. I should go back to a little bit because I had to also touch base on things which, which intrigued me to be part of this subject. One was like, I started my career in a design project, a mining scenario, and I thought that would be pretty interesting for the audience. So, this project ran for 1.5 years, and then we, we redeveloped or redesigned, uh, certain equipment’s, over 10 of them. And during that time, I realized this subject has a different application and we need to pursue more. That’s where I started doing PhD and all that, all the things. Uh, but as you know, life happens, things change, and I, I started my career in a university setting teaching after completing, uh, my PhD. So, while teaching, there are different design applications from physical product design to interaction design and all that. Stuff. So then, as usual, things change, uh, and I followed my husband to Middle East, and that’s where, uh, it’s a different, uh, scenario of ergonomics kind of came into my understanding because it’s a business side of it. That’s when I started my business because there was less scope of applying in the education domain.

Sure.

And before that, I lived a little, uh, time teaching in Nepal, one of the universities, medical school. So, all these things and, uh, kind of intrigued me to apply different domains of this area as well as leaving my comfort zone, I guess. So, in Dubai, we kind of, uh, what we did was, as I said, there’s less education apply— like application or courses. However, there was a scope, uh, to represent companies who had multiple offices across Middle East to help them in their ergonomics initiatives. So, you could call it a beginning of a mini-MBA for me, hands-on practice, and which I wouldn’t have done otherwise if I wouldn’t be leaving my secured career path. And that’s where it’s a different approach which, which is taken from there. And then onwards, I lived in the US and practiced, and then it came back to Canada at one point. So, through all this journey, which why I, I wanted to mention that I— it gathered to me, one is I understood the local practices, standards, and all that.

Sure.

It also did an interesting thing to me. I became more and more open and like it grew empathy to me more. And that is one of the key factors we practitioners in ergonomics do. And it’s really one of the key important factors to be successful in this field. Right. And coming back to your question, what is human factors and ergonomics? Is essentially reducing the mismatch between product or system and the user. So, in one word, however, there are several, um, definitions you could find. That is, it’s a science of work design, science of workplace design, and so on and so forth. But we always emphasize on one important aspect aspects of ergonomics and human factors, two different words. Yeah, coined together, they actually mean the same according to International Ergonomic Association. Uh, the overall— I mean, uh, the definition is, is like human factors or ergonomics is concerned with the understanding of interactions among humans and other elements of a and this profession applies theory, principle, data, and methods to design and optimize human well-being and overall system performance. So, we always focus into the system level, uh, changes so that it affects in an effective way for long term.

So yeah, in one word, it helps, uh, I think, reduce any mismatch between any system and product. And improve productivity.

And so why is it so important for businesses to look at that combination of ergonomics and human factors? And what’s the ROI that comes from it? 

It is a very interesting question. And we still, I mean, it’s proven, understood that it’s a business-friendly concept.

Sure.

Why? As I said, it reduces mismatch in very different ways. From building design to the product design, even for software design. So, there is a coin word called usability. That’s actually how you reduce the mismatch between human and the software or any interface design. So, over the years, it has been shown to be kind of helpful for the business. And why it is helpful? It reduces error, less time, and sometimes the processes are improved in, like we call them, ineffective time. How you reduce them? All this together, as well as a different reachability and use— usability, or ease of usage of any, any such product. Or given— I will just give you some examples.

Yeah, that would be good.

Yeah. Like for, uh, suppose a company who has a production line who produces certain products. Now if the workstations are higher compared to who are operating and there are a lot of reaches, like you move your hands pretty quickly and there’s long reaches. Now if we do it once or twice, that’s fine, right? And if you do it throughout 8-hour shift, sometime industry have 12-hour shift. To. Sure. So, these are the different aspects. One is size-wise, one, one is process-wise. And suppose you have kept certain products or so stored certain products in a different section. Now the employee has to go bring them. So, there are different touch points and different level of postures which is happening, which could have avoided with a better design.

Sure.

When the industry is built or when the workstation— yes, when the workstation was designed. So that’s where if we incorporate these issues, like how this whole process works, where, where people has to interact, and who will be the person who will be interacting. It is a range of people, not every— like, for even given, uh, different genders, there are sizes. And suppose, giving example, 95% percentile stature, people may not be having 95th percentile hand length or arm length, right?

Right.

So, all these challenges kind of available, or it is there within any workstation workplace setup. So, the more we kind of accommodate these requirements since the beginning, you definitely kind of benefit. And end of the day, product quality also improved. So, this whole span of activities, if we consider it effectively, we will save on time, we will reduce injuries, and the injuries will be less fatal, as well as there will be less error. As a result, you will get a product which is quality-wise better and more product. So, it’s an overall win-win for both employees and the employers in a way. I hope I understood.

No, no, absolutely. Yeah. So, and it’s something, as you talked about, it can mean how I design a plant for how the workers are going to work in. But I could also retroactively drive some improvements. So, there is less movement that’s unnecessary, less lifting, bending, stretching, overreach occurring throughout the day.

Also, less decision-making.

Sure.

Because more and more workplaces becoming automated.

Yeah.

And people are even in regular manufacturing settings; we see employees has to interact with machines where they have to put input and given that the cycle number and what is the output number and all that. So, these— all these interactions are happening at like simultaneously.

Sure.

So, there are cognitive demand as well as physical demand. I, I just gave you a very simple industrial scenario. So, there are complex scenarios like pilots interacting with machines, or we are driving a car. There are so many distractions these days, from external to internal to phone and displays and stuff. So yeah, it makes more sense to incorporate through the design at the beginning. However, it could be applied in every stage.

Sure. Yeah, to drive improvements, to improve the work practices, but also the cognitive load that you mentioned before in terms of the decision-making. I like your example of the car as well. So very, very beneficial. As you said, there’s a The ROI is really because it’s helping, one, the workers, but it’s also helping productivity directly. If you have less distractions, you have less complexity in your decision-making and less movement to complete the task. Is that fair?

It is fair. And I should also add where it is, most of the time, the ergonomics or human factors concepts are applied towards later phase, like when you have an injury, right? And this is not that proactive, more reactive approach. Unfortunately, in— especially not even only in Canada, I have seen in the US or even in the Middle East, that’s where we are called as a practitioner. So, when everything is all set, you have a process set, you have a design set, and there are also different teams working together, not including one of, like, human factors or ergonomics professionals within. So, what it does is there’s always a gap remaining. So, end of the day, which we see, there is an incident, and most popular incident which relates to ergonomics, human factors, that’s musculoskeletal injuries.

Yep. 

And that’s where people think that’s what ergonomics is, which is not at all, uh, right directions. But that’s where most of the time we are called in. So as there also huge number of dollars are lost every year, if we see the recent statistics even through WorkSafe BC locally. It’s over $2 billion of cost. 

Sure.

And over the year, like recent years. So that is something has to be definitely seen as one of the ROI where we could control this cost.

And ideally done proactively, right? So, as you mentioned in the plant design, or even at a later stage to drive improvement.

Yeah, true. Unfortunately, that is not always done that way. 

Yeah, unfortunately not. Yes. Yeah, unfortunately, sometimes you need an event to realize it wasn’t designed the right way. So, one of the things I know when we first connected that you touched on, which I thought was very interesting, is around changing workplaces. And there’s a lot of changes in the current workplace. How does that impact the space of ergonomics and human factors.

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Few things we have to understand. Since World War II, when the subject evolved, many organizing factors, there’s very less understanding across other disciplines about the breadth an application of the subject. So, when, uh, the workplace changes considerations came into play, especially in Canada with the Inclusive Act and all that thing, uh, the concept remained pretty old. Like, it’s not that new, right? Uh, so the changing workplace has been— we see, just giving you an example, if we visit, even you come to any public place or any workplace, you will see different variations of populations coming from different cultures, background. So how does it affect the workplaces? Uh, one is size, like your anthropometric measurements. You have a different language spoken throughout like when growing up. So, you are learning a different language, you are getting instructions through different languages. As the same— at the same time, we have different, uh, equipment’s incorporated into the workplace, more like recent AI. And over the years, we have seen a lot of more automation happen. So, employees are interacting with various different as I mentioned earlier as well, the physical, like manual material handling to giving input to the machine to do a proper setup speed.

Sure. And the production. At the same time, you are getting information through your handle devices.

Yep.

And you are also interacting with some of those displays. And there’s a workplace changes happen through the age. We have older work curse, who has limited ability to interact with digital devices, right? So, these are a complex scenario where you have different, different genders, you have different background, you have different language, culturally different thinking. We don’t have enough time to talk about that stereotype things, but it is there. We think differently, we perform, understand differently. So, these vast and different sizes, as I mentioned, we incorporate this whole group of population within a particular workplace. Right. So, definitely there will be repercussion on that. Yeah. Unless it is really designed well or it is accommodating all this requirement. And at the same time, you have differently abled people who have limitation like moving or different level of cognitive abilities. So, there are so many different challenges within that place. So, when we say the accessible or universal design concept, so we, we talk about all of these people is welcome in that workplace or any space, and they can easily interact with all these different things. And how we make those things user-friendly for them. So that’s when we talk about different level of accessibility or universal design.

Which really means a lot more flexibility in terms of how you would interface with equipment, the technology, potentially very different sitting position, if in that scenario, you’re talking about, where there’s flexibility of adjusting depending on what’s right for that particular individual.

Yeah, I can provide you another simple example. Suppose you are accessing, uh, like an ATM machine, right? Right. So now, for people like you and me, I will go walk, park the car, go walk and access. It’s not a big deal. We know these are bigger buttons and everything. Now consider this person who cannot move, who is on the wheelchair.

Yeah.

Now there are different level of accessibility they need. So, he has to access the building first. There has to be certain ramp where they can access. And then there has to be certain reach so that they can see it, still see it, and interact with the machine, right? Not only physical buttons, but there are also digital buttons. 

Sure.

So, then there are all these requirements. So, you have a person who will operate this machine standing, there’s a person who may come on the wheelchair, there’s a person who may come in differently, other way of different, and there is person who cannot see. And also, the language-wise, so people may read English well, some may not, some may come from suppose Mandarin They speak Mandarin, reads Mandarin or Japanese.

Sure.

So, consider a world where all these people live together and interact with the machine. So that’s where the usable or universal design or accessibility come.

And bringing that to workplaces as well, because the same example, it’s how do I design a work environment, whatever that work environment might be, to have that flexibility in terms of interaction.

That’s right.

Excellent. And I know one of the themes we also touched on is around now that we’re hearing more and more about exoskeletons. How does that play into these human factors and ergonomics space?

That is another interesting area of time. Anytime we talk to colleagues, they come up with this question. So, I was recently listening to one of the webinars done by— I don’t remember the organization, but the person who was presenting, Dr. Christopher Reed from Boeing, he was reflecting on many such research and applied within the Boeing scenario. I will refer some of her— some of his topics. So, exoskeleton is, of course, related to ergonomics. It’s not like insects and others. So, it’s an external structure which helps us to support while working. 

Sure.

So, we call them industrial exoskeleton. And there are different types. Some are automated. I mean, they are more advanced these days. But essentially, it is built to support while working.

Right, sure.

So, few, a few different types. I’m very broadly, I’m touching this. One is made for postural assist system, like when someone is working within an environment or very concise space where you cannot do any engineering changes, where you cannot implement those changes. So that person has to work in a certain position, suppose electrician, in that space. You cannot bring in any other equipment. So continuous working within that space and having those shoulder and arm muscles in the, like, over above shoulder level. So that’s when this type of exoskeleton helps. Like, it’s a postural support where hands and shoulders and— sure, other, other part is supported. There is other type of where you have full body support, like especially doing manual material handling where any other engineering changes or equipment could be provided in such certain scenario. It seems that quite a few other companies, including Boeing, is using them while making the airplanes, not— I mean, after it is done, so before that part. So since employees are using them, I had also interacted with few local clients Sometimes, uh, some of the workers like it, some don’t.

Of course.

So, some of them— I, I was amazed to hear this— the— my contact person who was saying that 2 or 3 of them didn’t like it, so they never would wear them.

Sure.

So, there are 1 or 2, it happened that they wouldn’t open it. Without that, they cannot perform. So, there are different varied level of acceptance. Sure, there’s definitely different types of acceptance level as well as, uh, I mean, the type of work people does. Depending on that, this is effective. So, it’s always the first thing we as a professional suggest. If there is option, engineering changes is better options. In any day. However, there is no, I mean, opening to incorporate such changes, then explore this. Still, there’s a lot to— yeah, there is a lot of research has to go in. It’s still developing.

