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 Jessi Beyer. She’s a crisis mental health professional. Jessi, welcome to the show. Very excited to have you with me today.

Thank you so much for having me. I’m excited to be here as well.

Let’s get started with how you got started in this space and really your passion, your motivation around it. Then we’ll get into why it’s so important.

Absolutely. So, my story started when I was 16, and my boyfriend at the time attempted suicide. He had texted me. He said, Hey, tonight’s the night. Can you come over and say goodbye? And I was like, well, I can come over and bring 911 with me. I can definitely do that. And so, I ended up calling law enforcement, calling 911. Law enforcement showed up, and he was safe. He was taken to the hospital. That story ends well. But the reason I bring this up is because there was a social worker that showed up with law enforcement. So, once they had made sure scene was safe and everything. She came in, she spoke to him for a little bit, and she handed me her card. And she told me, she’s like, hey, if you ever need anything, if you have a hard night, you can always give me a call. Understandably, that night was incredibly difficult for me. I mean, that was a teenager trying to handle life and death in a very real, very emergent way. And her card and her presence was just this little bright spot in the night for me. I did what any good 16-year-old does.

I took her business card, and I promptly I put it in the top bathroom drawer of my bathroom, and I never looked at it again. But what that card did and what that moment did was it planted this seed for me of, that was cool. I went to school, I studied psychology, undergrad, grad school. I found myself really drawn to the trauma and crisis side of the world as opposed to the private practice side of the world. I’ve always been that way. I was an EMT for a little bit. I worked in search and rescue for a little bit. I’ve always been drawn to more of those short-term interventions, a little bit of adrenaline, a little bit of crisis. That’s where I thrive. And as I was graduating grad school, I got this call from an organization that was like, hey, we’re standing up an infield crisis intervention program, and we want you to be our first, our first clinician. And I was like, oh, my gosh, I’d love to, because it was a thought in the back of my head of like, wow, wouldn’t it be cool if I could, blah, blah, blah?

But I didn’t really think it existed. And so, when they called me, I was like, I would love to. And I just had this full circle moment back to that business card in my bathroom drawer of, wow, this is funny how life turns out this way. So that’s my story. I’ve been working in this program for the past almost three years, which is really exciting to see it grow over those past couple of years. And it all started with a really, really, really terrible night in high school and a co-responder’s business card.

Wow, what a powerful story in terms of how you got started in the connection in life. We’re mostly talking to safety executives, leaders. This is a topic that’s sometimes not talked enough in the safety space. Huge levels of connections with safety. Sometimes mental health is passed on to a responsibility that belongs to HR versus safety, has to handle the safety events. Let’s start with a little bit about the stats. Why is it so important for organizations to be aware of mental health, suicide prevention, all those themes?

Mental health is something in the workplace that I think a lot of people, especially in the safety liability risk management side of things, they think it happens over there. It’s something that happens in homes, in parking lots, on sidewalks, but not in the workplace. Because when you’re working, you’re working, and you’re here to work, and you’re here to be professional, and you’re here to do all those things.

Wouldn’t that be simple? 

Wouldn’t that be so nice? I think if we actually sat down with ourselves, we would recognize that that’s not the case. It doesn’t quite work that cleanly. But a lot of people are like, well, I can focus on physical risk. I can make sure there’s no hazardous chemicals spilled everywhere. I can make sure that there’s barriers, so people don’t fall off of things. You can probably tell that I’m not a physical safety expert because I don’t know what those things look like. But people talk about those things. But what they don’t recognize is that how someone is in their own head is how they also show up at work. So, a few stats to put to this. Approximately 4% of Americans consider suicide annually. And this is a It’s an actual serious consideration, not just a fleeting thought, intrusive thought type of thing. Which means that if you’re running an organization of 100 people, you’ve had four folks that came close to dying in the last year. If you’re running an organization of a thousand people, you’ve had 40. That’s a lot of humans that are really, really struggling. When someone is having a mental health concern to the level of thinking, Maybe I should die, that’s going to affect how they show up in the workplace.

