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  • Barton McMillin | How to Know When Safety is Catching

    Barton McMillin | How to Know When Safety is Catching
    Oct 14 2021
    All it took was a single industrial safety class for Barton McMillin to realize a career in safety was right for him — particularly because it didn’t require sitting behind a desk 24 hours a day. “Things that I was learning in the safety class, I could apply during my normal day of work,” Barton, who maintained a job throughout college, says. “So it was like, hey, this stuff's making sense and it's interesting. And I couldn't say that about a lot of the other classes that I was taking.”In this episode of the No Accident podcast, presented by TRUCE, we hear from Barton, who’s worked in the industry for more than 25 years and currently serves as the Vice President of Environmental, Health, & Safety at Swedish multinational telecommunications company Ericsson. He discusses why engagement with a safety culture is a great measurement of a company’s success, why it’s important to think of safety in the proactive sense rather than simply compliance, and why safer employees are more lucrative for the business.“I am the safety guy, but I'm also here to help the business,” he says. “And helping the business is to make sure that the business understands what risks we're taking and how it's affecting our people.”He also explains why a good safety professional is someone who genuinely cares about their employees’ safety inside and outside of work rather than simply being focused on productivity and how much money an injury could cost the company. Barton believes in expanding our definition of safety to include other elements of an employee's wellbeing, such as mental health. Especially in the past year and a half, he’s noticed that the pandemic brought everyone to a new level of stress that inevitably affected safety. But it’s important to overcome the stigma around mental health in order to address these stressors in the workplace. “One of the things I think that gets overlooked in the safety world is the wellbeing of people,” he says. “Fatigue and mental wellbeing is probably an associated cause with 90% of all injuries and incidents.” Featured Guest👉 Name: Barton McMillin👉 What he does: As the Vice President of Environmental, Health, & Safety at Ericsson, the Swedish multinational networking and telecommunications company, Barton uses his more than 25 years of experience in the safety field to ensure his employees are buying in to his proactive, engagement-focused safety approach.👉 Company: Ericsson👉 Key quote: “Business is important, but people are as well. And they can't go without each other.”👉 Where to find him: LinkedIn Safe Takes⚠️ Safety isn’t just the recording of incident rates. It’s important to follow OSHA and report injuries, but Barton notes that there’s a whole other proactive element to safety that every company should emphasize in its safety culture. What can you do now to prevent injuries from happening in the future?⚠️ Engagement is a great measure of the success of your safety culture. An engaged employee, especially an employee whose boss is asking them about their concern regarding safety for themselves and their coworkers is an employee who’s much more likely to buy into the safety culture and think proactively when it comes to being safe. ⚠️ You need safe, healthy employees to have a lucrative company. Good safety leaders, Barton believes, ensure they’re not only worried about productivity metrics, they’re looking at the larger picture of who safety protocols affect. “Without the people, you don't get the numbers. You don't get the productivity,” he notes. And keeping people safe includes checking in on mental health, especially in the COVID-19 era. Resources⛑️  Incident rates –– Although Barton notes that they’re not the only thing to focus on as a safety professional, it’s important to know how to compute a firm's incidence rate. ⛑️ Mental health during the pandemic — This Kaiser Family Foundation brief explains the implications of COVID-19 for mental health and substance use. Barton believes all safety professionals need to connect these dots in order to check in on their employees/make sure increased stress isn’t making them less safe. Top quotes from the episode:“That's a common thread, they (his past employers) really care about their employees and they want to do the right thing, not just on a safety level, but just generally speaking. And I think that's an attribute for companies with a strong safety culture.”“Compliance is the foundation. If that's all you're ever talking about, then you're just not getting it. The stuff that they really need to be talking about is the prevention side of it. What are the things that we can do to prevent injuries, incidents from happening?”“If you can measure the amount of engagement between your leadership team and your employees and not just the CEO or the COO leadership engagement, very high-level engagement usually ...
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    30 Min.
  • Tony Wallace | The Operating Discipline of Safety