Yeah, absolutely. I think for me, the first example I saw of this was, I’m going to say it’s almost a decade ago, and it was in Japan with baggage handlers, and it was around how do we reduce the lifting and switching that’s happening when they’re moving bags, which sounded very interesting if you think about the repetitive motions and the— you don’t even know how heavy a particular bag is going to be, which adds a lot more risk as well to that equation.

Yeah, you’re right. And also, I remember mentioning I think 6, 7 years back, uh, still the COVID at the beginning of COVID or before that, there were, uh, we ordered some furniture’s and people came to deliver. Some of the company who was contracted to do that, so the employees, their employees were using those exoskeletons to move those furniture’s. Yeah, so I have seen, it’s interesting, few companies adopted them pretty well. And then sometimes, as I said, it’s, yeah, not always accepted.

And as you talk about change, I think one of the things that makes good sense to transition to is what’s the role of a leader in driving that change, right? So, they can— we talked about your role coming in and assessing, but how can a leader support change?

It’s a Very important and interesting topic, and that’s one of my other passion area these days— how to incorporate human factors ergonomic concept within the strategy, right? So, we all know this concept is old enough. However, it’s less accepted amongst the senior leadership.

Sure.

One main reason is the language we speak. So, language has to be such so it is acceptable to the senior leadership. And senior leadership, one and important part which I realized over the years is, of course, they have to be trained in certain aspects. So, we as a professional has to be able to speak that language which caters to that group. At the same time, leadership has to be a little bit open towards these new concepts coming in, right, which is beyond the conventional, okay, they have— there are standards, engineering standards, and we— sure, we have it, then it is all done. It is not always the case because at the end of the day, users are human, right, right. And or whoever is using it, they are the one who is manipulating with the system.

Right. 

So, the leadership’s main, I think, the initiative would be understanding, like keeping a little open mind, one. Second is putting a human factor economics concept as a strategy goal, which is actually part of their business decisions. Then if you have a budget, allocated already, then it’s much easier to implement at the design stage than at the level when an injury already happened.

It really touches the whole space of safety by design, even in terms of if you, if you do things right at the front end, and you’re putting in the time and the effort, you’ll be much better off later.

Exactly. And also, we always say this, you have as a company, every company has their standard operating procedure or SOPs. So, it is always smart to align the programs, including safety, ergonomics, and other programs, to that, right? It’s, it’s much— it makes a lot more sense. And if you remember, I touched upon briefly on a certain point that we have various departments within a company. Unfortunately, some of them, they don’t always interact, or there’s less, less scope, or whatever may be the reason, that interaction is very important. And leadership can bring in that interaction so that same things are simultaneously done but not applied effectively. I have seen that in my practice. That quality team had come up with an idea which is not fully applicable because of the other challenges, However, there was another department have developed a newer idea and applying them within the team which others didn’t know. So again, the communication, communication, and allowing this communication to happen free flowing among different departments without a bias. So that is another leadership role I, I think would be very helpful in such initiatives.

Sure, absolutely. And so, if somebody wants to get in touch with you, what’s the best way to do so? And maybe share a little bit about the type of work that you do to help organizations in this space. 

Right. So best way to reach me through LinkedIn. Also, we have our website, www.argoera.com. You can and definitely click to that website and see our services.

Yep. 

We do offer different types of services. We do offer the program support where the corporations can— an ergonomist like us or others can work together to come up with a plan or aligning their SOPs, which is more long-term. And I think we focus more into that. However, as I— excuse me— as I said, there are a lot more focus into risk assessment or management. So that’s where a lot of business come through that area. So, we do, of course, cover that risk assessment. It could be your industrial risk assessment to corporate. At the same time, we also do worker compensation. Kind of support. I mean, you do need that kind of risk assessment as well, and all, uh, different types of workshops, being it the executive workshops to strategy level workshops, and also participatory ergonomics.

Makes sense. Excellent. So, Era, thank you so much for joining me today. Appreciate your time.

Thank you so much.

Thank you for listening to The Safety Guru on C-suite Radio. Leave a legacy. Distinguish yourself from the past. Grow your success. Capture the hearts and minds of your teams. Elevate your safety. Like every successful athlete, top leaders continuously invest in their safety leadership with an expert coach to boost safety performance. Begin your journey at execsafetycoach.com. Come back in two weeks for the next episode with your host, Eric Michrowski. This podcast is powered by Propulo Consulting.

ABOUT THE GUEST

Dr. Era Poddar is a Canadian Certified Professional Ergonomist (CCPE) and safety specialist, with broad international experience across North America, the Middle East, and Asia. Her expertise covers industry, academia, corporate, and government sectors. She holds a Ph.D. in Industrial Ergonomics, a NEBOSH International General Certificate in Occupational Health and Safety (practical applications), and a mini-executive MBA from the Sauder School of Business, UBC.

With more than twenty years in consulting, coaching, training, and research related to ergonomics, human factors, workplace accommodation, and safety, Dr. Poddar helps organizations meet goals in health and safety, ergonomics, and MSI control. She currently sits on the Board of Directors for the Canadian College for the Certification of Professional Ergonomists (CCCPE) and actively contributes to the International Ergonomics Association (IEA) Health and Safety Technical Committee, where she leads a group advising on ISO 45001: Guidelines for Ergonomic Processes. Additionally, she is part of the Canadian Mirror Committee (CMC) to the ISO Ergonomics TC 159.

Era is the founder director of Ergoera Services Inc. (https://ergoera.com), which provides customized ergonomics and occupational health and safety services and training. She also serves as an Adjunct Professor at the University of British Columbia, guiding master’s students and professionals in industrial ergonomics, injury prevention, design ergonomics, human-centered design, and user research.

Known as an innovative entrepreneur, leader, and public speaker, Era balances her roles as consultant, educator, researcher, and mentor. She has successfully managed multicultural teams globally, including in North America, Asia, the Middle East, and India. Her work involves leading excellence initiatives, promoting accessibility and universal design, developing safety and ergonomics strategies, and implementing quality improvement programs. Throughout her career, Era has spearheaded ergonomics programs, risk assessments, participatory projects, gap analyses, and process improvements in sectors like manufacturing, mining, food processing, government, corporate environments, and healthcare. Her evidence-based, user-centered approach supports healthier, safer, more functional, and productive workplaces, reflecting her commitment to “Design for All.”

For more information: https://ergoera.com/

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Prepare for the Unexpected: Leadership and Safety Lessons from an Offshore Explosion with Lee Ellis

Apr 30, 2026

Prepare for the Unexpected: Leadership and Safety Lessons from an Offshore Explosion with Lee Ellis

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ABOUT THE EPISODE

In this powerful episode of The Safety Guru, Lee Ellis from Proud2BSafe shares his firsthand experience of a catastrophic offshore explosion in 2020, involving a commercial fishing vessel off the UK coast, and the critical leadership and safety lessons that emerged from it. Through vivid storytelling, he takes us into the heart of the crisis, revealing what it truly means to prepare for the unexpected. Drawing from this life-altering event, Lee explores essential lessons in safety leadership under pressure, risk identification and mitigation, and the true value of recurring training—not just completing it but truly trusting it when it matters most. He highlights the importance of prioritizing mental health support, fostering a strong debrief culture, and providing ongoing support in the aftermath of trauma. Lee also emphasizes that exchanging experiences and knowledge across teams, along with adopting a growth mindset, is vital to strengthening safety culture and ensuring teams are truly prepared for unexpected situations. Tune in now to experience his powerful story and discover these impactful lessons, as he challenges us to move beyond routine safety practices and actively prepare for the unexpected.

READ THE EPISODE

Real leaders leave a legacy. They capture the hearts and minds of their teams. Their origin story puts the safety and well-being of their people first. Great companies ubiquitously have safe yet productive operations. For those companies, safety is an investment, not a cost. For the C suite, it’s a real topic of daily focus. This is the Safety Guru with your host, Eric Michrowski, a globally recognized ops and safety guru, public speaker and author. Are you ready to leave a safety legacy? Your legacy success story begins now.

Hi and welcome to the Safety Guru. Today I’m very excited to have with me Lee Ellis. He’s an offshore maritime professional who’s going to share with us today a pretty exceptional story about an incident at sea and some of the learnings from it. Lee, welcome to the show. Excited to have you with me.

Thank you very much, Eric.

So, Lee, why don’t you start out with your story and what happened in, in that, that day in 2020?

Yeah. So, I was working on a service operations vessel on off of the east coast of the Uk supporting wind farm operations. We were doing service and maintenance and on this particular day, there’s nothing significantly different about it. It was quite a bright, sunny December day. It was quite pleasant. But we were involved as a, as a craft with the, an incident involved a fishing vessel by the name of Gal wadi Moore, which has had a catastrophic underwater explosion. So, it started as a regular day for our wind farm. The SOV was called the Sag Nord. So, we had part Norwegian crew, part Dutch crew, part Danish crew. Sorry. And then UK resident technicians and a nice mix of general different nationalities now on board, all working together. So, yeah, on this day, just gone past 11:00am, cool, bright sunny morning, as I said, December 15th and there was a very loud bang. I was in my office on the operations, in the operations management office on board the vessel.

Yep.

And yes, the air fell silent for a few seconds after this bang and then all of a sudden there was quite a lot of commotion in the changing room which was located right next door. A lot of the crew members were rushing into the, the rescue equipment locker. And then my desk phone started to ring. It was the vessel captain, and he was calling to let me know that they just received a mayday call from the fishing boat and it was located approximately three, three miles away from, from us from our current location at that point in time to the north of our position. So just a little bit out of the wind farm and that the SOV itself was going to deploy its fast rescue boat and its fast transfer vessel, which are Two small rib type craft with three, three crew on each, driver, navigator and an assistant person, rescue person, if you will. And they were going to go to the location to assist where possible with this news. I called all the, for all the work within the wind farm to be stopped immediately. And so, we did have a couple of teams out on locations already.

At that point they had to play deployed on two different turb. So, I gave them a shout on the radio and also to the control room, put a full stop work order on the whole wind farm, everybody to just stop what they’re doing, go to their nearest safe place within the wind farm or within their wind turbines and just take a break and wait for further news. We also deployed, we had a, a small service vessel, transfer vessel with us as well. Kind of moderate size, twin catamaran hull. She could carry up to 12 people. And I deployed her out to go sit with two teams between their turbines so they can provide support facilities if they want to go back on board, use the toilet facilities, stuff like that, or fresh water supply. They were there available for them.

Sure.

Until we knew, you know, if we needed any additional resource, we knew where to find them. But for the meantime, they’re in a safe place. So, once they must have in the safe areas and received the messages back, we started to receive more information from the fast boats that were seen at the scene of the vessel, the fishing vessel, where the explosion had taken place. And they’re in the process at that point of rescuing all seven of the fishing boat crew. Some of these crew members were in very serious condition. So, to put it into context, the skipper, he was in, he received in the wheelhouse at the time, he actually had three broken vertebrae.

Wow.

Broken cracked sternum and orbital bone and significant knee injuries. The first deckhand let’s find him. He, he was a fractured skull, fractured pelvis, arm, ribs and toes and a ruptured bladder.

Wow.

The second deckhand had a broken leg, damaged knees, damaged knees and elbow and a punctured lung. The third deck had the deck hand. My apologies. He had significant eye injuries, plate to cranium fracture. So, it’s skull fracture and loss of sight in one eye. The fourth deckhand, he had minor injuries to his shoulder, ankles, knees, neck and back where he’d been thrown around in the blast. The fifth deckhand just had minor cuts and bruises. He was the guy who was on deck of the vessel, fishing vessel at the time. He kind of got thrown in the air and landed back on his feet and then fell over. So, he had Minor injuries. And then there was the night watchman who was in below decks. He was being the night watchman. He was asleep in his bunk, and he got thrown clear of his bunk. So, he was in the prone position in the upper bunk. He had a broken leg, broken hip and a broken shoulder where he was thrown out of his bunk completely. So fairly substantial significant injuries there. And yeah, so it was quite a quite difficult time for dealing with those casualties as they were coming back to the vessel.

So, everyone who wasn’t directly involved in the running of the critical vessel operations, we assembled them out on the back of the rear deck where the fast boats are recovered back to the, the main service operations vessel. And we made it into a; the deck area became a triage basically for the administration of first aid and pain relief. So, on board the vessel as well as having the, the basic first aid training that we all have to do to go offshore, we also had a vessel medic. We had an independent medic on board as well for being in farm paramedic grade medic with us who had been doing additional training on days when we weren’t able to work. He would give us an additional first aid training lessons and progressed our first aid level skills up to an advanced level.

