Effective Safety Committees

In this episode, Mary Conquest speaks with Dave Rebbitt, a safety leader, consultant, and prolific author. The subject of his best-selling book, ‘Effective Safety Committees: A Practical Guide’ forms the basis of this engaging and compassionate interview.

Dave developed the concept of “Intelligent Safety” and explains what this means and why it’s especially necessary in this era of static or rising workplace fatalities. He encourages safety professionals to look beyond manuals and training and truly explore whether systems are working and risk is effectively managed.

Despite safety committees being a legal requirement in most G8 countries, Dave believes they could have a much more positive impact. He clearly defines the purpose, functionality, and benefits of effective safety committees, while highlighting the key red flags.

It’s not easy to measure the effectiveness of safety committees, but Dave provides some top practical tips and shares his views on the role of HSE professionals within the committee.

Dave also discusses the importance of Terms of Reference and good communication and helps us overcome common issues, such as complex structures, committee overwhelm and finding consensus.

Throughout this thought-provoking conversation, Dave highlights the need for respect and genuine care for the well-being of co-workers. He ends with some great advice to help safety professionals shake off the ‘judgemental safety cop’ stereotype.

♪ [music] ♪ - [Mary] My name is Mary Conquest. I'm your host for "Safety Labs by Slice," the podcast where we explore the human side of safety to support safety professionals. We move past regulations and reportables to talk about the core skills of safety leadership, empathy, influence, trust, rapport, in other words, the soft skills that help you do the hard stuff.

♪ [music] ♪ Hi there. Welcome to "Safety Labs by Slice." Safety committees, I'm willing to bet that the term itself brings up a lot of associations for you, dear listener, and not all of them may be positive.

Today's guest has explored safety committees in-depth, their purpose, their pitfalls, and how to help them succeed. Dave Rebbitt is a military veteran who advocates for what he terms intelligent safety. He has over 30 years of management experience and is a prolific Canadian safety author, having published blog posts and peer-reviewed articles.

He's the author of the books, "Effective Safety Committees" and "Harassment and Workplace Violence Investigations." Dave developed and taught courses for the University of Alberta's OHS certificate program. He served on multiple safety boards, including the Workers' Compensation Board of Alberta and the Board of Canadian Registered Safety Professionals.

In his spare time, Dave enjoys writing science fiction novels. He joins us from Calgary, Alberta. Welcome.

- [Dave] Oh, thanks for having me. It's great to be here. I look forward to an engaging discussion.

- All right. I'll try my best. Before we get into safety committees, as I was looking at your bio, I got really curious about the term, intelligence safety. So, what does that mean to you and why is it an important concept in your work?

- Well, intelligence safety is a term I came up with, I think about 10 years ago. And I really do mean to write a book about this, but, you know, there are so many different things out there these days. Safety 1, Safety 2, HOP, HRO, but, you know, they seem to think they've discovered that safety is about people.

It always has been. And I think it always will be. It'll be about the human interface in the workplace. And, you know, if we reel back the clock, we think about, well, you know, management systems were a big thing a few years back...well, a few decades back. And everybody's casting about for, you know, the silver bullet. And there really isn't one.

So, what I call intelligent safety is, you know, the concept simply put is you design the safety system as a health and safety professional, or you're involved in implementing a health and safety system. And yet, you know, the questions we ask are not really the right ones. And I think the question we need to ask is, is it working? We often do audits or we do investigations that say, well, this bit's not working, or that bit's not working, but we don't have a way to detect what Rasmussen called drift.

You know, when you train somebody to do a task, at that moment in time when you say, yes, you're competent, that's how you do the task, you're at 100%. But over time, people look for shortcuts, better ways to do things. And so they drift away from what we would expect. And eventually, that results or can result in an incident.

But, you know, organizations have no way to detect that drift. When I was working in construction, I did an experiment and I found out something very shocking. If you take the high-risk task that people do, and you look into that, and I don't mean, you know, walk around, but really look into it, say, here's our procedure.

This is what we expect you to do. Is the training being effective? Are people doing those things in that manner? Are we doing those things safely? Because those are two different measures. And what I found consistently was that people were performing high-risk tasks safely 75% of the time. Now, that would frighten most people, and it was of deep concern to me, but I found that across organizations, that tended to be about the number, 70% or 75% of the time, high-risk tasks were being done safely.

And the number of times they were being done in accordance with procedures was somewhat less. You know, the question that we need to ask is, is the system that was designed and we're trying to implement, is it working? Is it being effective? And the answer to that is often not really.