    Tony Wallace | The Operating Discipline of Safety
    Sep 30 2021
    Whenever Tony Wallace’s wife chops vegetables, he can’t help but put his safety professional hat on. “I’ll gasp, and she'll say, You don't trust me,” he says. “I’ll say, No, I trust you: I don't trust the knife.” Tony has tried to explain that this helicopter approach to safety is an overflow from his workday. “She goes, You must drive people nuts,” he says. “I do, but I just want to make sure that she's safe. If she were to cut her hand, that would be horrible, but there are a lot of other ramifications. And this is where it comes into the workplace too.”The cost of an accident is just one of many topics Tony, the Global Vice President of Safety, Health, and Environmental Quality at industrial gas company Linde, speaks on in this episode of the No Accident podcast, presented by TRUCE. He also explains why Linde’s leaders take a hands-on approach to safety, and the importance of viewing it as a disciplined group effort that helps the whole business, not just individuals. “When our senior leadership goes into the field … they’ll walk around and ask questions like, How are you doing on your safety?” he says. “Talking to the employees and asking the question, What are some things we can do to help make you and your site safer? and then following through. It’s making that connection with our employees and our lineman.” In Tony’s more than 35-year career, he’s never had to deal with anything like COVID-19. But the pandemic reminded him of the impact that everyone’s safety decisions have on one another.Tony says that he’d never hire anyone who doesn’t wear a seat belt, for example, and that translates to people who don’t take COVID-19 precautions, such as wearing a mask on an airplane. The people implementing such rules are still seen as “safety cops,” but he believes he can overcome that mindset by reminding people that following these protocols makes everyone’s lives better. “My background is being able to understand how and why we do things — not simply what the safety answer is, but how we do it together to ensure we can accomplish all of our goals,” Tony says.  Featured Guest👉 Name: Tony Wallace 👉 What he does: As the Global Vice President of Safety, Health and Environmental Quality at Linde, a multinational industrial gas company, Tony uses his diverse business background to implement a we’re-all-in-this-together approach to safety. 👉 Company: Linde👉 Key quote: “Safety is like integrity. Somebody once told me that integrity is what you do when no one's looking. Your ultimate value of safety is what you do when no one is looking.”👉 Where to find him: LinkedIn Safe Takes⚠️ Safety isn’t selfish. Tony says strong safety policies are put in place not only to keep each individual employee safe but to help them keep one another safe. That’s why he encourages his employees to constantly ask themselves, Am I doing these actions solely for me? Or am I doing those actions to help others as well?⚠️ The motivation is to get everyone back to their family in one piece. Tony keeps his employees focused on following safety procedures by reminding them of the ultimate motivation: their family. During the COVID-19 pandemic, it’s been more important than ever to think about everyone’s fundamental values, and who they want to protect the most. ⚠️ The best way to determine the value of safety is on the ground. When Linde’s senior leadership visits a site, they’re not just doing it as a formality. They actively ask employees about safety procedures, so they can get a sense of how certain protocols are impacting the way the company operates. The company’s leaders take the hot seat too: Tony believes that companies led by people who have a strong working knowledge of safety procedures function more safely than leaders who are out of touch. Resources⛑️ OSHA — Learn about the latest OSHA guidance for mitigating and preventing the spread of COVID-19 in all industries.⛑️ The Effectiveness of Management-By-Walking-Around: A Randomized Field Study — Learn more about Linde’s on-the-ground approach to management from an academic perspective.⛑️ Linde’s Safety Commitment Day — Watch Tony talking about Linde’s Safety Commitment Day. Top quotes from the episode:“We come to work — and we do work — for our family. It's important that we get home safely at the end of every day. So no, I don't think we can be too safe.”“Over those 36 years [of working at Linde], everyone has grown in our understanding and our ability to be safe, and our ability to protect our employees, our customers, and the communities that we operate in.”“When we hire people, we explain to them what our process is, how safety is a core value, and that they need to be part of that. So if a person doesn't wear their seat belt, even though it's law … if that's the type of person you are, we don't want you working ...
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    25 Min.
  • Robert Schindler | Is There Really Such a Thing as a Safety Culture?