Another stat that is somewhat interesting related to this is that in the US, the cost of mental illness in the workplace to employers is over 500 billion per year. This is in absenteeism, this is in loss of productivity, this is in terms of health care cost, and this is in terms of lost life potential from premature death because of suicide or depression. I bring these stats up not to say that, oh, my gosh, we only care about it because it costs us money, but to show that this is not some little, tiny thing that a few people across the country struggle with. This is something that everyday humans, every day, bring into the workplace. And that’s why it’s so important that safety managers, risk management liability, understand that because their people are struggling. I was talking to a potential client one time, and I just cold-pitched him on LinkedIn like we do. And he responded, and he’s like, well, we don’t have any mental health concerns in our organization. And I was like, okay, you have 500 people. I didn’t say this. I did not this. This was just in my head. I was like, you have 500 people on your team.

Your people are probably struggling more than you know if you’re the type of leader that thinks that they’re not struggling at all in a team of 500 people. So, food for thought for folks that are running organizations of any size, but especially organizations where those 4% statistics are going to stack up into meaningful numbers of humans. It means it’s a challenge in your workplace, even if you don’t think it is.

One thing I would add as well is if you think about what you just You mentioned the 4% considers suicide every year, a lot of safety requires a team member to have focus on task, to have attention on the work they’re doing, to be looking at risks, mitigating those risks in the work environment. If you’re not well, you’re not there in the moment present assessing all these pieces, your awareness of the risk in front of you may dramatically change.

Absolutely. It absolutely could. And that’s something where we start to see not necessarily deaths in the workplace, but accidents in the workplace that could have been prevented. If we think about this at a super, super basic level, depression as a mental illness slows everything down. Anxiety as a mental illness speeds everything up. So, if you think of a time in your life where you’ve been super anxious about something, maybe not to a clinical level, but even just in-laws are coming over, right? And you’re like, oh, my God, we got to clean the house. We got to do this. We got to do that. All these things are going on. You get a little bit You’re physically shaking a little bit, and maybe you spin around in the kitchen too quickly and knock a cup off the counter. This is a very, very mundane example, but now extrapolate that to a high-risk workplace. You spin around and knock a chemical off the counter because you’re anxious and you’re panicked about this and you’re thinking about this, and maybe it does rise to a clinical level. That’s not good from a physical safety and risk management perspective.

Conversely, on the depression side of things, everything’s slower. It’s harder to do things, to have the motivation to do things. And so now we’re moving through the workplace in a fog. We’re thinking that we’re not connecting with our coworkers. We’re not having those… I’m putting unnecessary in quotes because it’s like, what conversations can I take off my plate to reduce mental load? But we’re not having those conversations with colleagues about, hey, did you do this? Did you check this? Let me double check this. Again, that’s where we start to see these accidents in the workplace. I’m, of course, not saying that every accident in the workplace is caused by mental illness. That’s way too much of a stretch. But those types of concerns of mental health challenges of depression, anxiety, suicidal ideation, those can have very real translations into increased accidents in the workplace.

Are there some sectors that introduce more risks? Because one of the things that I’ve historically heard is a lot of the fly-in/fly-out type of operation where there isn’t necessarily stability in the home environment because you’re gone for potentially a week or two weeks at a time, more at risk. Certain types of professions, like construction where you could be on the road for extensive periods of time, also increase the risk? Are there some other industries like that that would have maybe a higher risk around suicide or mental health challenges?

Absolutely. This is such a good question. And to answer this fully, I’m going to zoom out and look at this from a societal lens. So, yes, certain professions are definitely at a higher risk. Broadly speaking, your high trauma careers, so your military first responder types, those are going to have higher rates of mental health challenges, specifically suicide, as well as a lot of your more blue-collar type professions. So, construction is consistently at the top of that list of professions that have high risk of suicidal ideation and suicide attempts and suicide deaths, everything on that spectrum, as well as a lot of your food type industries, your agriculture, your forestry. A lot of those blue collar, traditionally lower wage professions are the ones that have high suicide rates. On the other end of that spectrum, your finance, your business, things like that, they have generally a bit lower suicide rates. And when I’m referencing higher and lower, it’s in reference to the national average. Sure, exactly. So, the national average is measured as per 100,000 people, higher or lower than that. It’s what we’re talking about here. And there’s some different professions that are weighted by genders.

So, it’s like, male of this profession has a higher suicide rate than female of the… Things like that. But in general, those are the trends. And if we zoom out and look at why, you started hinting that. But in order to have a full happy, healthy life, in order to be a fully healthy human, we look at not just what is your physical health or even what is your mental health, but we look at social determinants of health. We look at your social relationships. We look at your financial stability. We look at your ability to keep a roof over your head. We look at all of these different things. And it’s interesting because I took a class recently on suicide forensic autopsies, which is basically the practice of if someone passes away, likely suicide, doing an investigation into the few months before their death to learn about what is contributed to that death and how organizations or families or societies can change things to prevent similar deaths in the future. Really, really interesting. But we spent six hours talking about all the different risk factors for suicide. And if I had to sum it up in one sentence, the one sentence would be, the worse your life is, the more likely you are to consider suicide.