Sure.

To the point where we could administer a pain relief in the form of a drug called Pentorex, which is an oral, oral pain relief. It’s like a little cylinder capsule. You pop the capsule and you take it like an inhaler. But it’s quite a strong, potent pain relief which we would been trained to use. So, he was out there as well. So he was, he was organizing the triage. Basically, we set up accidental emergency on the back of an offshore vessel. So it was, it was quite an interesting, interesting morning at that point. So, as well as controlling things in the wind farm, I was also hands on with the. Administering first aid to both the fishing boat skipper and the second deckhand. I, I did the bandaging of the skipper’s legs. So, I actually saw his, his bone, his shin bones.

Wow.

Where he had been thrown in the wheelhouse. His shins and his knees had taken out the counter console of the wheelhouse itself, and it basically skinned his shins on both legs. So try to patch him back up as best we could just so that he was able to transit back to shore at that point. Right. The other guys had the other, more, more serious casualties out on deck on, on stretchers and spine boards and we’re administering additional pain relief to them as well. Obviously, the Paramedic and the, the ship second officer were far more highly trained. They could administer more different pain reliefs that they had available to them. So, they were going through those and putting IV drips and stuff in as well. So yeah, it was quite a significant time.

And do we know what happened that caused that explosion?

Yes, we do. So, there was after the event a few, a few months later, well, the vessel was towed back to shore and assessed. She didn’t sink. Surprisingly she did take on water, but she didn’t sink. There was significant, the significant damage throughout the vessel. The, the hole was rippled as well. The bulkheads had moved; the engine mountains had moved by six inches. It actually shifted the whole engine inside the vessel off of its engine mountains in, in the, in the depths of the. The hull.

Wow.

But yeah, she was actually token back to hull in, in Yorkshire to a maritime yard there and assessed by the maritime agency. And it was determined that it was a Second World War bomb that had been caught crabbing. That. Yeah, yeah. But it’s not as crazy as you might think and I’ll get onto that bit in a minute. This is, yeah, she, she dragged up. They reckon It’s a 250-kilo bomb damage that they assessed it to be and then they did send down a, a dive robot a few, a few months later and they found fragments. There were also fragments in one of the pots, the crabbing pots that remained on the seabed where it parted the line and they found pieces of that. So, it was significant physical evidence to say exactly what it was. And they reckon it was a, say a 250 kilo German Second World War bomb. But yeah, so due to the unfortunate events of that day and being a completely random nature, but it’s still estimated, you say about the bomb, about a hundred thousand tons of unexploded bombs in and around the UK waters.

So, 100,000.

100,000 tons. Yeah.

That makes it risky to do anything that touches the.

Whoa. Yeah.

Deep water surface.

Yeah, exactly. So yeah, it’s, you know, it’s a, it’s a real big. 

It’s.

They, they still pull stuff up all the time. Occasionally the fishing boats will pull up an old sea mine or something like that and you hear of the lifeboat, or a naval vessel will go out, and minesweeper will go out and try and deal with it or they’ll locate it. Things get dragged up and then they get destroyed by the bomb disposal. Whether it be depends on where it sits as well on the shoreline. If it’s higher than the tide mark, then the army have to deal with it. If it’s lower than the tide mark, then the navy will drag it out to see him and make a big water splash. So. But yeah, there’s a lot of it out there still, especially around the east coast, obviously, because it was closest to mainland Europe. So, yeah, so there’s a lot of that out there.

Wow. So, in this example, how, how would you characterize leadership under pressure? Because you, you were in a routine day, or what appeared to be a routine day until about 11am and in, in a high-pressure environment, how do you prepare for this type of decision making? 

You have to rely on your training. And there’s no, there’s no specific training for that scenario, sure, no, and there probably never will, but you can always, you can always maybe surmise it may happen, but the risk factor is very minimal. But in the offshore renewables and in the offshore industry on a whole, it’s always about the training of what you, you prepare for the worst conditions is it particularly a high-risk environment. And so, there’s a lot of time, you know, it’s all about having good risk identification and mitigation factors. And it’s the same with a lot of land-based industries. You, you train to identify what is the potential risk to yourself, your team, your crew and also in the environment. And this, however, being at sea is purely complicated by that fact that you are isolated and well away from regular emergency services. You’ve got no fire, you’ve got no ambulance, you do have helicopters and we do have helicopter support from shore. The, the Coast Guard agency in the UK have interspersed helicopters around the UK coastline. But again, where you are in the North Sea, you could be an hour away from one of those.

We were, we were 45 minutes at the outset and that was a direct flight to us. And he was, he was hightailing as fast as he could in a large rescue helicopter and that was still 45 minutes away. So, you know, you are isolated, so you have to deal and you have to be prepared as best you can. Anybody who goes offshore has to be trained in the basics of emergency firefighting, first aid, management of control of certain situations as well. So, you do those as undertakings, but then you progress and you learn, you take as many more additional trainings as you can over periods of time. You, you basically, you increase and advance your portfolio, and you also add experiences into that. So, in this situation, although unprepared for it, having never faced an explosion before, it’s a case of, well, what Can I deal with and how can I deal with it? And it’s. So, it was a case of us. You’ve got to keep calm. It’s first, first and foremost in any situation, at any management level, you’ve got to keep calm and look at the facts and see what it is you’re actually dealing with.  

And what can you do to help and aid that situation or make things better or make improvements. You get the rescue parties moving as fast as you can. Which was dealt with in this situation by, by the vessel crew, by the captain on the bridge. He sent out his rescue teams on their fast boats. And from my side of things, for managing my personnel that I was directly responsible for, it was to make sure that the initial teams I had out, as I said before, they, I made sure they went to a safe place and they stopped work so they couldn’t come to any further harm of what they were doing. The turbine that they were working on was shut down. There was still power available. They still had, they had food and water, and they had a support vessel there for other needs that was necessary. You could ask why, why didn’t they just get on that support vessel and sit there all day? But actually, if it’s quite a bit, if there’s a little bit of lump or swell out there and you’re not that well-seasoned a maritime traveler, a wind turbine is actually a far more stable place to be than traveling around on a boat all day.

So, you know, some of the lads do have to deal with seasickness. They’re quite happy sitting on a big boat because that doesn’t move so much. But they don’t want to sit there all day, Bobb, if they don’t have to. So, they’d much rather be in a more comfortable situation on the turbine. So, so yes, there’s other things you have to deal with, but basically, it’s, it’s to keep a cool, calm and collective head about yourself and deal with each thing as you come across it.

So, so there’s an element of also being prepared for the unexpected. I think that that, that comes through from your story because I think in most trades, we tend to assume the best possible outcome. And as you said, there’s conditions. It’s a little bit like when you’re in the, when you’re in the air for pilot or if you’re at sea, you’ve got to be self-sufficient and find your way through whatever is happening in front of you because of that extended distance. I’ve been to many offshore wind onshore wind farms. But I can’t fathom to imagine the exponential difference in risk when you’re offshore and you’re dealing with the same wind farms.

Yeah. I mean between being on the actual wind turbine, the risk is exactly the same. That part it’s all, it’s all about the getting to and from. It’s, it’s about that element of working at sea and in, in high-risk environments like the offshore renewable industry, you have to build, you have to build your culture daily risk awareness and it’s all about the good safety culture. So, the development along with the training, you develop a good safety culture. It’s something that every company wind farm site strives to achieve and maintain, and it takes the involvement of all parties. So right from every new visitor that starts on site, they have to start with a thorough site induction as well as the site induction. You do a safety induction, you go through all the relevant toolboxes talk talks, incidents that have happened, recent historical facts with the safety related within the wind farm. Along with that initial induction. The team, if they’re going out, will have pre-sale briefings. So again, you’re looking at the reef risk factors again and the toolbox talk as well. You’ve got to have a toolbox talk every day before you do anything.

Regardless of what industry are onshore, offshore.

Yeah.

In America, maritime, aviation. All the same, everybody has a toolbox talk periodically as well to make that safety culture long standing and get the buy in of everybody you’re looking for. We do safety focused stand down days and stuff like that and team building days designed to make sure that everybody you know is, is both fully engaged and comfortable and confident in identifying the, and discussing and reporting on positive and negative safety issues and risk jobs used in this way that creates a very productive safety culture which should you know, part the way for everybody having a safe and productive but everybody coming home safely at the end of the day. And that’s the number one most important thing.

This episode of the Safety Guru podcast is brought to you by Propulo Consulting, the leading safety and safety culture advisory firm. Whether you are looking to assess your safety culture, develop strategies to level up your safety performance, introduce human performance capabilities, re-energize your BBS program, enhance supervisory safety capabilities, or introduce unique safety leadership training and talent solutions. Propulo has you covered. Visit us at propolo.com

and there’s also, I hear in your story a lot of elements of recurring recurrent training as well. Right. So, what you were talking about in terms of the medic it’s not okay I’m qualified with first aid, it’s how do I continue to upskill while we’ve got some downtime so that my skills are prepared for an unexpected event like what happened that day.

Yeah, absolutely. With, with any training it’s always about keeping it fresh as well and doing. You have, as I mentioned, the basic periodical trainings that everybody has to go offshore. They call them the GWOs, the global wind Industry Organization trainings which covers your fire awareness and those, all the basics, that’s fine, you repeat them every couple of years at a training college but in the meantime it’s expanding on those skills and making yourself a better training portfolio for yourself and making your skills sets fresh. And as you mentioned, the paramedic on board, he was an ex British army paramedic. Absolutely lovely guy. But he was, he was adamant that if we had days when we weren’t doing a lot because the weather was too bad, we were training with him. He, he didn’t, you know, you couldn’t go down to the games room and play computer games. No, no. Today we’ve got a training session and we would do two or three hours of advanced first aid to the point where he pushed it and to his credit, absolute credit and on this occasion he, he pushed us through to doing our advanced first aid certificates and we were under him to do advanced first aid which is, it’s maybe a two, one or two steps below UK paramedic level.

Certainly, it’s like an ambulance technician level where you’re able to do the splinting, a lot of the traction stuff, putting into baskets, putting, preparing for spine boarding. We also went to the level where we could give minimal pain relief in the form of the Penford, which is, it’s like an oral inhaled pain relief which is what we’re permitted to do. So. Yeah, so you know, you can never stop learning and the training is, is valid and significant but it’s, it’s very well and good doing it in the two-year cycle. But if, if you don’t keep up those periods of training more often and keep it fresh in your mind and things become stale and stagnant and you forget.  

So yeah, it also takes a mindset around training to maximize the value to, from a growth mindset to also say how do I get to the best version of myself from a safety standpoint because I can pay attention to training, soak it up or assume it will never happen to me.

Yes, definitely. And with these sort of things it’s Very easy to, to say, oh yeah, you do that when you speak to the new guys I mentioned before, you have to the new, a new visitor or a new technician comes to the site and you say well what advice would I give them? And my advice would be quiet, quiet, quite short and simple to them really. It’s never stop learning and sharing that knowledge. If you, if you’ve had experience with things, these industries from people, you go further through life. You meet different people who come from different walks of life. They’ve done different things. They may have ex-military backgrounds, they may have done, worked around the world. Me personally, I came to this industry from a brief spin stint in oil and gas. Before that I was working in factories. So, I’ve seen things and done things and been involved in general life. You know, people, people experience things in their lives different to everybody else. And the best thing you can do is share that experience. If you’ve seen something done better or you’ve experienced that some somewhere else, share it with a guy who hasn’t.

You know, you may have done a training course, but the knowledge more often comes from, from that experience. And so, it’s always best to try and learn from that as well. Whether that comes from, you know, an experienced colleague sharing a story on something or from something that you’ve actually witnessed yourself. You know, maybe you, you were first to witness a car accident or something like that. You’ve had to do first aid. I mean it’s, they’re not nice situations and you never really learn from a nice situation. That’s the unfortunate thing about life in general, you know, so, you know, but don’t ever be afraid to share that knowledge and, and that experience or ask for that knowledge and experience if you know, somebody’s got a little bit of a history in that. So, know what, how have you dealt with this situation? What have you seen before? What’s your backstory? You know, get to know your colleagues on a boat, it’s a lot easier because you sit around in the evening watching telly and chat, just chatting the day away. Some of the guys that we used to share the boat with, they were xref for, for a start.  