    Robert Schindler | Is There Really Such a Thing as a Safety Culture?
    Sep 16 2021
    When Robert Schindler started his career in construction 18 years ago, he remembers the safety and operation teams working on opposite sides of the construction site. The safety team didn’t talk to superintendents, or project managers. Everyone did their jobs independently.Now, as the Vice President of Safety at Arch-Con, Robert has seen the benefits of integrating safety across departments and working groups. He believes the best results come from having safety closely intertwined with daily operations.“It’s a part of our DNA,” Robert says of the commercial construction company, which has an award-winning safety program. This mindset has helped play an important role in the success — and profitability — of the company. “Safety directly affects your bottom line. Safety directly affects how you can bid on certain projects. But most importantly, safety is your biggest tool when you’re selling something,” Robert says.Sure, a good safety score will increase project opportunities, but it goes beyond that. To Robert, safety is equated with efficiency. To reap the benefits of safety measures, the approach has to be proactive. A good safety program should create smooth workflow processes and prevent issues before they become a problem, which saves time and money.But, proactivity is only possible when the whole team is on board with safety protocol — and when it’s made simple. Don’t be fooled, though; simplicity does not mean cutting corners.  Featured Guest👉 Name: Robert Schindler👉 What he does: Robert is the Vice President of Safety at commercial design and development company Arch-Con where he leads the company’s award winning, nationally recognized safety program. He has more than 18 years of experience in the construction industry.👉 Company: Arch-Con👉 Key quote: “A good company has a positive safety program. A great company is pushing the boundaries of how to make it better.”👉 Where to find him: LinkedInSafe Takes⚠️ Safety and operations work hand-in-hand. A job is never successful and never profitable when an injury takes place. When safety and operations personnel work together, they are both benefiting.⚠️ Safety is efficiency. The question to ask yourself is “how can safety become more efficient?” The days of safety slowing down projects and creating unnecessary work are over. When done right, safety boosts productivity and quality.⚠️ Safety should be simple, not easy. When safety makes sense, people will understand why regulations are put in place and they will follow them. However, just because it’s simple, doesn’t mean that important steps should be overlooked. Resources⛑️ Arch-Con's safety page— Arch-Con has an award-winning, nationally recognized safety program and an EMR safety rating of 0.70. ⛑️ OSHA — Keep up to date on all the latest safety regulations and trainings from the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA). ⛑️ American Society of Safety Professionals — Network with other professionals in the field and stay up to date on the latest industry news through the American Society of Safety Professionals (ASSP). Top quotes from the episode:“I look at safety as being as efficient as possible, and I focus more on, how can we be more efficient? And when you're efficient, the byproduct of that is safety, quality, and production all rolled into one.”“If I'm doing my job properly, then operations will benefit from what I'm putting in. And if they adapt it and they use it, they will be more efficient, which then allows them to be more productive.”“Safety’s hard. And when you try to make it easy, that’s when mistakes happen. There's a huge difference between making it easy and making it simple. Making it simple is putting things in place that people understand. … If you make it easy ... where there are things that they don't have to do, that's when people get hurt and that's when bad things happen.”“A lot of people want to say, Hey, we have a safety culture … That’s one of the things that really, really frustrates me when it comes to safety and construction … that means it’s something different than your actual culture. Safety’s integrated into our culture. It’s part of who we are. Safety is not something separate.”“If you put the time and effort in, on the front side of everything, it pays off in dividends on the back.”
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    26 Min.
  • Bianca Castagna | The Strength of a Good Defense