And so, in a lot of these professions, we see things Exactly like you were talking about. Inconsistent social relationships because you’re constantly changing crews, changing jobs, moving here, moving there. We see some financial instability. You have periods of I’m working a ton. There’s a ton of construction. Oh, God, I can’t find a job. Now I’m on unemployment. Now I’m worried about how I’m going to pay my bills. I’m getting food from the local organizations that are giving it away instead of being able to buy it. Maybe I can’t pay my rent. Maybe I start to cope with those things by using substances more than I should. It’s all connected with how these things turn into a downward spiral. And then if you look at someone’s life and you see homelessness and you see addiction and you see maybe strained relationships in the marriage because they’re stressed about work, all of these things compile into what could be a suicide attempt or self-alternation or depression or anxiety or all these different things. And so, it’s more than just saying, Oh, shame on you. You work construction. It automatically means you have a higher likelihood of dying by suicide.

But it actually means, hey, these professions come with certain social and societal risks, and all of those things together correlate into higher suicide risks. And the last thing I’ll say is that for those of you that are listening that work in safety, recognize that the professions that I just named are often the ones with robust internal safety departments because of the physical risks as well.

Correct. That’s exactly where I was going to go.

Yeah, exactly. Take it away, Eric. But yeah, that was the point I wanted to make there.

No, I think it’s a great observation because the industries you mentioned are the industries that typically have higher physical risk. It’s not the accountant; it’s not the lawyers that typically are going to have a serious injury. It can obviously happen. But those are the industries that have more robust safety cultures, generally more risk awareness. But not necessarily addressing the full spectrum of the mental health element.

Yeah, absolutely. I think that that’s an opportunity for change. Risk is a whole human. Social determinants of health, it’s a whole human. How do you take care of your whole people. It’s not just the physical risk. It’s not just, hey, let’s make sure someone doesn’t accidentally chainsaw their leg off. But it’s also, how do we make sure that they are taken care of on the inside as well? Cool.

Maybe let’s talk about some of the existing interventions that we see in many organizations. Let’s look at some of the challenges or shortfalls to be aware of with them.

Absolutely. I want to start by saying that any organization that is doing anything at all to address employee mental health deserves a round of applause. This is by no means a critique on, well, shame on you, you’re not doing enough. This is just an evaluation of how some of these things work. One of the most common ones is what’s called an EAP, so an Employee Assistance Program. And it is, broadly speaking, there’s different formats, but it is a hotline or a website that you can access that provides short term resources for different things. So, you can get a couple financial counseling sessions. You can get a couple mental health therapy sessions. They can refer you to some other resources Some EAPs will have monthly trainings. We recently had one on buying your first home, so how to navigate that whole process. So, it’s like a miniature two one, a miniature location where people can go and get resources for things that they’re struggling with. But the challenge with EAPs is, well, actually a couple of different things. But one, their employer provided, and so confidentiality is a concern. EAPs are in theory confidential. They should not be telling your employer that, oh, they took financial counseling from us, or, oh, they took mental health counseling from us.

But there’s always that concern, especially in organizations or professions where there’s a culture of, I’m strong, I don’t need it, or maybe even the very real risk of, if my supervisors find out that I’m struggling with my mental health, they’ll bench me, they’ll fire me, they’ll demote me. All of those things in certain professions are very real risks, unfortunately. And so, there’s that concern of, okay, well, I’m calling this number that my employer gave me. I don’t want this getting back to I don’t want this getting back to them in any fashion. So, there’s that concern related to confidentiality. But there’s also the concern about a true connection to the resource that’s being provided. Three therapy sessions, great. Love it. Any person getting in the door of therapy is amazing. But in order to really have positive impacts from mental health counseling, you need that strong therapeutic relationship with the person that you’re providing. With an EAP, it’s usually very short-lived, and there’s usually not a huge variety of providers or even the opportunity to choose which provider that you’re working with. I’m sure there’s an EAP out there that’s going to comment on this and be like, well, we can do that, and that’s amazing.