So, they’d been to some of them in both the Iraq campaigns and stuff like that. One guy was ex-army, he’d been in Bosnia, things like this, you know, significant military background and you can learn a lot from them. But some of it’s really scary but the experience is still valid. So yeah, it’s a shared knowledge that helps you build your experience. Not your personal experience, but it can help you with how you would deal with a situation.

And I think one thing that struck me when we first talked about your story is also the element of mental health, but also the debrief that occurred the day after. So rather than run back to work, when all was said and done and everybody was back on the sov, you didn’t jump right back into work. Tell me a little bit about how you handle mental health, but also the debrief that’s so important after an event like this.

Yeah, absolutely. I mean, the debrief started pretty much after the last helicopter had taken the last significant casualty off of the. Off the boat, and we were starting to return back to actually go and pick up ours. Our stranded team members who were back in the wind farm where we’d sailed away to do the helicopter operations. At that point, it was about an hour and a half sail back to the wind farm, and we kind of all just sat around in a bit. A little bit of a state of shock, if you will, just trying to process. Yeah, everybody’s trying to process. Nobody really said a lot. Everything was just trying to process personally, what on earth just happened. You know, there’s that big question mark you might go, did we do the right thing? Didn’t we do the right thing? Have we. Have we done what we best we could have? We could. We’ve done it better. And it’s like, okay, that’s fine. Everybody will ask those questions. And that. That is your own mental health to his tea. Sure. But what we did when we got everybody back on board, because we debriefed the guys when they came back on board as well.

And we got everybody up. We went to the anchor ground, and we got everybody up from the crew and everybody who was involved up on. In. In the bridge. It’s a large bridge area. There was about 50 of us in total, all stood up there in the end. And we had a general chat session, and it was led by the captain, and he was. He was talking about, you know, what happened, how. How we go about dealing with the situation. What do we think? Palm reflection? How do we think we were. Things went. And it was. It was kind of. It’s a bit of a strange one. So, the captain, when we all stood up there initially, we all gathered up there and the captain broke the silence and he gave a brief recount of the whole event, which he’d taken from his ship’s log directly. And then he personally praised every one of us for professionalism and the collaboration with the rescue effort, you know, with the guys who went out on fast boats. We helped them get the, the casualties off. Everybody mucked in with the helicopter, helicopter operations. And then we started to open up conversations and, and just talking about the things, how we were involved, what we did, where we were, what we were doing.

And just kind of a little bit of a breakdown analysis. Not too in depth but just kind of post incident. And then in the following days after that there were individual and group counseling sessions that were offered to everybody. We didn’t go back to work the following day. Certainly not. There was a couple of days actually we didn’t get back to work. It was just best just we were in a good position with the wind farm anyway. But that wouldn’t have mattered.

Sure.

You know, we didn’t have anything significantly broken. We were ahead of service, so it was like fine. But if that hadn’t been the case, that would have just waited. And management were really good about that. They turned around and said, you guys need to, you need to decompress, you need to take your time. We need to make sure everybody’s okay. And the mental health accent on that was really significant. And I was quite impressed with the, the company that managed that we work for on how they dealt with that. So much so that they had especially psychologists and counseling sessions. You could either do group ones; we all did group ones anyway to start with. And then they offered an extended that to individual sessions if you want to schedule them yourself, if you want to have a chat. We also, we were also having little breakout areas around the boat and just having little group chats and stuff and would go and have a coffee with one of our colleagues from the canteen or someone from the engine room. And because everybody ended up interspersed throughout the whole vessel during the incident. So, everybody was working with people they never really worked with on a day-to-day basis.

Some of the guys did have sleepless nights and it did affect them. Certainly, some of the younger lads, those who hadn’t had significant military backgrounds and things like that, maybe they weren’t. So, it’s, it’s a nasty phrase. But battle hardened, if you will, hadn’t had the experiences of traumatic experience so much so some of them were fresh out of college. So literally they’ve only ever seen was school.

Right.

So, you know, they’ve done an apprenticeship, become an engineer and thrown onto a wind turbine and that’s where they were, you know, and no face with this in their first year out from college. So yeah, absolutely. Yikes. And some of Those guys did need a little bit more support as well and that was given to them as well as best we could on the vessel. And again, with the onshore support and we actually made port on the third day. We went back and dropped a few guys off and made sure they got home. Some, some weren’t, some lived a few hundred miles away as well and they weren’t, they weren’t allowed to drive home. They were driven home and their vehicles were taken home for them. So that was quite a really nice supporting touch I thought. Or they were put onto trains, and their vehicles were arranged to be picked up or whatever means when it made necessary for them. But the ongoing from that was the long term on the mental support. It kept going. It wasn’t just when they went back to work.

Right.

That was at the end of did carry on. If you needed to talk to someone there would be a program put in place for you. And it was as you wanted it. It was a really good supporting feature of the company.

Yeah. Well Lee, tell me, thank you so much for sharing your story. I think there’s some really good learnings as well in terms of preparing for the unexpected in terms of professional orientation that happens in the, in that environment. But also, how you debrief and how all the practices to make sure that people return to work in good shape after a traumatic event like this. It’s a really, really good. Because it’s one thing to have a one-time intervention like you said, versus ongoing support recognizing that it’s a pretty traumatic event that happened.

Yeah, it certainly was. There is a, a bitter note to the end of that story unfortunately.

Okay.

So, when I presented my initial talk it was a two-day event for the company I now work for. And one of the participants in the audience, he was actually, he’s a vessel skipper, he’s a captain on one of the smaller vessels and he was actually that day he was the lifeboat skipper who came out and rescued some of the, the, the medium and minor injured personnel. The ones that weren’t helicoptered off.

Sure.

And that day I learned that even though with all our company orientated all our mental health support and everything, the captain of the fishing boat himself 18 months after the event succumbed to amount mental health insurance. So, he left behind a wife and two children. And it was because he has. Because they’re essentially, they work for themselves. So, they work for a very small, not big. The fishing industry is, is not huge, not big companies that they don’t have that kind of support or that, that and yeah, he unfortunately in the end, 18 months later, he didn’t make it.

And the others, the other six.

The others, the others certainly I’m aware that the ones with the significant life changing injuries, two of them never went back offshore again, but they are moving on with their lives. And the other three who didn’t have such significant injuries, I think they went back to fishing again. Sure.

So, thank you for sharing that. Unfortunately, that final note and it is true because there isn’t the support mechanism that exist in larger companies for industries like phishing that are highly decentralized small companies for the most part.

Yeah.

So, thank you. If somebody wants to get in touch with you, Lee, what’s the best way to do that?

Probably best to contact me through Proud to be Safe through P2Bs through the UK and they will. They will message through from this.

Excellent. Thank you so much for sharing your story.

Thank you very much for your time.

Thank you.

Thank you for listening to The Safety Guru on C-suite Radio. Leave a legacy. Distinguish yourself from the past. Grow your success. Capture the hearts and minds of your teams. Elevate your safety. Like every successful athlete, top leaders continuously invest in their safety leadership with an expert coach to boost safety performance. Begin your journey at execsafetycoach.com. Come back in two weeks for the next episode with your host, Eric Michrowski. This podcast is powered by Propulo Consulting.

ABOUT THE GUEST

Lee Ellis is a seasoned maritime professional and survivor of one of the UK’s most serious commercial fishing incidents in recent years. On 15 December 2020, while serving as duty operations coordinator, Lee was directly involved in the emergency response to a catastrophic underwater explosion aboard the crab potting vessel Galwad-Y-Mor, 25 miles off the Norfolk coast. The blast left the vessel severely damaged, injured multiple crew members, and triggered a complex rescue operation involving the RNLI, coastguard helicopters, and offshore support vessels.

In his powerful talk, Lee recounts the events of that day with raw honesty and vivid storytelling, using presentation visuals to help audiences understand not only the incident itself, but the split-second decisions and teamwork that followed. His session includes a 15-minute personal account that places listeners on the deck with the crew — feeling the impact, confusion, and courage required in the face of the unknown.

But Lee’s message goes far beyond the incident. He speaks to the value of training — not just attending it, but trusting it when it matters most — and the critical importance of mental health support in the aftermath of trauma. Most importantly, Lee challenges teams and individuals to think beyond routine safety: to go above and beyond in their preparation for the unexpected. Because when the unthinkable happens, it’s not just knowledge that counts — it’s mindset, readiness, and the ability to act without hesitation.

Lee’s delivery is calm, relatable, and deeply authentic — the kind of message that resonates particularly well with operational teams, offshore workers, young professionals, and anyone involved in high-risk environments. His session serves as a stark reminder of why safety training, preparedness, and emotional support aren’t just checkboxes — they’re lifelines.

For more information: https://www.p2bs.org/safety-speakers/

Explore more speakers from Proud2BSafe by clicking the image link below. They bring together a diverse network of motivational speakers with powerful lived experiences, supporting organizations on their broader safety journeys.

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The Importance of Neuroscience and Behavior in Improving Safety Performance with Cristian Sylvestre

Apr 2, 2026

The Importance of Neuroscience and Behavior in Improving Safety Performance with Cristian Sylvestre

LISTEN TO THE EPISODE: 

ABOUT THE EPISODE

In this thought-provoking episode of The Safety Guru, Cristian Sylvestre unpacks the importance of neuroscience and behavior in improving safety performance. Cristian breaks down four key brain modes that drive nearly everything we do, offering a powerful lens for understanding how attention and awareness influence our actions and how subconscious states like complacency, impatience, and fatigue quietly shape behavior in high-risk environments. He also explores the limitations of current safety practices and the critical role of attention in safety, helping us understand why even the best safety systems cannot fully protect us when attention slips. From understanding the root causes of inattention to building awareness and safer habits through repetition, this episode provides practical strategies to help prevent serious incidents and fatalities through individual actions. Cristian also highlights why workers should be seen as valuable resources in safety discussions to strengthen overall safety performance. Don’t miss these transformative insights and powerful takeaways to create safer workplaces. Tune in now!

READ THE EPISODE

Real leaders leave a legacy. They capture the hearts and minds of their teams. Their origin story puts the safety and well-being of their people first. Great companies ubiquitously have safe yet productive operations. For those companies, safety is an investment, not a cost. For the C-suite, it’s a real topic of daily focus. This is the Safety Guru with your host, Eric Michrowski, a globally recognized ops and safety guru, public speaker and author. Are you ready to leave a safety legacy? Your legacy success story begins now.

Hi and welcome to the Safety Guru. Today I’m very excited to have with me Cristian Sylvestre. He’s a managing director of Habitsafe based out of Sydney. Christian, so happy to have you with me today.

Thanks very much, Eric. Appreciate you having me.

Absolutely. So, I’d love to start with your story and how you got passionate about safety.

Okay, so look, I’m a chemical engineer and I worked as a process safety engineer for a refinery here in Sydney. And what I found, as a process safety engineer, you quickly come to the realization that you can’t rely on the person in order to foresee what’s going to happen and deal with it, because things are very complex. So, nobody’s got enough cognitive horsepower to be able to foresee it with enough anticipation in order to be able to fix it. So, process safety is really very much about having the system and the checks and balances in place. So, things don’t get away from you.

Sure.

But the refinery that I was working for had the worst occupational or personal safety record in the shell world. So, the refinery manager said to me, why don’t you look at it and see what you can come up with? And I looked at it, I looked at the management system, and it was pretty robust. Leaders were talking about safety on an ongoing basis. So, we were doing all the right things. And the only thing that I could come up with at the time was that, well, people are just not paying attention at the time when the hazard is nearby.

Sure.

So initially we went out and we started telling people to pay more attention and be more careful and all that kind of stuff. It had no impact at all.

Right.

So, then I kind of left shelter, went off and did and did other things. And in sort of 2005, 2006, I started seeing papers that were looking at how the brain worked, but not how the brain works from the point of view of, you know, when something, when somebody’s sort of got problems with it, but how the brain worked for the function of how, how things happen. So where does behavior come from? And all that kind of stuff. So, I started looking at that, and what I found was that there were four main brain modes that decide almost 100% of what we do. And that’s conscious control.

Sure.

Autopilot, usually sort of. The third one is impatience. So, fatigue, frustration, anger, that kind of stuff, and also fatigue. So, I started getting interested, given my background with Shell of. Okay, well, how can we use this information in order to help people manage, you know, their ability to pay attention when hazards are about?

And so, when we’re talking about hazards, where do most accidents or fatalities actually happen?