    Bianca Castagna | The Strength of a Good Defense
    Sep 2 2021
    While some safety leaders measure success or failure by the number of injury reports, Bianca Castagna, leader of the Environmental, Health, and Safety (EHS) program at the GE Aviation plant in Auburn, Alabama, prefers to think further ahead.“If we define safety by the strength of our defenses against hazards, rather than just avoiding injuries, we will have better outcomes,” she tells the No Accident podcast, presented by TRUCE. Bianca has been with GE Aviation since she enrolled in a co-op program during her junior year at Worcester Polytechnic Institute, where she earned a Bachelor of Science in Environmental Engineering. She’s now responsible for ensuring the safety and wellbeing of the plant's 180+ employees.Instead of fixating on the number of injuries, Bianca focuses her attention on identifying potential dangers, and building procedures to eliminate these.One very effective way to do this is to ask the employees on the floor what hazards they are aware of, and what steps they’ve taken to protect themselves. Once Bianca and her team have identified these defenses — as they call them — they investigate further to make sure they’re effective, sufficient, and being properly maintained.“Those are the things that we should be focused on, because if you're just chasing zero injuries, you're too late,” Bianca says.Obviously no one wants to see someone get injured on the job, especially when a simple conversation with the people using the equipment could have prevented the accident. Bianca says that an added bonus of this kind of collaboration with employees is that it proves to them that the company is looking out for their safety. This in turn makes them more motivated to work harder and produce good results.“If people are safe and healthy at work, they’re more likely to make better quality parts, and to be productive and feel a sense of ownership in what it is they’re producing,” Bianca says. “It's all about getting products out the door to our customers, so they can be satisfied and we can make money.” Featured Guest👉 Name: Bianca Castagna👉 What she does: Bianca is Senior Environmental, Health and Safety (EHS) Leader for the GE Aviation plant in Auburn, Alabama. In addition to being responsible for leading all aspects of the EHS program, this summer she also took on a managing role in GE Aviation’s Global Operations Management Leadership Program. 👉 Company: GE Aviation👉 Key quote: “Safety is not the absence of injuries: It’s the strength of defenses.” 👉 Where to find her: LinkedIn Safe Takes⚠️ Know your workforce. A leader who is in regular, face-to-face communication with every worker on the shop floor — as opposed to one who adopts a hands-off leadership style — will be much more effective at motivating workers, which in turn improves safety and productivity. ⚠️ Make your people your Number One priority. “The people making the products that we sell to our customers need to come first, because without them we can’t ensure the delivery, let alone the quality of our products,” Bianca says. Make sure your staff feels healthy, protected, and heard. They’ll be much more motivated to help your business succeed. ⚠️ Act on your employees’ safety concerns. Safety leaders need to listen to employee concerns and address them. Bianca is leery of companies that report zero injuries in an entire year. It suggests that the company is ignoring employees when they report safety issues. “This is when it can get dangerous, because when workers realize nothing is being done to fix a problem, they stop trusting the leadership and stop reporting hazards,” she says.  Resources⛑️ Why Prioritizing Workplace Safety Increases Profit — This article provides three tactics for increasing productivity by promoting a safe work environment.⛑️ The Factory of the Future Improves Safety, Quality and Productivity — Risk identification and hazard prevention play a large role in this vision of our industrial future. ⛑️ Revealing Hidden Risks: Tools for Enterprise Risk Management — This overview of risk mitigation strategies includes a detailed description of how the Strength of Defense Matrix works to validate solutions to potential hazards.  ⛑️ Lean Safety – Improve Workplace Safety with Lean Principles Lean Safety is often thought of as primarily a manufacturing process, but it also improves safety, which helps businesses stay competitive. Top quotes from the episode:[3:57] “Often, people underestimate the impact of morale on a business’s culture, and safety and culture go hand in hand. You can’t have a good culture unless you’ve got a safe, clean environment where people can go to work.” [9:12] “With the integration of lean manufacturing and EHS over the past year and a half, people have come to see safety as an enabler that helps them do their job in a safer way.” [12:34] “We should always strive ...
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    22 Min.
  • Alex Guariento | The Ripple Effect of Safety