But for the vast majority of them, it’s a pretty limited system. And research has consistently shown that the quality of the therapeutic relationship is even more important when it comes to positive outcomes from therapy than the modality of therapy or the clinical skill of the provider. So, this isn’t just, oh, it’s nice to like your therapist. It’s there are actually measurable clinical outcomes from having a positive relationship with your therapist. And then EAP simply doesn’t provide that for most people. So better than nothing, but also something to consider that, hey, maybe this isn’t doing quite what we think it is, and we can’t just check the box of, Good. Mental health’s solved. We have an AP. The other resource that I see a lot are flyers for the crisis line. So, the National Suicide Prevention Crisis Line is 988. It works just like 911. It’s a 24/7 free resource that you can call. It is completely confidential. All of their clinicians are bound by HIPAA. So, it’s not something that me, as your employer, could call and say, hey, has Eric called 988 lately? They’d play down and be like, I don’t know who Eric is.

I’ve literally never heard him in my life. I know this because I’ve had to handle some of those calls. Yeah, no, it’s a really, really phenomenal resource, and I absolutely love it. The challenge with 988 is that it is a reactive resource. So, it requires the person in crisis to say, I’m in crisis. I’m going to reach out for this resource. And as we just talked about in a lot of these professions, there’s that culture of, I’m okay, I’m okay, I’m okay, I don’t need help. What we really need instead is, yes, we need an EAP. Yes, we need to refer people to the crisis line. But we need to go upstream a little bit more and look at how do we turn our organization into a culture of care within itself, where I can look at you and say, hey, I’m noticing something. You’ve been late, you’ve knocked over a few things, you just look sad. Maybe don’t say it like that, but you’re recognizing some of these things and saying, hey, are you okay? I’m going to check in with you. And not only do I have this skill to recognize when you might need a check in, but I have this skill to know how to handle that check in and what to say, how to have that conversation and where to send you afterwards, which is where we talk about EAP-988. 

But we need to come a little bit further earlier in the system than that to really get people before it turns into a crisis.

Great observations on that one. Another thing on the EAPs that I’ve often heard from frontline team members is I’m calling somebody on a phone that’s obviously in an office in a big city who has no understanding of the work that I do, and they’re struggling to connect with me and my specific challenges. That element also changes because if you speak to a lot of… In the aviation space as an example, often they’ll have something that’s more in tune with what you’re talking about, where you’re talking to somebody who understands the space. Maybe they were a pilot before they understand the environment. And so, it becomes, I’m talking to somebody who gets me, which also helps.

It helps so much. Yeah. And here’s another plug for the 988 Crisis Lines. They do have some specialized options out there for certain professions. So, there’s hotline specifically for first responders. There’s hotline specifically for military service members. In Washington, where I live, there’s a hotline specifically for members of indigenous communities, where it’s staffed entirely by folks of indigenous backgrounds. I don’t know about hot lines for construction or things like that, but there are definitely hot lines for medical professions. There’s a hotline specifically for sexual assault survivors. All of these ways of crunching down the community into these are a group of people that can understand what I’m going through. That’s phenomenal. And so, I love those unique crisis lines that are out there for things like that.

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You touched on this element of culture of care, and I’d love you to double click a little bit more on that in terms of what is this culture that you’re trying to build? How would you go about it? Because it sounds simple in many ways, but it’s not as simple as to say, Are you okay? Tell me a little bit more.

Absolutely. It’s simple, but it’s not easy. I’ll say that. It’s not a complex process, but it does take buy-in and time and training in order to make something like that happen. When I say culture of care, what I mean is that most employees, especially if you’re working overtime, especially if you’re working shift work, you end up spending more time with your coworkers than you likely do with your family at home over the course of your working years. And so, what that means is that hopefully you have some pretty strong relationships with the people at work, though not always. But it also means that they are going to be the ones that notice some of these signs and symptoms if they are trained to before your family might or before you yourself It’s another touch point. It’s another opportunity to reach out and connect with someone before whatever they’re struggling with turns into a crisis. And so that’s what I’m talking about with the culture of care is how do we build that entity to where it’s not, I come in, I clock in, I do my work, I go home. But it’s, I come in, I clock in, I see Eric crying in the corner, I check in with Eric, and I see how Eric’s doing, and I connect Eric to a better resource.