So, when you look at where accidents are happening in the United States, for instance, there’s about 5,000 accidental fatalities every year. And they’re divided between process safety and personal or occupational safety. And when you look at that, what you find, I mean, process safety is really the refinery blowing up, the nuclear meltdown. Really complex things. Not many of those deaths and not many incidents are associated with process safety. But when you have a process safety incident, it’s kind of. It’s big. You’ll see it big.

Yeah.

So, when you look at just the workplace, what you find is that you find for each. Everyone, process safety, accidental fatality, there might be 20, 25. And that’s the same ratio in the U.S. in Australia, in the U.K. i suspect in Canada and New Zealand as well. But that is only 4% of the total data available. What we also know is that 120,000 accidental fatalities happen outside of work, a good deal of those on the road, people driving. So, 4%, in my view, is not really representative enough to give a complete picture of the total problem. And what that leads to is that it leads to a limiting of the range of possible solutions that get considered. So, if you’re wrongly looking at fatalities at work, you’ve got a fair amount of control over the environment. So, what you do is you tend to focus on doing things around the person. Yep. And you tend to assume that the person can’t do anything about keeping themselves safe. And I think that that’s a real weakness. Because when you start looking at all the accidental fatalities, what you find is that the majority of those fatalities, the person could have done something different in order to avoid it.

Sure. And so that brings me to the how does this connect with hop? And maybe some of the challenges with a purely HOP lens when looking at safety, because we’re not talking about blaming the employee, but we are talking about how is it that I can do things differently to have a better outcome?

So, HOP came about from process Safety. And it’s been around for a long time. And I think when you use hop in process safety, it helps a great deal. The issue, I think, is that we’ve extended that into personal safety. And I think what hop it does is actually gives people the sense that they can control everything around the person. So, for me, the problem with hop is that it kind of negates what you can do with the person, which doesn’t really help. So, whether you do hop safety differently, safety one, safety two, maybe they’ll come up with safety 137 soon. That is only about doing work around the person. And that gives us the illusion of control, in my view. Now, I think that is a part of what we need to do. So, we need to do things around the person, so the person is safe. But if you look at the workplace fatalities over the last 10 years in the US haven’t really changed. If you take out the suicides and the overdoses, they’ve gone up by almost 7%. The population has gone up by 6%. So, you can’t argue that that’s actually having an impact.  

And we’ve been doing hop and focusing on things around the person for the last 10, 15 years. So, when I look at the data and you think about, okay, so it seems to be that we’re stuck in a zone of diminishing returns. We keep doing the same thing over and over under a different label, expecting a different result. I tend to think that that’s the definition of insanity. We also need to look at what can we do with the person.

Sure. I would just. So, I agree, the last 15 years of data in the U.S. most countries have shown very little impact. Most cases, an increase in terms of fatalities, workplace fatalities. The other thing, though, a lot of organizations are doing is treating the same thing, the bee sting, in the same way as a fatality or potential Sifs and getting distracted from things that could have CIF impact. But I don’t think it detracts from this element that you need to look at the person as well as the context in the system.

Yeah, it’s kind of. I think it’s fascinating that we keep, you know, riding the worker out of the safety story. If you look at incidents outside of work, sure. The majority of prevention happens because the worker or the person did something different. 

Right.

So, one of the things that we asked when we do some training with people is we say to them, is a safety management system 100% effective, 100% of the time? Every single person goes, well, no. And I Say it’s okay. So, when the system fails, what keeps you safe? The workers intuitively know. They say, it’s me. And I said, that depends on whether you’re paying attention to what could hurt you at the time. Would you agree? So, the second question I ask is, so, what keeps you safe outside of work? And most of the time they go, well, it’s me. And I go. And that is a function of how good you are at paying attention. And given the number of accidental deaths that there are outside of work, what that tells you is that we’re not very good at paying attention, but we think we are. So really, when you analyze that for people, you go, okay. At work, your first line of defense is the safety system. Right. Your second line of defense is whether you were paying attention at the time that it failed outside of work. Your first and a lot of the times your only line of defense is how good you are at paying attention.

Right.

So, for me, it kind of makes sense. If the safety System is not 100% effective 100% of the time, what have you got when it fails? Because at the moment, what I see is all the effort is going into making sure that it never fails,

which is fair. And I think in some cases that’s impossible. I think it’s one thing in a controlled environment to be able to think you can control a lot of the failure points. But a lot of environments people work in are uncontrolled.

Yeah.

They change by the day.

Yeah. So, what I think happens is that people frame the problem in a way with a solution in mind. Right, sure. So, plenty of safety professionals have said to me, oh, no, look, the safety system should prevent all incidents. I go, really? I mean, what about, okay, I’ve investigated a number of incidents, ran into a pole that had been there for 50 years. Right. They tripped coming down the stairs. That have been there for 20 years. Right. So. And some of those have been quite serious in their consequences. You know, you fall down the stairs, and you hit your head hard enough,

and it’s quite charming, substantial.

So, for me, I tend to think that there’s this second sort of layer of protection that we could have that we’re not doing anything with. And the question that I always ask is, I mean, why is it that we are so allergic and want to continue to ignore this? It just doesn’t make a lot of sense. Now, are you familiar with the Lewin equation?

No, I’m not.  

Okay, so Lewin was in the 1930s. He was a behavioral psychologist or something. I don’t really know, but he basically wrote an equation that said behavior is a function of the person and the environment. You put the person first. Why did he put the person first is because you’ve got a lot more control over what we do with ourselves than what the world does around us. It seems to me like safety without really realizing or intentionally doing it. It’s trying to maneuver or to change the Lewin’s equation to behavior is only a function of the environment. Which is kind of bizarre to me because you can control a good deal of the environment at work, but the majority of people are not dying at work. They’re not killing themselves accidentally at work. And for me, if I was running a business and one of my employees had a car crash and couldn’t come to work, that is just as bad as whether they got injured at work. I’ve got to find somebody, I’ve got to train them, all that kind of stuff. So, I tend to sort of continue to try and push this argument that it’s great to do things around the worker and we should do as much as we can, but we also need to start looking at what causes inattention and what can people do in order to be more attentive.

Because when we do that, we can actually help prevent many incidents where the safety system wasn’t 100% effective.

And ultimately, behaviors matter, the person matters. If we are taking a view that only the environment matters, then that’s a very fatalistic view that eliminates personal choice decisions. And I think it’s a very dangerous path to go in. In general.

Look, I. I totally agree with you. I mean, this thing about, you know, only context drives behavior. Right? I mean, people. People go, is that true or. And I go, well, it’s true, but it’s also misleading because if you drop the only.

I think it’s okay.

Yeah, I think so. So, I think that when you talk about the environment and people talk about the environment drives behavior, what they talk about is the external environment. And the external environment does generate a situation, right? No doubt about that.

Yeah, no doubt.

But they never talk about the internal environment, what’s going on inside people’s heads. And that situation gets interpreted by the internal environment, which then generates a behavior that could be attentive or inattentive. And that’s what a person needs to do in order to avoid harm.

Sure.

So, what I talk to people about is I say, look, you can certainly control the external environment to an extent, but there’s many situations. There are many different triggers for people. Why would you not want to train people in understanding what causes inattention and how they can be more attentive? Because if you teach them to do that, then their behavior becomes more attentive and it’s much easier for them to avoid harm, which is the game that we’re trying to play.

Yeah. Can we touch a little bit on neuroscience and the link between neuroscience and behaviors? Recognizing that, we could probably talk for an hour on this and probably we can get you back onto another episode to go deeper on the neuroscience piece. But I think that’s a very interesting connection point.

This episode of the Safety Guru podcast is brought to you by Propulo Consulting, the leading safety and safety culture advisory firm. Whether you are looking to assess your safety culture, develop strategies to level up your safety performance, introduce human performance capabilities, re-energize your BBS program, enhance supervisory safety capabilities, or introduce unique safety leadership, training and Talent Solutions, Propulo has you covered. Visit [email protected]

So those four main brain modes conscious control, autopilot, impatience, and fatigue. Which one of those so we asked this question when we, when we train, which one of those do you think determines most of what you do? And most people will answer autopilot. Because most of the stuff that I do, I’ve done plenty of times before. And that’s true. But if you think about it, safety through social science or whatever it is, has tried to convince us that it’s conscious control for the last 30 or 40 years. And the assumption is that because safety is important, people should be able to keep it front of mind. Now, I wish the brain worked that way because it would make it a lot easier, but that’s just not how the brain works. So, what happens is that when we are given a situation, what the brain does is it says, it asks itself, what is this most like? Not what is it exactly like, what is this most like? And it decides within 20 milliseconds, right. 1 50th of a second, not even a blink of an eyelid, which of those four modes it’s going to assign.

Sure, if it’s new or different, it’s the conscious mind, because we need to analyze it, we need to sort of work through it in order to get a solution. But the problem with that one is that it’s really slow and it uses a lot more energy, like a hundred times more energy than habits. So the brain doesn’t want to use it unless it’s absolutely necessary. And it’s absolutely necessary where it deems it absolutely necessary. About 5% of the time. I mean, neuroscience measures this. It’s beyond debate in the neuroscience. Right. So new or different is the first option. Second option, is it familiar and do I feel safe doing it? If that’s the case, you do it in autopilot. But most of the autopilot involves an inattentive habit. So, if you think about things like, you know, texting while driving and you talk to people and you ask them, why do you do it? I say, well, because I’ve done it a thousand times before. Nothing bads ever happened. You know, it’s illegal. And they go, yeah. Do you know it increases risk significantly? And they go, yeah, but what your brain does is it assigns behavior today based on the outcomes of the same behavior previously.

So, if you’ve texted while driving, nothing bads ever happened, your brain is going, hey, nothing bad will ever happen. Well, nothing bad.

Will it feel safe?

Yeah, exactly. Right. So, when you are doing things that are familiar, which is most of what we do, it’s not really autopilot. It’s actually complacency. So, what we do is we define autopilot with inattentive habits as complacency.

Sure.

Okay. If you’re short of time or something’s getting in your way, then what tends to happen is that’s frustration, fatigue. Sorry, frustration, rushing, anger, that kind of stuff. What you tend to do is you tend to use a shortcut because you get very focused on the outcome.

Sure.

And the last one, fatigue, is when you. That happens when you sort of don’t have a lot of energy. And what you tend to do under fatigue is you tend to do a bad in the moment decision. So, for instance, if you’re tired, what your brain knows is that you need to go to sleep. And what it also knows is that you sleep much better in your own bed than everywhere else. So it says to you in the car, you know, get in your car and drive home. Right. You, if you were lucid, you consciously understand that that’s high risk. But because you’re tired and you’ve got mental blocks and you’re not making good decisions, that sort of tends to happen. So what the brain does is that it interprets a situation in 20 milliseconds is the size of brain mode. And with that brain mode, what you get is you get an operating mode. And the operating mode, you either think about it consciously or you use a habit. Most of the time inattentive, you either do a shortcut, or you end up making a bad decision in the moment. That you don’t know about.

Sure.

And 95% of behavior is driven by the subconscious brain modes, which are complacency, impatience, and fatigue. But. But this is the catch. It still feels like a conscious decision. And we understand why that is. And the reason why that is, is because the conscious mind is the last step. So, the last step the brain uses is conscious processing. And because as soon as we become aware, the behavior happens, it feels conscious. When we go into organizations and we talk to people, we give them a choice. We say, you can either manage safety the way it feels, or you can manage safety the way it is. Which one you want, because you can’t do both. And in my view, a lot of the safety that we’ve done over the last 30, 40 years, it’s about how it feels. It’s all outside in. There’s none of this, what’s going on inside the brain so that we could understand behavior from the inside out, which. Which is really what I’m interested in.

Right. And so fascinating. But what can we do about it? How do we wire that in so that people actually can make tangible differences in terms of how they show up? 

So, there’s a couple of obstacles. And the first obstacle is that most of the time when people are inattentive, so part of the training, we ask them, so what is the most common consequence when you’re doing things and you’re in an inattentive state?

Sure.

Most people will say there’s an incident. Right. And I go, well, not really. When you’re inattentive, nothing happens.

Sure.

Because if every time you were inattentive you had an incident, you would teach yourself how to pay attention. Right?

Correct.