So, intelligence safety is really about, you know, not just writing a manual or training people on it, but having health and safety people instead of running around doing inspections or observations, actually digging in and saying, "Is this working? Are we effectively managing the risk here?" And the answer to that is no, about 25% of the time.

And, of course, a low-risk task, the number tends to be higher. So, in a nutshell, that is really what I call intelligence safety. It's not about doing observations or, you know, HOP or high-reliability organizations. Those are not new ideas.

They're just a new term for an old idea. And for the last, I don't know, 30 years, we haven't seen a real advance in health and safety. The injury rates, you know, and certainly the fatality rates have remained fairly static. And the reason for that is because the traditional methods have reached the limit of their effectiveness. So, now we start to see, you know, in the last few years, large, you know, organizations like the ASSP or the National Safety Council saying, we need a new paradigm.

We need something new because, you know, the traditional health and safety approaches are not being effective enough. And as I found in my master's thesis, fatalities in high-risk organizations, the actual fatality rate, is static or rising, which should be disturbing for everyone because we've done such a great job over the last 100 years bringing that down.

- So, intelligence safety is more about the design of your safety system. Is that accurate or?

- Well, I think it's about reaching behind the training and the manuals and all that other bureaucratic stuff that we tend to have to really ask yourself, "Is this working? Is it being effective?" Because no one asks that. And it's up to the health and safety professional to say, "What do I expect to see here? Why am I not seeing it?"

Because the default often is, well, the workers are not following the procedure, or the workers aren't very bright. They're plenty bright, they're trained, they're professionals in most cases. But, you know, is that system serving the needs of the company, or did we just write some procedures and hope for the best? There is no follow-up. There is no going around to the back end and saying, here's the procedure, or here's our standard.

We expect this output. But nobody ever checks for that expected output. Everyone just assumes that it's working because we didn't have an incident. So, intelligence safety is about examining those, especially high-risk tasks and saying, are we doing those safely? Because usually, the way you find out you're not is there's a serious incident.

- Okay. Well, thank you for satisfying my curiosity on that. I'm ready to dive into the book now, which is what this is mostly about. No, I appreciate that. So, the title is "Effective Safety Committees: A Practical Guide." So, this is less of sort of a philosophical tone on the nature of committees, and it's more of a roadmap on how to do them right.

That said, why did you decide to write this book? Like, where were you seeing the need?

- Well, Alberta, where I live, I legislated safety committees, you know, a few years ago and a lot of people don't realize that Alberta was the first province to legislate safety committees and also the very first province to unlegislate safety committees. Because employers see them as, you know, a real, I guess, difficult issue to resolve and time-consuming and resource-consuming.

And as happens in these things and in every province in Canada certainly, the regulator puts out a booklet and says, this is why you have to have a safety committee and these are the things the safety committee should do. And that that's all well and good. And they all do that. But I guess part of my frustration and my experience in working with larger organizations is that that's where it stops.

People go on this legislated course and basically it tells them, you know, this is what the law says. This is why you have to have a committee. No one ever says, this is how to make it work. And I've had some very positive experiences in larger organizations organizing a committee structure and having very engaged committees.

In one place that I worked, there was a waiting list to get on one of the committees because people saw them as being effective at doing things and really moving the needle and thought that their, you know, input was being respected and integrated into the organization's actions.

In other cases, of course, you know, when you say safety committee, I don't know about you, but that conjures up for me, you know, an image of some people sitting in a room, drinking coffee, eating donuts, and complaining about things. It shouldn't be that way, and it doesn't have to be that way. But I think safety committees are misunderstood.

You know, the concept has been around since the 1970s. And, you know, the intent was to have a forum for workers to work cooperatively with the employer to make sure the workplace remains safe. And I don't think that employers have really seen the value in that.

And I really think that health and safety professionals or health and safety departments sometimes miss the value that a safety committee can bring to the effort. So, I thought someone should write a book. And I did. I wrote a book about, you know, how to have an effective safety committee because there's no use writing a book about why you need one, because the law's there, the regulators telling you why you need one.

And so often employers just say, "Well, you know, we're supposed to have these people. They're supposed to meet once a quarter. Just get some people together and have a meeting and talk about safety." And that's about all the direction they get. And then the employer is disappointed when the committee doesn't seem to accomplish anything. And no great secret, neither are the people on the committee.

They're there by and large because they want to accomplish something, but, you know, they're not given the training or the tools, you know, or the support to be successful.

- I'm not familiar with, like, legislation around the globe. I know that a lot of our listeners are in different jurisdictions, we have a lot in Australia and in the State. So, I'm not sure if safety committees are, you know, legislated across the board. But are there ideal conditions for a safety committee, or conversely, red flags for conditions when a safety committee is kind of the raw solution?