That’s what we’re trying to build, is how do we take care of each other? And it’s not It’s not just, oh, I am the HR person, so therefore, I am now the person that everyone comes to. That’s great, but that’s a huge load on you for one person to try to manage the mental health of the entire organization. It’s how do we get all of us to do that? It’s not one person for everyone. It’s one person for one person. And so that person has someone for them. And it’s this spider web that we’re trying to connect people in. And so, what I really tell people and what I teach people is what I’ve designed as my life model of prevention. And it’s an acronym, L-I-F-E. And I will tell you, I spent entirely too much time trying to come up with a relevant acronym for this.

So please be- But it’s a good acronym.

A lot of work that went into that. But our life model here. So, our life model is four steps, and I’ll high level it. Eric, we can break it down if you have specific questions there. But this is really everything that I learned in grad school, everything that I do in the field, condensed into four simple steps that anyone can use to interact with someone in crisis. The L of this model is listened. And bear with me, because people who hear active listening usually are like, oh, for the love of God, please not again. We don’t need more fluffy stuff. Or they’re like, okay, this is really cool. And I will tell you, in my current job, I do crisis work. I’m in the field. I’m also a negotiator on our SWAT team. And the whole skillset that we use when it comes to diffusing those really, really high-risk situations and convincing someone to walk out of the house and get arrested is active listening. Sure. So, this is not fluffy. This is not, oh, show them you care. This is very tactical. Here’s how to phrase this sentence when they say this.

That’s how much we’re breaking it down in the L of that life model. Our I, F, and E of the life model, those are specifically to someone who might be considering suicide. So, we do all the active listening. We understand their story. They feel really heard and understood and validated. And then we move into the I, which is inquire. This is where we ask if someone is considering suicide, and we do it very calmly, very directly. No wiggling around it because we’re uncomfortable about saying the word. This is also the place where if they say yes, we do a very, very basic risk assessment to understand if this is a, I can handle this situation, or an, oh, my God, I need to call 911 situation. Very, very basic risk assessment there. Sure. In our F of the life model, this is forming a safety plan. So historically, 10, 20 years ago, we used safety contracts, which is essentially if I was feeling suicidal and Eric was my therapist, we would both sign a literal contract, like a piece of paper that said that I would not kill myself. And understandably, that really didn’t work super well.

And we unfortunately had to lose a lot of people to recognize that me living out of obligation to a piece of paper that I signed with Eric is not fantastic. And so, what we have now are safety plans. Safety plans are a collection of resources that a person in crisis can use the next time that they’re in crisis in order to get them over that hump of the crisis into a longer term resource, whether that’s making it to their therapist appointment in a couple of days, whether it’s waiting until there’s a bed available at inpatient, whatever that is. So, there’s actually things that they can do, people they can connect with and resources that they can engage with on that safety plan. The last step of our life model, the E, this is eliminating lethal means. Lethal means is just the fancy term for what they’re going to use to try to kill themselves with. And so, we’re not trying to do perfect lethal means restriction and take away every single possible thing that someone could use to end their life. But we’re trying to pull away some of the big ones and create time and distance between when they’re having that suicidal thought and when they could act on it. 

This ties in well with the safety plan because most suicidal crises, really, really acute, I’m going to go jump off the building type of suicidal crises, are actually quite short. It’s a couple minutes to maybe a day or two is when those really, really, really acute crises last. And so, we with the safety plan and with the lethal means restriction, we’re trying to see if we can keep them away from that method long enough for that crisis to pass. So, to give a concrete example of this, if someone is considering using a firearm to end their life, and the firearms is loaded safety off in their unlocked nightstand drawer, all they have to do is open a drawer and pull a trigger if they’re in a crisis. But if the ammo was completely removed from the house and the gun is in the safe in the basement, and only their partner has the code to that, then they would have this thought about ending their life. They’d have to call their partner, get the code, get the gun out of the basement, put on pants, drive to the store, buy ammo, drive back home, and then pull the trigger.

And with all of that time, that gives it space for that person to metabolize the crisis, and hopefully for their partner to step in and say, hey, honey, why do you need the gun safe code? So, there’s opportunities there for that path to reverse. And that’s what we’re trying to do with lethal means restriction. So, all of these things, it can sound complicated. It can sound overwhelming when I’m saying this right now. And I’m not trying to turn anyone into a therapist. If you’re feeling like this is too much for you to handle, sit down with the person and just listen. Forget the I, the F, and the E. Call 911, call their therapist. Call the crisis line. That’s what they are trained to do day in and day out. But if you can do the listening really, really well, if you can inquire well, confidently and calmly, and you can connect them to resources and distance them from what they’re thinking of using, you’re phenomenal. That’s amazing. You probably just save that person’s life. And so those are the skills that I’m trying to instill in these communities and in these organizations, especially those that, like we talked about previously, statistically have that higher likelihood of having folks die by suicide.