    Alex Guariento | The Ripple Effect of Safety
    Aug 19 2021
    Alex Guariento is Trimac Transportation’s Vice President of Safety. The Calgary-based freight carrier’s 3,400 employees make sure that every shipment they’re charged with delivering all over North America reaches its destinations on time without sacrificing safety. Alex has always been connected to transportation and logistics, but his transition from the operations to the safety side was something he didn’t expect.He began his career in the U.S. Army where he served as a transportation officer and paratrooper. This experience, plus working as a manager of Greyhound bus drivers immediately following his military career, gave him the unique perspective of someone who has worked on both the operations and safety sides of a large organization. During a Greyhound restructuring, he was asked to work as a senior manager of duty compliance, which led to his nearly three-decades-long career in safety. Over the course of 14 years as a top safety and security executive at Greyhound, Alex helped shape a vigorous safety and compliance training program. Its driving instructors often had 10+ years and in some cases, multiple decades of accident-free miles behind them. The company’s success underscored to Alex the relationship between safety and market leadership. “A company’s safety record has a huge impact on its bottom line,” Alex says on this episode of No Accident. He further explains the connection between safety and a company’s financial health, noting that accidents can result in costly lawsuits and that employees and customers don’t want to associate with organizations that have poor safety records. Though Alex doesn’t manage Trimac’s drivers directly, he strongly believes that a great safety leader has to be able to influence what happens on the front lines. “Typically a safety leader has no direct operational control of the people who do what it is that the company does. In my case, I don’t manage drivers and have no direct operational control on dispatch,” he says on the podcast. “But if I’m not able to influence the way the operational leaders do things, I will not be successful on behalf of the company from an operational safety perspective. I have to be present without physically being there.” Featured Guest👉 Name: Alex Guariento👉 What he does: As the Vice President for Safety of Trimac Transportation — a 75-year-old, Calgary-based logistics company that uses the motto: “Service with Safety” — Alex uses his extensive military and private industry experience to ensure driver safety and the safe delivery of hazardous materials to clients.  👉 Company: Trimac Transportation👉 Key quote: “Being on the leading edge of incorporating safety best practices is the only way large companies in the transportation industry can stay in business today.” 👉 Where to find him: LinkedInSafe Takes⚠️ Talk less. Listen more. Be willing to step in. Alex says the ability to do these things are essential to great safety leadership. “Great safety leaders have empathy and the moral courage to intervene and say, ‘This is not going to work, stop what you're doing.’” Alex describes it as an ability to acknowledge disagreement and a willingness to step in when you see a strategy that could be unproductive or worse, unsafe, being discussed or implemented, regardless of the repercussions.⚠️ Work with your operations partners. Alex considers himself fortunate because he and his operations team are always able to reach a middle ground that satisfies him from a safety perspective and addresses their concerns..⚠️ Keep pushing for improvement, even after hitting your benchmarks. “We are a very progressive company when it comes to integration of the culture of safety in the car. That doesn't mean that we cannot improve. We absolutely can improve. It’s a never-ending process for us,” he says. Safety concerns are ever-evolving, and striving to adapt to changes in the marketplace that affect safety means going above and beyond KPIs and bare minimums.Resources⛑️ Trimac Transportation Looking Ahead to Future Opportunities - Marking Trimac’s 75th anniversary, this article covers its vision for the future. ⛑️ Top 12 Characteristics of Great Safety Leaders - Empathy and continuous learning are just some of the qualities that make a safety leader indispensable to their organization.  Top quotes from the episode:“Safety is not the responsibility of the safety department. Safety is the responsibility of everybody in the company.”“At the end of the day, our ultimate goal is for everybody to return home whether it's an employee or an associate or another motorist.”“Nobody wants to work in an environment where there is a likelihood they’re going to get hurt. Not being safe is going to have a ripple effect that affects retention.”“I've been fortunate enough to work exclusively with and that companies that have same end goal ━ to ...
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    20 Min.
  • Joseph Tommasi | Trees, Sawdust and Safety