Most of the time when. When you’re inattentive and nothing happens, what you do as a human being is you repeat whatever it is you’re doing, like texting while driving. So, what that means is that you’re continually embedding inattentive habits. So that’s what you end up with. You end up with a suite of inattentive habits. That sounds bad enough as it is, but it’s even worse because you’re not even. You don’t even know that that’s what you’re doing. So, it’s a huge blind spot for the person, it’s a huge blind spot for the supervisor, and it’s a huge blind spot for the leader. And what we know about human beings is that we do nothing about our blind spots because we don’t even know they’re there. That’s what we Call them. The first obstacle we need to overcome is to convince people that are a lot more inattentive than what they are. But the problem is that their brain doesn’t register inattention unless something new or different happens. Because unless something new or different happens, the conscious mind doesn’t come into play. Right. So, the first thing we get them to do is we get them to look for the causes of inattention.

So that’s the first practice technique. So, this is the whole thing about the neuroscience, is that there’s only one way to change, you know, your neural circuits, and that is through repetition.

Sure.

And what we know is that it’s far easy or far better to do five minutes a day for, then do an hour on Sundays. The rewiring happens when you’re asleep. So, when you’re asleep, what the brain does is that it detaches or it breaks up neural circuits that you’re not using and uses those, make connections with the ones that you’re actually using. So, if you’re talking about if you want to not do texting while driving. So initially what you consciously have to do is stop yourself from doing it.

Sure.

Right. So initially it’s a conscious thing. Right. But with enough repetition, it becomes automatic.

Sure.

And that’s the process that we need to take people through. So, we take people through. The first one is to convince them that they’re a lot more attentive than what they are. But. But, you know, whenever we do the training that we hear this a fair bit, they go, well, if I’m so inattentive, why is it that I’m still alive? Well, most of the time, inattention doesn’t lead to an incident. Maybe in a couple of. Couple of times in your life, you know, you could have been a meter or a second away from, you know, from fitting the gene pool. Have you got any of those examples? And most people have got more than a few. You. Right, right. So, I say to them, well, think about the poor guy that drove when he was fatigued and ended not surviving. Do you think that there was always a close call that made him aware before he had that fatal incident? Sure, he might have been. He may have been, but because he got away with it, he didn’t put any time and effort into changing. Right. So, we give people a technique to first and foremost convince themselves that they’re more inattentive than what they are.

Right.

Even if they improve, you know, even they acknowledge it, you know, 25 or 30% more, that tends to be enough for them to go, oh, maybe I need to do something about this.

Sure.

We give them a technique to deal with. Well, we go with the easier, the in the moment one first, which is impatience. So, things like rushing, frustration, you know, that kind of thing. We give them a technique to deal with fatigue because that’s kind of you can warning signs to fatigue. So, we teach them about what those early warning signs could be and which is the one for you. And then the third one, which is the more difficult one to deal with is complacency. Because when you’re doing stuff inattentive it just feels normal.

Yeah.

So, we tend to say to people, look, you can’t detect complacency. You have to look at what you do, decide what habits you may need to change and start practicing those new habits. And just to give you an idea of. And this is not; it’s not rocket science to identify which habits is that. Look before you move. Right. Look for the line of fire because if you see it, you can avoid it, but you don’t see it unless you look first. So, a lot of what hurts us we can actually see not everything, but a lot of what can hurt us we can actually see as long as we look for it. And most people are not very good at looking for it. If you have any doubts, Eric, go to the, the go to the, the nearest mall and look at how many people are looking at the mobile phones while they’re walking.

It’s crazy. And it’s getting worse. I’ve actually seen in some countries when I travel where the, they’re starting to change the lights for pedestrians at crosswalks to even be on the floor so that it, you can have a better chance of seeing it while you, you’re walking and texting. It’s scary.

So, it seems like we are, we kind of, we don’t want to help people. And this is what I think. I think that inattention is a modern-day problem that’s getting worse. But everybody wants to ignore it or they only want to deal with it just doing things around the person. And you can’t do everything around the person everywhere. So sooner or later it’s actually going to catch up with you. I think it’s far more efficient in the longer term to teach people what are the core causes of inattention and what can you do to be more attentive. I mean that’s what I do with my kids.

Right.

Nobody’s perfect. But you know, it’s far better to be a little bit more attentive than to be totally inattentive. And I don’t know about. About you, where you are, but I’m now starting to see people cross the road looking at the mobile phone.

Oh, it’s crazy. Yeah, it’s dangerous.

It’s not. I’ve never seen somebody miss a red light or miss a pedestrian crossing, but

I’ve had people walk into me because they were texting.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. So, when we were. When we were sort of. I mean, my kids now are in their 20s, but when they were little and to teach them how to cross the road, what we would say to them is that, look, I don’t care what the green man’s telling you to do. I don’t care what. I don’t know what you call them Lollipop ladies. You know, the ones that have a little sign, help people, Help. Help kids cross the road. At schools, we call them lollipop ladies. I don’t care what she’s telling you to do. I don’t care what your friends are telling you to do. Right. You look both ways before you go, and you continue to look both ways while you’re crossing until you get to the other side. Because I wanted to put them in a position where they could see it coming as early as possible because that gives them the most chance to get out of the way if somebody misses a red light or doesn’t, like, the lollipop lady tries to hit it or whatever. So, if you think about this as it applies not just at work, but also the people that you care about outside of work, I mean, it’s really worthwhile doing.

And a lot of the stuff that we do with people is we. Actually, the byline at the end of our presentations is take it home, bring it to work, take it home. Because they’re the most important people you are. Teach it to them and then bring it to work. And if they go home and they teach it, they’ve got to model it. And then when they come to work, they’re much better at the techniques that we try and teach them.

Your point around. Look before you move. I think I remember I had a guest earlier talking about the number of electrical contacts with wires above ground. Yeah, I can’t remember the exact number, but I think it was 20 times more per mile of cable versus the one that’s underground that you can’t see because there you are, you don’t see the hazard, you’re more concerned. But people walking in, touching, going up, a boom, hitting a wire is incredibly high. If it’s above ground where you should see it very similar to what you’re, you bring up.

Yeah. Look, if you can, you can look at a lot of behavior through this prism and all of a sudden start making sense.

Right. 

And really, I don’t know why safety is, does not want to understand what’s going on inside the worker’s head. I think it makes them feel good if you just sort of, if you, if you assume that you can just do things around the person and don’t get me wrong, I think that is the place to start. But once you start having good robust safety management systems and you’re doing a lot around the person, then there’s not a hell of a lot left that you have. You get into diminishing returns. What are you going to do next? Well, don’t do it faster, harder and for longer look at what can you do with the person because that is a resource. I mean your workers are your most valuable resource and yet we keep riding them out of the safety story. Doesn’t make any sense to me whatsoever.

Right. Fascinating story. I’d love to explore more on the neuroscience in a future episode. If somebody wants to get in touch with you, Christian, continue the conversation, learn more about some of the training programs you’ve talked about and about habitsafe. How can they get in touch with you?

Well, look, the easiest way is to go to our website, which is habitsafe.com au I live in Australia, so people sometimes forget the AU. That’s the easiest way. You can have a look at the kind of things that we do. And there’s also a contact page. So if you want to shoot me a message, then I can always sort of make contact and talk to them about what we do, how we do it and see if it’s for them. 

Perfect. Sounds good. Thank you so much for joining me, Christian. It’s been a very thought-provoking conversation.

Thank you for having me, Eric. I appreciate it.

Thank you for listening to The Safety Guru on C-suite Radio. Leave a legacy. Distinguish yourself from the past. Grow your success. Capture the hearts and minds of your teams. Elevate your safety. Like every successful athlete, top leaders continuously invest in their safety leadership with an expert coach to boost safety performance. Begin your journey at execsafetycoach.com. Come back in two weeks for the next episode with your host, Eric Michrowski. This podcast is powered by Propulo Consulting.

ABOUT THE GUEST

Cristian Sylvestre is a chemical engineer with a Master’s degree. He started his 25-year safety career in heavy processing, where he learned to think holistically about safety. His research shows that inattention is involved in 95% of incidents of all severities.

His work uses the discoveries of neuroscience to understand what really drives behaviour, how to minimise inattention, reduce errors, and prevent incidents everywhere, not just at work. He authored “Third Generation Safety: The Missing Piece” to help organisations understand the main causes of inattention and what can be done to help their people fail less.

For more information: https://www.habitsafe.com.au/

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Advocating a Safer Tomorrow: A Mother’s Mission to Make Workplaces Safer with Patrizia Cassaniti

Nov 27, 2025

Advocating a Safer Tomorrow: A Mother's Mission to Make Workplaces Safer with Patrizia Cassaniti

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ABOUT THE EPISODE

Join us for a deeply moving and powerful episode featuring Patrizia Cassaniti, a passionate safety advocate who transformed unimaginable tragedy into a mission for change. Patrizia recounts the heartbreaking loss of her son, Christopher, in a preventable construction incident caused by complacency and poor safety decisions. Through her story, she underscores the critical importance of putting workers’ safety first, fostering open communication, and creating a culture where workers feel empowered to speak up and know their safety concerns will be heard and respected. With passion and unwavering commitment, Patrizia challenges the production pressures so common in many workplaces and reminds us that every safety decision matters because everyone deserves to return home safely to their loved ones. Join us for this inspiring and heartfelt conversation about a mother’s mission to make workplaces safer and advocate for a safer tomorrow for all.

READ THE EPISODE

Real leaders leave a legacy. They capture the hearts and minds of their teams. Their origin story puts the safety and well-being of their people first. Great companies ubiquitously have safe, yet productive operations. For those companies, safety is an investment, not a cost for the C-suite. It’s a real topic of daily focus. This is the Safety Guru with your host, Eric Michrowski, a globally recognized ops and safety guru, public speaker and author. Are you ready to leave a safety legacy? Your legacy success story begins now.

Hi, and welcome to the Safety Guru. Today, I’m very excited to have with me Patrizia Cassaniti. She’s an international keynote speaker and a director and founder of Touch by Christopher Foundation. Patricia, welcome to the show. Very excited to have you with me today.

Eric, I’m very honored to be on your podcast. Thank you for having here today.

Absolutely. So why don’t we start with Christopher’s story? Because it’s quite touching.

Yes. So, I’ll start off pretty much in the beginning of Christopher’s life. Christopher was my second son. I have three beautiful boys, and Christopher was my middle. But there’s a special story behind Christopher’s birth. When I gave birth to Christopher, when I got to the hospital, there was no heartbeat. So, they thought that Christopher was actually going to be stillborn. But when he was born, he was screaming. Everything was fine. And even the pediatricians and the obstetricians were going, what on Earth happened? We don’t understand because there was definitely no heartbeat there. Christopher was born on the 27th of March 2003. Sorry, 2001. And I brought him home on the first of April around lunchtime. And when I reflected at the time when he died, he actually died on the first of April around lunchtime, 18 years later. When Christopher was born, obviously, thinking before I even went in to have him, with an emergency Caesar that I wasn’t going to have a child. So, for me, he was always a miracle child right from the beginning, from the moment he was born. He was very special throughout his whole life with family. A lot of people were drawn to him.

A happy, very happy person, never angry, always smiling, and was truly the light. Every time he would walk in any room, and as they say, a smile, he always smiled and made everyone so happy. So, he was my angel. He was my angel on Earth, and now he’s my angel for real. And growing up, my boys were very boys, very much typical boys. And in 2017, Christopher finished year 10, and he decided he didn’t want to go on to further his education in the last two years that we normally have. In Australia, we got to Year 12. He said, Mom, I want to get into construction. At the time, I was working as a coffee lady. I had my own coffee van, like a mobile one, and I would go around to all different sites and provide coffees, and I would provide lunches, smoker to all the workers. I got to know a lot of the workers personally, and I asked the form workers on that specific site to see whether they would give Christopher a trial, and they agreed straight away. The next day, when he finished his year 10, I had He did him up in his PPE, had his white card ready, which is the white card is what allows you to be able to work on job sites and high-risk work.

He came with me 5: 30 in the first morning and started his trial and absolutely loved it. Loved the camaraderie. He loved the outside, loved the job. Everyone on that side absolutely loved him because of his kind nature, the way he was. A lot of people were drawn to him. His bosses would come up to me to the coffee van, and they would say to me, Trisha, I don’t know what you’ve done, but he’s not your typical 18-year-old. He’s the best apprentice we’ve ever had. He truly made me proud, really did. A lot of trades would also come up to me, say, If Christopher decides to change, to do a different job, please send him our way because we’d love to have him as an apprentice. That’s the type of kid Christopher was, not just at work, but at home as well. Very helpful, very kind, beautiful person. On the 27th of March, like Actually, before his birthday, about a month before his birthday, we do a lot of water skiing. We used to borrow a boat to get onto the water. I was just sick and tired of seeing my kids on their Xboxes all the time and in their dark rooms.