Sure. And fairly straightforward in terms of the steps. What I liked about when you talked about culture of care, and safety is also this reference of actively caring. Really, if I know your baseline, if I get to know how you are every day, then I can also spot when somebody’s a little bit off, different, something’s bothering them at that point in time as well. It connects very, very nicely to what you’re talking about on the life side in terms of the life model. Tell me a little bit more about how you go about it in organizations because you obviously are trying to train lots of people in work environment, not some HR person far away, but different people in the work environment. How do you go about doing it? What has worked well in terms of those interventions?

Absolutely. I just want to comment really quickly on what you said previously just this moment ago, because I think that this culture of care is not just, hey, let’s proactively take care of each other, but it also informs how we reactively respond to problems. If someone is having more physical accidents, they’re knocking over more stuff. I just keep coming back to that example, but it’s an easy one to use. They’re knocking over more things. They’re late a couple of days in a row. Their frequency of calling in sick has increased over the past period of time. Instead of you as a leader or you as an administrator sitting down with them and saying, we got to put you on a performance plan. We got to fix these issues. We got to do this, that, and the other thing. Instead of starting there, start with this life conversation. Because for someone to go from a model employee to, oh, my God, they’re barely making it through the door every day, something changed in in that person’s life, meaningful in that person’s life. And that is an opportunity for you to start with, Are you okay? Talk to me human to human.

You’re not in trouble. This is not going to be disciplinary. What’s going on? And start there. I’m not saying don’t have discipline. Because some people make performance plans and all those things but start with that culture of care. That’s really important to start with. So, in terms of what I actually do within organizations, the first question that I ask when I’m speaking to leaders that are like, hey, we want to train our people in this. We want to understand this better. I ask them not who are your managers, but I ask, who are the people within your organization that your people already go to for support? Maybe that is the HR department. Maybe it’s the second-tier level. So, I work with a lot of law enforcement. I do a lot of law enforcement training. And oftentimes it’s the sergeants, which is like one or two steps up from patrol. It’s not the captains, the lieutenants, the command staff. It’s the one level up. So, I want to sit down with leaders and understand who within your organization is already fielding these types of emotional pleas from people. Because those are the people that we want to start with.

If I’m coming into an organization that has a thousand people and I’m like, let’s train all of your people, they’re going to be like, we can’t take a thousand people off the front lines to come sit in this training. It’s not going to work. So who are these people that are already those cornerstones of the emotional structure of the organization? And then we’re going to train them. And everyone has been through a million and one different trainings, all the online, on demand, mandatory, click the button as fast as you possibly can to get it over with type of trainings. And that’s not what we do. We come in, we are in person, and we do a lot of roles playing and activities and scenarios. And I’m not just saying, oh, I’m going to pretend to be a person in crisis. I mean scenarios where I’m literally sobbing my eyes out in the front of the room, and we have to work through this together, and we have to practice those active listening skills. And so, what this does is it obviously is way more engaging, but it also gives folks an opportunity to practice these skills before it’s an actual crisis.

The last thing I want to have happen is teach you this amazing life model that you probably fell asleep through half of it because you’re bored out of your mind just sitting there listening to me talk for 2 hours and then say, go forth and conquer. And you’re like, well, I vaguely remember she said something about a reflective statement, but I have no idea how to use that. I’ve never done it before, and now I’m trying to talk my colleague off the roof of the building. We don’t want to have that happen. And so, we’re looking at how do we implement all of this in a way that is actionable and trainable, and people actually get something out of it. And so, we come in, we have these training sessions, we have these scenarios, we have these discussions with leadership of more from a consulting perspective of how do you change this organization? Do you want to build a peer support team? Do you want to find an EAP that actually works? Do you want to create a literal space within your organization where people can go to have these hard conversations? Because doing it in the lunchroom with everyone walking by is probably not the best idea. 