    Joseph Tommasi | Trees, Sawdust and Safety
    Aug 5 2021

    Joseph Tommasi started his career clearing trees around utility lines and trained as an arborist in the early 1970s. He worked his way up as a crew leader, then a supervisor, and has been with The Davey Tree Expert Company since 1994.

    Based in Kent, Ohio, Davey is employee-owned and was established more than 100 years ago.

    From the office to the field, safety is an expectation that employees, managers, businesses and even clients expect when they do business with Davey. “There is an expectation that many of our clients — particularly our larger ones, but certainly individual homeowners — want nothing but a quality job executed well, and that there's been no harm done to anyone in the course of that work,” Joseph says on this episode of No Accident. 

     Joseph sees OSHA best practices as a starting point. “You can’t manage your safety program by regulation alone. Your program has to start off with communication and valuing your people, and your people need to know that.” 

    As the U.S. and Canada’s third-largest landscaping company, according to Lawn & Landscape — Davey has undergone significant expansion, but not without giving safety considerations a hard look first. 

    “Whether it’s new locations or entities, safety is a key factor that the acquisition team weighs early on during the due diligence process, even before we make any commitments.”

    When Joseph started his career in safety, many industries viewed safety as the role of the safety department alone. Today, he sees a shift to safety as a holistic and integrated system that requires ongoing improvement across divisions. Joseph attributes an intensified awareness of safety among consumers and businesses to the events of September 11, 2001. 

    “Now it’s a two-way street. The people in the safety departments and the field, but also managers and supervisors, have to share the message of their safety programs and ownership of the process with each other.” 

     

    Featured Guest

    👉 Name: Joseph Tomassi

    👉 What he does: As the Vice President of Corporate Safety at the Davey Tree Expert Company, Joseph draws upon nearly five decades of experience in horticulture, management and safety to protect his workforce and help Davey thrive. 

    👉 Company: Davey Tree Expert Company

    👉 Key quote: “Good things come from being persistent in trying to achieve safety excellence —  company success, employee success, opportunity and profitability.” 

    👉 Where to find him: LinkedIn

     

    Safe Takes

    ⚠️ Go above and beyond when communicating your expectations to your greatest assets, i.e. your employees and other team members. “Be honest and credible with them. They need to know they're going to be held to a standard of conduct, but that you're there to help them succeed.”

    ⚠️ Take a behavioral approach to address safety. Davey puts interpersonal relationships and human interaction at the heart of its Personal Excellence Program, which promotes OSHA compliance and ultimately success for its employees, management and customers. 

    ⚠️ Adopt a continuous improvement mindset. It’s nearly impossible for a large organization to achieve excellence in safety at every single point with every single individual. But nevertheless, companies should aim for it at every opportunity. “Safety excellence is a value that has helped our company grow over time because people recognize how important it is to us and how it informs our work on a daily basis.”

     

    Resources

    ⛑️ Lawn & Landscape Top 100 — a list based on 2020 revenue from landscape

    profit centers. Davey ranks third on the list. 

    ⛑️ Utility Safety — Page detailing the Davey’s commitment to safety

     

    Top quotes from the episode:

    “Doing the work of safety professionally increases productivity.” 

    “People today seek more in terms of safety and security than ever before. You can see it in the marketing and advertising on television. The expectations for professional organizations to address safety are high in the eyes of consumers.” 

    “[From an organizational perspective], I see that people are much more embracing of and asking for the opportunity to work together on continuous improvement and safety.”