I grew up water skiing. I said to my husband, I said, we really got to get these kids out. We started borrowing somebody’s boat and getting onto the water and teaching our kids how to water ski. In the first year and a half of Christopher’s working life, he had saved all this money and then went out and bought himself a boat. So absolutely proud of himself. It was about a month before he died. So unfortunately, we didn’t get to use the boat, probably put in the water once or twice before he died. So, it’s quite heartbreaking. And about five years ago, just before Christmas, that boat got stolen. But coming leading up to His birthday on the 27th of March of that year, where he had just bought himself a boat, he was already up in the clouds thinking, Wow. He’s not even turned 18, and he’s already got a massive wakeboard boat. As he turned 18, it was a Wednesday morning, 27th. We get into the van as per normal, go to work at the coffee van, but I hid a cake inside the van. I had everyone’s coffee done. Everyone went off to work, and I grabbed the cake, and I went into his lunchroom, and I called his boss and said, Go gets Christopher.

It’s his birthday today. So, they went and got him. But you can only imagine when he walked through those lunchroom doors and saw his mother with a great big cake, he was absolutely mortified. He thought, Oh, my God, mom. I said, what are you doing? You can’t do this. He goes; I’m working on a job site. I’m never going to live this down. I looked at him, I said, But you’re 18. I said, we have to celebrate. I can tell you now, it was a day that I never lived down. I can tell you now. That very first day, he also had loan papers ready because he wanted to buy a car that he’d put aside that was owned by one of the steelworkers that was on site. He had just bought himself a brand-new car and was selling his car. So, Christopher approached him, he says, Mate, I’ve just bought a boat. I’ve spent all my money. And can you wait until I turn 18 so that I can actually take this loan out to buy your car? Because I need a car now. And the guy looked at him and said, Are you sure?

What if you can’t get a loan? He goes, Then I’ve got this car, and I’ve got to keep it for you. He says, oh, no, please, please do. So, he did. Christopher had his loan approved that very morning. He bought the car, picked it up on the Friday, happy as Larry. Oh, my God. He was so happy. Then Saturday, he drove himself to work for the first time in his own car. That afternoon, when he came home, we celebrated his 18th birthday with family and friends. But the whole night was spent outside in the car, up and down the street, planning what he’s going to do to the car, and the things he’s going to put on it, and the places he was going to take it to because it was a high lux four-wheel drive, so you can take it on adventures. Then on the Sunday, he gets up, he looks at me and he goes, Mom, I’m so happy because now I’ve got my car to tow my boat. But there’s one more thing I’d like to do. I thought, Oh, my God, what’s that? Mom, I want my car to be fully sick.

I just looked at him and went, What? He I said, fully sick is very expensive. Now, the word fully sick is a car that has been done up to the max. new tires, new wheels, new snorkel, all these things to make this car look amazing. I looked at him and I said, In time. I said, you’ve just spent all your money on a boat. You’ve now bought a car on loan, and you need to save some money. He says, Yeah, I know. I said, Jim, tomorrow, I’m not coming to work with you. You can go. You’ve got your own car. Now, I’m going to stay home and clean up after his birthday. Monday morning, he wakes himself up, gets in the car, drives to work. At 12:20 PM, a nine-story scaffold that was two bays wide, collapses and crushes him to death. Everything Christopher aspired for, everything, gone. All because of a five-minute complacent decision that was made that took him for life. It breaks my heart because Christopher never got to experience life as an adult. He never even got the chance to have his first beer at the pub with his mates.

And his whole life taken from him over a choice, over a decision that should never have ever been made. And that decision was to remove to move every single tie that holds a scaffold to the building on a nine-story scaffold.

Unbelievable.

Yeah. It was just absolutely insane. And not only that, but the builder also decided to lift with a crane two pallets on every single level of that scaffold, making it overloaded by 18. 9 tons.

Wow, 18. 9 tons. That’s crazy. Yeah, 18. 9 tons. So, the choices and decisions made on that day were detrimental. There wasn’t even a mistake. It was all due to getting the job done. Two weeks prior, there was an Alamac there that was removed because it was costing too much money for the company to keep it there. And because they had a crane in front of that building that they had to put the bricks on the balconies, they decided they’ll use a crane to lift the bricks on top. The hardest thing is that Christopher and Carla, his supervisor, were actually working through lunch because as farmworkers, all they were doing was they were next to the scaffold, they weren’t even on it. They were forming up a planter box which had to be poured that afternoon. The place where that planter box was situated was actually an exclusion zone, so they shouldn’t even be there. But because they were working through lunch and everyone was in the lunchrooms, the builder said, just get it done. Just get it done now because everyone’s in their lunchrooms, no one’s going to disturb you. Get done. But two brick layers had just finished their lunch, and they stepped onto the ninth floor of that scaffold seconds before it actually collapsed.

It was a 26-year-old and a 64-year-old. A 26-year-old was the one that actually felt it move away from the building when he grabbed a 64-year-old man and pushed him onto the balcony ledge. And the whole scaffold has collapsed from underneath and then crashed in, Christopher and Khaled. Prior to the scaffold actually collapsing, there was scaffolders standing in front of it with their leading hand, absolutely mortified of the load that was on there, that they actually said, we need to stop the job. We need to get everybody off the podium now and remove everybody and get those bricks off the scaffold. But it was the actual leading hand that had that she’ll be right moment to say, It’s okay. We’ve already organized a forklift to take those bricks off the scaffold and onto the balcony ledge soon. Well, that soon didn’t come soon and there were 250 workers that worked at this site. And I can tell you know that’s 250 lives that have been changed so drastically. Because when tragedy like these hits, it doesn’t affect just the person that has been injured or died and their families. It affects everybody, coworkers, managers, the business, everything.

Over choices and decisions that were made that weren’t an accident. They’re incidents waiting to happen because of complacent decisions that are made that lead up to them. The way my son died was horrific. Absolutely horrific. I will never, ever accept what happened. This is why I do what I do. To go around workplaces. I do expos, whatever it takes for me to get in front of as many workers as I can to shift that complacent mindset, give them the courage to always speak up because no one should ever go to work and die. My son survived it for 20 minutes, and then he suffocated to death. And in that 20 minute, his supervisor, who was also crushed, and his injuries are so horrific that he wishes he died with Christopher. But he held Christopher’s hand for those 20 minutes, and he said, Trish, it’s not my pain. It’s not the fact that I can’t sleep anymore. The worst part of my life and living every single day, is hearing your son scream out your name, and there was nothing that I could do. This is so heartbreaking because it affects so many families over those incidents.

This one incident that has affected the company, it has affected the decision makers who made those decisions and choices, and the whole workers that were there that witnessed it. It’s just horrific. Absolutely horrific.

It’s a horrible tragedy. And story that really, like you said, this should never have happened. There’s no reason there’s so many signs that this was not okay from removing the ties to overloading it to working in an area that nobody should have been in. One of the themes that you bring up with audiences is this element that we’re all humans and also this element of needing to walk with workers. Tell me a little bit more about that.

Yes. So, when it comes to going to work, we got to understand that we spend most of our living time at work. Our coworkers, everyone at work is like family, okay?

Right.

Even as an owner, CEO, manager, it’s still a job, okay? It is still a job for them because they still have family at home waiting as a worker, it is a job. It’s a job for everybody for us to do, but we all must do it safely. We’re not robots, and I say this all the time. A lot of people, it doesn’t matter where you are in the It’s a shame. If we all come together and work together and listen to each other, things will synergistically work. When I say walk with the workers, it’s not about walking the talk or doing what you say as a manager or a leader. Everyone has safety protocols put in place. Everyone has to do the right things at all times. We have to provide workers with a safe working environment at all times. In the end, I always say it’s the worker that makes the last decision. They are the ones in the co-face, and they’re the ones doing the job. They are the experts. And as managers, they need to respect that. They need to respect that they are the expert at what they are doing. Sure.

Managers give the job and workers do it. So, communication is key. We can’t remove the human factor. We are going towards AI at the moment as well. So, a lot of things is done in AI. We’ve got to remember that AI has no emotions. It doesn’t know when someone is fatigued. Keep that human factor when it comes to high-risk work at all times. And when as a manager, the best thing I can say is walk with the workers because we are human. And no manager ever wants to have the task of having an incident happen on their watch and the task to have to go to someone’s house, knock on the door to let them know that their loved ones are coming home.

Right.

And unfortunately, a lot of managers have that hierarchy feel of, I’m your boss, you do what as I say. I’m not understanding if someone’s being put in danger and something happens, it actually affects them as well.

Of course.

The trauma, when an incident like this happens, it does affect you mentally. And you take this home, so it affects your families as well. So, let’s all be… Let’s understand, yeah, you might have that hierarchy, you might have that leadership role, but you also have to walk with workers to see what they are doing and listen to them. Listen to what they’re saying when they’re speaking up to say, I don’t feel right. But I also encourage workers to always speak up when something isn’t right, to stop convincing themselves that it is, because that is where tragedy leads, is as soon as we have that she’ll be right moment. I’ve done this a thousand times before. Oh, Jeff did it the other day, and it worked. Why shouldn’t it work for me? We can’t live on luck. We can’t live on having They’re locked behind us because one day it’s going to pinch. And those pinch points are like black snakes. They just strike. And when they strike, it’s You can’t go back. You can’t fix it.

The lead had the chance, heard from team members saying, doesn’t look right. And that’s a perfect example of what you’re talking about in terms of when people were Is speak up, which is already a beautiful thing because as you said, it doesn’t always happen. We don’t always get people speaking up the way we want to. But here they did. Didn’t feel right. There’s at least three things that were not right that day. But this element of it’ll be okay. I think you said she’ll be right. That’s very, very dangerous to not listen to people speaking up like this.

And can you imagine their lives today? They’ll never be the same. And I do feel for them because I know it’s not just me, myself, my husband, and my children that are suffering from this. I do believe that the people who made those choices and decisions on that day that caused the scaffold to collapse, lying their bed, staring at the ceiling saying, I should have, I could have. Well, I should have, I could have does not save lives. We must listen to each other and put human life, never risk human life or injury for any job. Agreed. And it’s just not on because in the end, it’s a job. We’re all a number. Even as a leader, you’re just a number. And you get replaced Because a job gets done with or without you. But family can never replace you. If you’re mentally scarred by something, your whole life changes, even as a leader. And you take that home with you. Your family can’t replace you because your mental health declines when an incident like this happens. So, choices and decisions is what we must know, recognize when we are being complacent. That is when we have to sit there and think, why did I say that to myself?

Why did I say she’ll be right? Why did I say, I’ve done this a thousand times before? It is then that we have to stop and evaluate.

Before. And I mean, I take through my journey and through my speaking engagements with workers, I take workers and managers on a journey with me to make them understand what it feels like to be in a tragedy. I show a video of the incident. I’ve created a reenactment of the whole day; from the moment my son gets up to moment that he dies. And then it’s followed by a real video of the aftermath depicting, obviously, the trauma of those 250 workers that come to try and rescue the sun. Now, that journey is in my hope that I’m the only tragedy they ever get to see to shift that mindset of them understanding the next time they have she’ll be right moment that they to really stop. Because unless you’ve been through tragedy or have witnessed tragedy, safety will never be in the forefront of your mind. And that is what I try to do through my speaking is to bring people on that journey and allowing them to understand that we are all priceless and we all have people waiting for us at home.

Right.

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Another thing I want to touch on is you talked about the pressure that was on the site from a financial standpoint, and this element of some form of production pressure shows up in many different incidents. It’s often a precursor for mistakes, for people to overlook things. And you made an interesting observation where we were initially talking about how in construction, there’s always some form of pressure. But you can control it because some job sites are able to control, they’re still able to deliver, and you don’t get these types of incidents. And in others, it permeates the entire site that we’re fouling behind. We need to catch up, and everybody starts making trade-offs. Tell me a little bit about how, from what you’ve seen, you can deal better with production pressure in a job site.