We look at the organization as a form, again, those social determinants of health and say, what can we do to fix this problem? The last thing I’ll add as well is I briefly touched on this earlier with the suicide forensic autopsies. I’ve had a few clients that I’ve worked with where they have tragically lost someone to suicide. And everyone is scrambling, emotionally, logistically, professionally. And so, we’re able to come into organizations and do those autopsies and say, hey, as an organization, here are some things to think about, here are some things to potentially actually change. I want to be very clear with that, I guess, service offering. It is not to point fingers. It is not to point fingers and say, well, this is your fault that your employee died. It is not about that. It is saying, how do we take this absolute tragedy of an instance and make sure that it doesn’t happen to anyone else? Sure. That’s really the lens that we approach that with. So, variety of different options, but the base of it is instilling these skills in folks in a way where they actually feel confident in using them and have some fun along the process.

Because, again, we don’t need another online self-paced, just click the button type training.

So, can the people that are trained, can they be peers? If it’s a unionized environment, I can imagine sometimes it’s a union rep who’s the one that people turn to. Is it always leadership type roles?

Not necessarily. When I say, hey, who are the people that your people are coming to? A lot of times it’s someone with absolutely no formal leadership role. It’s the janitor sometimes because they’re always there and they’re always seeing stuff and they’re part of that community and they recognize people. So, it doesn’t matter a leadership or not. And to your point about peer support, that is my dream, to have clients that say, okay, here are 5, 10, 15 people that people always come to. We’re going to put them through this training, and then we’re going to turn them into a formal peer support team. So how do we structure that? How do we give them access? How do we do this? How do we do that? And then it’s not just, Cool, the people know the thing, but it’s the people know the thing, and there’s actually a structure that other employees can engage with when they’re looking for that level of support. So I am all for people extrapolating this training into a formal peer support team that lives in perpetuity and that provides that legally protected confidential conversation for people when they’re looking for something.

To round this full circle back to our EAP conversations, there’s that concern of, well, I don’t really know this person. I don’t have relationship with them. They don’t understand my profession. All of those very valid challenges within EAP. And that’s what an internal peer support team or even just a culture of care in and of itself can fix. You know these people. They know you. They know your profession. They understand what it’s like. There’s our ready that baseline level of trust, which makes this whole life intervention just a million times easier from there.

And I’ve definitely heard of organizations that have done that with peers, and it really, really rave reviews in that regard because people feel more comfortable sometimes talking to somebody who does exactly the same work as them who understands the work in some cases, even that went through similar challenges. It could be drugs, alcohol, could be mental health, and then just having that recognition of somebody who understands their job, their role. Then the union as well. If you’ve got a good partnership with the union, sometimes that union rep can be also the person if they’re speaking the same language, doing similar actions.

Yes, absolutely. I’ll just add as well, if you leader are thinking, Hey, I want to put together a peer support team, I cannot instill this enough in you that it is not the people that you think are the most emotionally literate or the best at intervention that should be on the peer support team.

That’s a good point.

It needs to be the people that your people think are the most emotionally literate and the best at mental health that need to be on this peer support team. I’ve worked with organizations where I’m looking at the team and I’m looking at the people, and there’s this grumpy old dude in the corner who doesn’t want to be here and wants nothing to do with what I’m talking about. And then we find out later that he’s the team dad that everyone goes to. And so, it’s like, I want that person on the peer support team. So, you as a leader, again, it’s not about what you think or what you want or who you necessarily would trust. It’s who your people trust. Just that framing, if you take away nothing else when it comes to peer support team creation, take away that framing.

Jessi, thank you so much. Really good insights, ideas. I think it’s something that a lot of safety professionals really need to think about as to how does that fit into my safety program? If it’s within HR, how do I partner with HR to have adjacent goals around, make sure that we’re bringing this topic forward, not only just for the suicide prevention elements that you talked about, but in terms of even just directly from a safety standpoint, there’s a huge connection. If you’re not well, you’re not going to perform as safely as you possibly could in the tasks that you’re doing. So, Jessi, if somebody wants to get in touch with you, what’s the best way to do so?

Absolutely. Well, thank you for having me. This has It’s been an awesome conversation, and I’m excited for your folks to get their hands on it. I am on LinkedIn. Feel free to shoot me a message on LinkedIn. If you’re like, yes, I’m bought in. Let’s do this. I want to make sure that my people are protected with their mental health as well. Shoot me a message. I’d be more than happy to have a conversation with you. I offer free consultations related to suicide prevention where we can look at your organization, what are the risks, what’s your industry doing right now related to this, and how can we move forward there. So, questions, if you want to get started, just find me on LinkedIn, and I’m happy to have those conversations.

Awesome. Thank you so much.

Take care.

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.