    “Safety is a wonderful career with opportunities across industries, and it’s become much more highly regarded as a profession.”
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    31 Min.
  • Host Favorite: Travis Post | Safety Protects Profits

    Host Favorite: Travis Post | Safety Protects Profits
    Jul 8 2021

    Travis Post never intended to go into the safety field. But after a Skilsaw injury at one of his first construction jobs left him a partial-leg amputee, his career trajectory completely changed.

    “In the early eighties, I received my safety baptism, as we call it,” Travis says in this episode of the No Accident podcast, presented by TRUCE. “It took about two years of physical therapy to learn how to walk again.”

    He took a new job in respiratory therapy, then was working in the cardiac unit of a major hospital when he got a call from his old employer — the company he was working for during his injury wanted to know if he had any interest in construction safety. Travis thought it sounded interesting, and went back to work for them in a completely new capacity.

    As a former construction worker who considers his injury the result of “horseplay” on the job, Travis was able to go into that position with a valuable point of view. He saw an opportunity for people who had experienced workplace injuries to educate employees who hadn’t, which made such trainings a more meaningful experience.

    “I started hiring employees that had previously shot their foot or their hand to the plywood to actually do training classes,” Travis said in one example of a response to several nail gun injuries. “The guys actually listened to them because they're active employees in the trade.”

    His team then took this approach one step further and started having individuals who had injured themselves severely enough to receive modified duty worker's comp payments speak to other workers about that experience to show that “you don't get rich off of it. It's basically there to let you survive.”

    These employee-led trainings are a result of Travis’ belief in employee-based safety, which he refers to as a hybrid of behavior-based safety and education that help protect a company’s profit.

    “You take an individual and have that individual completely buy into the system through education and clear direction,” he said. “If they have input in the whole process, then we get 100% buy-in.”

    Featured Guest

    👉 Name: Travis Post

    👉 What he does: As the National Director of Safety at Petersen-Dean, Inc., a Fremont, California-based construction company, Travis uses his personal experience with work injury to push an employee-based approach to safety.

    👉 Company: Petersen-Dean, Inc.

    👉 Key quote: “Safety protects profit. That's it in a nutshell, and that's why you should have a safety program.”

    👉 Where to find him: LinkedIn

    Safe Takes

    ⚠️ The best way to get workers to follow safety protocols is to explain them in a way that’s easy to understand and then ask for their input on what policies and procedures work or don’t work. As Travis says, “When you get that participation of 100%, the employees become active … if the employees don't like the PPE that we're mandating, they're not going to use it.”

    ⚠️ If you can get your employees to completely buy-in to a safety program, aka implement employee-based safety, then it becomes the “employee's responsibility to learn and facilitate the whole safety program,” which will inevitably protect your profits.

    ⚠️ Safety isn’t something you can afford to cut corners on. Travis specifically uses the example of fall protection and how, for those who work without it, “it usually ends very badly for the employee and long term for the company.”

    Top quotes from the episode:

    “What I do is … employee-based safety. You have to put it in terms that the employee understands.”

    “At the end of the day, it doesn't matter how much they made. If they're severely injured, they can't continue to utilize that in the future.”

    “You can't really look at safety as ‘go out there and be safety cops and catch people not doing what they're supposed to do and make them do it.’ What my safety department does is we protect profit.”

    “By having a proactive safety program versus a reactive, it drives that cost code down and therefore it’s not passed on to the customer.”

    “Your data has to encompass everything. It can't just be zero accidents. Because then what happens is people become afraid to actually report injuries.”