So, when it comes to time and money, as human beings, we lose that human factor because we are under that pressure of getting the stuff done so that we can get it done in time. And this is where things become robotics. Things, choices and decisions that are made aren’t based on safety anymore because they just have to get done. Sure. A lot of problems are that when you’re working outside, we have to deal with weather, we have to deal with rain, we have to deal with stops where they’re uncontrollable. These problems, unfortunately, do not add on to the end date. No one says that… We’ve had a whole week of rain where we’ve not been able to do anything. We need to add another week to the end date so that we can catch up. But that end date doesn’t ever change. Everything becomes time and money. We need to hurry. As soon as you start saying, we need to hurry, get this done, and everybody works on top of each other, things start happening, and you lose control. When you lose control of a situation, you’re not only just putting workers and yourself at risk, but you’re actually putting the business at risk.

Because when an incident happens, the business suffers, and so do the people. So, there is no point There’s no point in trying to push something that is inevitable. There’s no point. We need to start having maybe legislations, laws in place that says that if we have a big weather event or a natural disaster that has stopped us from working for a significant amount of time, that that time needs to be added to the end date, which never gets done. There’s always you come to the end date and people are going, oh, you’re going to have to pay extra because you’ve gone a day over. And you got to pay extra every single day that you go over. Of course, that’s going to put a pressure on each individual, workers, managers, the big guy is pushing, come on, we got to get this job done because we need to get paid. But what is the point? What is the point if something does happen and you die? Where’s the money going to go? It’s not yours. You’re not here. Or if you’re injured, what’s the money going to do for you? And as a business, you lose your business at times, depending on the size of your business.

An incident like this, you can shut shop and just say, That’s it. That’s it for me. And you could have been working on this job on your business for years and years and years. And it gets taken down within a matter of seconds.

In this case, the job site was closed for three months after.

It cost them millions, millions and millions. For what? A job? Seriously? If they just did the right thing, if they made those right choices and not stick to the problem of saying, she’ll be right, and understand that there are human beings that are involved, this would never have happened. Those buildings would have still been here, Christopher would still be here, and 250 workers wouldn’t be affected mentally.

I’d say the production pressure also; there’s a lot that can be done in terms of how an organization bids or prices or prepare us for a job. Obviously, it’s a competitive environment. So as long as somebody goes lower, that introduces new problems. But if people are realistic about timelines, we know storms are going to happen. We know it’s just going to be rain, there’s going to be weather environment. But it’s also how the leaders show up, because I’ve been to job sites, construction sites, where you sense the pressure. Everybody knows that you’re behind. And I’ve gone to other job sites that are equally behind, and people are just like, we’re going to do it right. It is what it is. We can’t change the outcome. We’re behind. We’re going to do the right thing. And so how the leaders show up, the leaders can still stress about it in the boardroom, but not bring it to the crew, to the crowd, to the There’s many different ways because it can be very different from one side to the other. Correct.

And this is where communication is very important. Ask the workers, what can we do to make things a little bit easier if there is that time pressure. Don’t put more pressure on them. Involve workers to make that communication and actually speak to the leaders of something that they can do to make better. When I go on sites and speak to workers, I’ll get someone say, I can’t do my job because I’ve got the brick layers on top of me doing something else, and I’m scared they’re going to drop a brick on me, so I’m not going to work here. And then when time starts to get underneath and people are losing that time, they start putting people on top of each other.

Which is what happened here. 

And the planning Yeah, the planning goes out the window. All the planning that is done prior goes out the window because of time management and money. Because they’re saying, we’re losing money. It’s taking too long. Okay, now let’s just put all these workers together, get it done all at once in one day when there is a process. Everything has a process. Everything has protocols. Certain workers need to finish before another worker steps in to continue. And when those time and pressures get involved, things go pear shape. And the only way to do this is communicate with the workers. Make them understand what’s happening. Let them be part of that communication because they know best.

Make sure they have a voice, right?

Yes. They know best. They are the experts. Some CEOs, some bosses, some managers feel like as though They are the experts, but they’re really not. That’s the reason why they employ workers with the expertise to get the job done. Otherwise, they would do it themselves. It’s about understanding the worth, the worth of the worker, and the worker understanding the worth of the manager being able to tell them what they have to do. But understand that if the worker says it’s not right, it just isn’t.

You have to listen to it.

It just isn’t. Stop convincing yourself that it is.

And that’s where the leaders set the stage, because it’s also multiple levels of leaders. You talked about the CEO, but multiple levels of leaders, but they have to set the stage in, my expectation is to walk with the workers, understand, listen, seek input, and make sure that they make the right choice, because ultimately, they have a huge amount of agency of influence around how the frontline workers show up and the decisions they make.

A hundred I’ve been to so many pre-starts where I watch the leaders do the pre-start with a piece of paper in front of their face and just read. Okay? It’s horrible. They’ll say, Conquer Concrete as you are today in building C, you have to get this done and this done, and then they go on to the brick layers, brick layers, you got to do the balconies today. They’re not even looking up. They’re just reading. I always believe as a pre-start and as a leader, you don’t read just off a piece of paper. You acknowledge the workers in the room. If you’re talking about the concertos, say, hey, concertos, where are you? Put your hand up. Get their attention because I can tell you now, every pre-start, workers aren’t in full attention of what the leader is saying. They’re too busy on their phones having their breakfast or whatever it is. As a leader, call out the concrete as they’re in the room and say, Concrete is where are you? Put your hand up. As soon as they put their hand up, they’ve been acknowledged by the leader that they’re in the room and then talk to them.

Speak to them, even though you may read it, read their task, but then look up to make sure that they’ve acknowledged that task, and then connect with them and then ask the question, Is there anything we can do for you that you felt that what I’ve just given you may not work. Can you please elaborate?

I like that.

Okay. And then 100%, that’s the human factor, right?

But it’s also touching on what you said. People have best laid plans. When you start having production deadlines, challenges, and so forth, in this particular case, they did plans that nobody would have conceived doing it at the front end, hopefully. And then somehow, they just execute without even questioning, saying, Have I missed something? Because Every person makes mistakes, including leaders.

A hundred %. And if we all understand each other, how much better would our workplace be? And how much better is your workplace going to flow when your worker feels important and belongs? Because they are acknowledged. Do not just read a task to someone. Acknowledge them before you go on to the next task in the next trade. And ask the question, just say, is there anything that I’ve missed? Or is there anything you need today to make your job better?

Another part I want to touch on is one of the pieces you talk about is the importance of stopping and speaking up. And I would say the leaders also have a role in this. In this particular case, two people stopped and spoke up. And so, there’s also an element of how we reinforce when that happens so that we encourage that this is what we want to see and listen to people. But that’s a hugely important piece on the job side because nobody is able to know everything. Nobody is able to wrap their head around everything and see every potential hazard. A lot of research shows that we miss half the hazards in front of us, even if we’re experienced.

It’s because we are too busy. It’s because we are trying to get the job done. We’ve been told to get it done. This is a time You have to do it in. You don’t even ask the questions anymore. We don’t even flinch when we’re being complacent. We don’t have that anymore. We forget, and we’ve been so good now at actually ignoring our natural instincts that tell us we’re in danger because we are so busy. We have butterflies in our stomach, which is our second brain. And those butterflies are an instinct, a natural instinct to give you a warning that something isn’t right. Yet we convince it, we squash it down, and don’t even think about it, go, no, I’ve just been told I got to get this job done. I’m sure it’s fine. I’ve got to get done. Then stuff happens. And when stuff happens and you really think about it and no one, unfortunately, realize the reason why until it’s too late that you think, It’s just a job. That’s all it is. It’s just a job. Why are you risking your life or injury to get the job done?

For what? For what? Speak up. 

Say no. Because you get replaced. The job gets done with or without you. Your family is waiting for you at home. And the only reason we go to work, doesn’t matter where you are in the chain, is for ourselves and our family. Full stop. That is the only reason why we work. No one chooses to be there. No one is fist-pumping that they’re at work. No matter where you are, we all We all have to go there. We don’t choose to be there. So, the key here is we all must respect, speak up, and always, always listen. Walk with each other.

Patricia, you have a very powerful story, a very, very tragic story around Christopher and what happened that day. You’ve used it from an advocacy standpoint to drive positive change from a legislative standpoint in Australia. And then the other part you touched on briefly is you try to really bring this to life with stories, videos, really connect with the audience. Tell me a little bit about both, so both the advocacy side and some of the results on that front, but also how you make this very real when you speak to employees in different organizations around the world.

So, the way I do that is obviously through my videos, the reenactment. I only produced a reenactment this year. It took me six years to get it done because it’s my It’s also my reality. I relive my son’s death every single day in the hope that I can shift mindset in every single worker. I can’t change the world. I’m not here to change the world. I’m here to change the individual that I impact through my story, through my videos, visual videos that actually show you the tragedy. If what I do doesn’t impact, I don’t know what will. I really don’t Because I don’t sugarcoat my son’s death. I tell it as it is. The reality of it hits home to every individual to make them realize why. What are they doing? Why are they risking life to get a job done? It’s not worth it. That is the key thing for me. With the legislation, obviously, after Christopher died, it took three and a half years for me to actually figure out and really find out what happened my son because I wasn’t privileged enough to know.

Even as his mom.

As his mom, I wasn’t privileged to know all the details because I had to go through court. So, it was sealed. And no, I was allowed to know until the court date. So, me sitting down in a courtroom and listening to the judge. And prior to the court starting, I was taken into a room by the prosecutor to give me a pre-warning and to tell me that there was no law in place that held anyone culpable for my son’s death. Well, that didn’t go very well down with me.

I’m sure.

And so, I educated myself. I went out. I got myself a certificate for in WHS so that I could understand the law and then tackle the government. And what I mean, I I called the government. I went in hard, and I fought for five years for industrial manslaughter to be introduced in our state of New South Wales. Every state started to get it in through all the tragedies that have been happening and the advocacy that laws in our WHS law needed to be changed so that people are held culpably. Because if I kill someone in a car, I go to jail. In Australian laws, we go to jail. There are no ifs, no buts. If your fault or not, if I kill someone on the streets, I go to jail. But if you killed someone at work, there was no penalties, none. There’s just a penalty for the organization. At the time, the highest penalty was $3 million. So, introducing industrial manoeuvrer, not only did we increase those penalties to $25 million for a category one offense, but also 20 years for people who are workers who are responsible for someone’s death, which brings in consequences when something isn’t right.

And when deliberate needs are done. And when you ignore it.

Yes. Yes. When you foresee a problem and you speak up and nothing is done about it, you are responsible for that person dying. No one goes to work intending on dying But no one also goes to work intending on killing someone either. But unless we put these consequences in place and let people understand that we all are responsible for safety, every single one of us, management to CEOs, to builders, to the actual workers. We are all responsible for safety, and we all need to work together. So yes, our laws did change. It took me a while to fight them, but these consequences needed to be put in place to stop people from doing the wrong thing because they just had to get the job done. Right.

And Patricia, if somebody wants to get in touch with you, would be interested in hearing about having you present to the organization, what’s the best way for them to reach out to you?

They can go on to my website Our website, which is https://www.letstalkaboutsafety.com.au/ That’s https://www.letstalkaboutsafety.com.au/ or they can also email me, which is [email protected]. I’m very easily found on LinkedIn as well. Just my name and touched by Christopher. If they Google my name Patrizia Cassaniti. I’m very much, very easily found on social media with LinkedIn as well.

Excellent. Thank you so much for joining me today to record this episode, for sharing Christopher’s story, as painful as it is to talk through. I really appreciate the time you took.

No, thank you for having me. And thank you for thinking of me to be on your podcast. So much appreciated. Absolutely.

Thank you for listening to The Safety Guru on C-suite Radio. Leave a legacy. Distinguish yourself from the past. Grow your success. Capture the hearts and minds of your teams. Elevate your safety. Like every successful athlete, top leaders continuously invest in their safety leadership with an expert coach to boost safety performance. Begin your journey at execsafetycoach.com. Come back in two weeks for the next episode with your host, Eric Michrowski. This podcast is powered by Propulo Consulting.

ABOUT THE GUEST

Patrizia Cassaniti is an international award-winning work health and safety advocate whose lived experience has become a catalyst for cultural change across Australia’s workplaces. In 2019, her 18-year-old son, Christopher, was tragically killed when a scaffold collapsed—an incident that was entirely preventable. Since then, Patrizia has dedicated her life to confronting complacency and inspiring workers to speak up for safety without fear.
Her presentations are raw, emotional, and unforgettable—reminding every worker why their family is the reason to work safe every day. Through her foundation, Touched by Christopher, Patrizia supports families who have lost a loved one at work, helping them grieve without the burden of financial stress.
Book Patrizia to deliver this powerful, life-saving message at your next safety event: [email protected] | +61 414 656 621
For more information: https://www.letstalkaboutsafety.com.au/

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