- Well, in most of the G8 countries, safety committees are a requirement. And even if they're not a requirement, they are a good idea. It's a great way to engage the frontline workers. But red flags for me for a safety committee, you know, it kind of goes like this. Somebody goes to, you know, a senior leader in the company says, "Hey, we have to have a safety committee."

And they say, "Well, that sounds like a safety department thing, or that sounds like a safety thing. Hey, you safety manager, you safety advisor, you take care of that." And so the safety person or a safety advisor ends up chairing the committee and gathering people together and talking about what they want to talk about. So that's a recipe for a very ineffective safety committee.

And I say that because the safety advisor or the safety manager tends to have way more knowledge and background in health and safety than anyone on the committee. So, inadvertently, they dominate the conversation, they dominate the agenda. And one of the things a safety committee is for is to monitor the employer's health and safety program.

So, if a safety person's running, and that means they're monitoring their own work, which is sort of a conflict in my book. And that's not a recipe for good governance. It's not a recipe for good outcomes. So, on the other side, and I talk about this in my book, what is the committee for?

And I think the employer needs to answer that question before they do anything. What is this for? What do we expect to get? You know, you don't want to invest time and effort in something without understanding what the outcome looks like. And so most employers will say, "Well, we want to have a safe workplace, and so the safety committee can help us do that."

Yeah, okay. That's all right. But it's really about engaging people who are doing the work in keeping the workplace safe. So, if you have a company, and a lot of the people who work there are deployed out into the field on jobs, let's say, sometimes what happens is the people on the committee are people who tend to be available for meetings during the day.

That's not the people out doing the work. So, you end up with a committee full of people who are in administrative roles, which are a low risk. That doesn't work so well. So, if the company says, we really see a need for a committee. We want to have one. What should it look like? Well, the safety committee is really a feedback mechanism for senior management.

At its base, that's what it does. So, you have a health and safety department that deals with all levels of the organization and gives feedback to senior management. And that is exactly what a safety committee's for. So, now you've got two feedback loops, which means that the information, if it's the same, probably is more reliable when it gets to senior management because often senior management has difficulty ensuring that the health and safety program or system is working in the manner that they would expect.

And you see examples of this where CEOs...we had a case here in Alberta where the CEO of Suncor Energy, a rather large company, ended up resigning over the company's poor safety performance after being assured that everything was fine. And then there was a string of fatalities. Not because I think Suncor Energy's a bad company or anything, but the information making it to senior management obviously wasn't accurate.

So, safety committees can give that necessary feedback loop and they can engage at all levels. So, you have worker members, you're required to have at least half worker members, and you select the people who are engaged in high-risk tasks. And then you have management personnel. And in a larger company, you may have a whole bunch of workplace committees that feed into, you know, a region or an area committee.

And if you have a very large organization, you might have a policy or governance health and safety committee above them. So, the health and safety committee is supposed to monitor the employer's health and safety system to make sure it's being effective and try and solve issues or gaps in that system with the cooperation of the employer.

What a great way to engage people at the frontline and get their feedback. And when, you know, we can't come up with a solution, be able to elevate those issues to senior management. What a great mechanism. And so that's the intent of a safety committee, which mirrors the purpose and the intent of a health and safety department, or a health and safety, you know, arm within the company because it's outside the normal reporting structure or outside the line management structure and provides necessary feedback to each level within the company.

- So, I think you've pretty well answered my question as to what defines an effective safety committee. I'm curious about there are different ways to measure effectiveness. So, how would you measure the success given what you've just said, the success or the failure of a safety committee?

- Well, often committees you know, they need something to sink their teeth into. They need something to strive towards. And I always say the first question you would ask...you know, if someone says, "I think I have an effective committee," I always ask, "What's their project? What's their project this year? What is their focus?" And committees often don't have one. But you need a central theme or a project to really get people looking in the same direction of working together.

So, if you want to measure committee effectiveness, it's not the number of meetings they've had or how long or short those meetings were, are they getting real issues from the workers? Are people comfortable in coming to the committee and bringing forward an issue? And does the committee work to resolve that and get back to that person and say, here is what we ended up with?

Because let's be honest, sometimes things come to the health and safety committee, they get discussed, you know, they get evaluated, and the decision is, we're okay. I don't think we need to do anything with this, or we're going to defer this until later because we've got a lot on our plate. Those are perfectly good answers, but often people bring forward a concern to the health and safety committee if they know how to do that because that's usually not that well-communicated.