    “Injuries happen every day. And if you're not in front of them, training your employees, the severity is going to do nothing but go up.”
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    24 Min.
  • Torrey Garrison | Getting Outside of the Box

    Torrey Garrison | Getting Outside of the Box
    Jun 24 2021
    To Torrey Garrison, safety isn’t just the right thing to do — it’s a selling point for a business.Torrey is the Vice President of Environmental, Health and Safety (EHS) and of Leadership Development at Performance Contractors, an industrial construction company based on the Gulf Coast. Through his dual roles, he negotiates between the safety and business aspects of the company. “A lot of times, we get our foothold into speaking with the C-suite by saying, ‘_Hold on, let's talk about the money aspect of this_’ — and then we can blend doing the right thing back [into the conversation],” he says on this episode of the No Accident podcast, presented by TRUCE.Torrey is fighting to change the view of safety from a “necessary evil” to a positive that can be used to promote the company. “It’s really hard sometimes for safety to show what the monetary value is for us to be there,” he admits. “[But] where you really start seeing the fruit of the labor is when you’re able to get more work, even with that organization or a different organization based off how your safety record is.”Torrey describes joining sales and marketing meetings with clients who are eager to hear about Performance Contractors’ winning safety record — something that separates them from competitors.Torrey’s career journey has provided great insight into the worker’s perspective as well, which has aided in his dynamic approach to safety. After spending five years in the U.S. Coast Guard, his first job was in the “very dangerous atmosphere” of a foundry. But it was there Torrey learned the importance of robust safety procedures from the other side of the clipboard.    “I'm looking around thinking, ‘_Wow, this is a very unsafe place._’ I was on the other side — I wasn't on the EHS side, I was actually on the hands-on side.”Featured Guest👉 Name: Torrey Garrison👉 What he does: As Vice President of Environmental, Health and Safety (EHS) and of Leadership Development at Gulf Coast-based Performance Contractors, Torrey combines his 20 years of safety experience with lessons in leadership to help leaders at all levels within the business.👉 Company: Performance Contractors👉 Key quote: “[With] everything that you have on your job site that's going well, don't wait until something happens to change it. We make changes as we go. I'm not saying rewrite the whole program and everyone has to relearn it. I'm saying tweak it and see what other benefits you can get.”👉 Where to find him: LinkedIn | WebsiteSafe Takes⚠️ A strong safety record can set you apart from competitors. Proving you can do a job safely is a selling point to prospective clients. Performance Contractors’ sales and marketing teams use the company’s safety statistics to stand out from otherwise similar rivals. ⚠️ Clients appreciate you going above and beyond with safety measures. Inspired by Torrey’s military career, Performance Contractors use a go/no-go system in every single procedure. It’s an extra step — and one their clients appreciate.⚠️ Working in EHS sets you up to lead. Safety personnel often find themselves explaining important procedures to large groups of people — sometimes as many as 1,000 on major jobs, Torrey says. It’s a high-pressure way to learn leadership skills, which then just need finetuning.Resources⛑️ Torrey’s website –– Read Torrey’s blog for more about his time in the Coast Guard, his work as a reserve chaplain for the Air Force and his thoughts on leadership development.⛑️ Beyond the Numbers — An article on Construction Executive, in which Torrey talks about Performance Contractors’ new methods for approaching safety.⛑️ Best For Vets profile — A breakdown of Performance Contractors’ work with veterans by the Military Times.Top quotes from the episode:“There are a lot of companies that do really good work, but what are their safety records? Can they do it safely? That's where we can get our foot in.”“Our ownership and management team have seen how important [safety] is to get more projects. And the more projects we have, the more money people make, the more we can put back into our company, and it's all based on working safely.”“We've had jobs that may not have gone the exact way we wanted them to — but we got another opportunity because our safety department stepped up on that job site.”“We're really part of the sales team. We have a sales program that we go through with new clients, to explain to them what our EHS department can do.”“Every time we discuss our EHS program with a client, my question is, ‘_Tell us something that you're doing that you feel excited about or you're passionate about._’ 90% of the time we have a program pretty close to it.”“Structure, accountability and knowing how to follow orders are three things that our veterans can teach our employees from the civilian world.”“I believe ...
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    31 Min.