And that's the last they hear. So, why would they want to participate? You know, instead, if it's an effective committee, they get invited to come to the committee. The person who they talk to has done the research, so they're able to present some possible solutions and this person gets to be heard by the committee.

Why not get it from the horse's mouth? So, measuring committee effectiveness is rather difficult, I would say, unless there's some kind of an accountability framework in place. What's the project? Did you do the meetings? Did you resolve issues? Are you engaging with the workforce?

And that is one of the key things. Committees have to engage with workforces. Posting the minutes on the wall, putting the minutes on a server drive is not good enough. I advocate for committees to provide a quarterly update because most committees meet at least quarterly, to the workforce and say, hey, we had a meeting.

Here's the big three items that we talked about. Here's the status on these items. This is what we're working for to try and resolve because these are the issues that are important to employees. So, who measures the committees? You know, that's another issue. You know, is it going to be the health and safety department that gets a report from the committee every year?

Is it going to be someone else in operations perhaps, or human resources that says, you know, we need a report on your activities? We want to make sure that you're doing the right things to be effective. You know, if you found a problem, did you review incidents? Did you make recommendations? Were those followed up on? So, there's a lot of things you could measure a safety committee on.

And the last thing I think you really want to measure is how many meetings they have because that has no relation to how effective they are. Do they have membership that reflects the requirements? And do those members show up for the meetings? That's probably very important because you see meeting minutes that really don't tell you who chaired the meeting, they don't tell you who wasn't present, or in some unfortunate cases, you see that the same people are not present all the time.

And so the committee really has to have some accountability to be able to do something with members who are not meeting their duties as a member of the committee.

- I wanted to ask as well, you touched on this...

- Sorry, I know that's a long answer.

- Oh, no, no, no. It's all good because you bring in a lot of different threads, and that's what makes it interesting. But one thing that you had mentioned was the role of the safety professional in terms of what it should not be. So, how would you describe the ideal or the best, most effective role for the safety professional in relation to the committee?

- Well, I've always said that health and safety professionals should be an ex-official member of the committee. And what that means is they go to the meetings, but they don't have a vote. They don't have a role in the consensus. They're just there as a resource. So, when I was running health and safety departments, I would assign, you know, a health and safety advisor to each committee as a resource.

And, you know, it's difficult sometimes for someone who has, you know, all this knowledge or education or training not to take over, but it is important that they let the committee do their work and make their decisions and just provide them with information. You know, so the health and safety professional is often the one that provides them with copies of incident investigations or copies of inspections or copies of procedures because sometimes the committee's project for the year may be to review and update a procedure like confined space entry, or fall protection, or some area where the committee might have some expertise or maybe they would need some training in that area.

So, the committee has a lot of things to monitor. If the employer's doing any industrial hygiene monitoring or testing, the committee may wish to review that, but they may need some training, you know, because having someone in the room that fully understands, that has all that knowledge doesn't mean that the members of the committee will ask the questions they want to ask.

So, it's often, you know, nice to provide them with a primer and say, well, this is how exposure limits work. So, this is what these numbers mean. This is how we measure them so that they understand what they're looking at. In terms of incident investigations, you know, they get sent to the committee. That happens in a lot of companies, but the people on the committee don't necessarily have any training, they don't understand what they're looking at, and they just say, "Well, hey, that looks okay to me."

So, by providing training to the committee, the employer demonstrates that they value the work the committee's doing, they value those employees, and they value that feedback.

- Yeah, I mean, they're really setting up the members to give more useful feedback if they're training them, which I was going to ask you about, so thank you for going into that. I'd like to talk about terms of reference and the reason is that... Sorry.

- Could I just add something? Sorry.

- Yeah, of course.

- In terms of the health and safety person's role, the professional's role with the health and safety committee, one of the most valuable things I've found with health and safety committees is as a sounding board. You know, because health and safety systems tend to be in a bit of a state of flux, in a state of change. And if there are changes that are coming about, it is really good to get in a room with a bunch of, you know, people who are actually doing the work and say, "Hey, what do you think about this? We need to know. We want your feedback before we, you know, really finalize a draft on this training program or this new process."

And that's really, really valuable because, you know, we see so many times changes fail because they're not socialized enough because the organization isn't prepared for them, or maybe there's too much change. So, that's really valuable thing that the health and safety professional can get from a safety committee.

- Yeah. And people are much more likely to adopt changes that they've had a hand in, at least had some feedback if they didn't design them, but, okay. So, I'd like to ask about terms of reference because they're mentioned quite a lot in the book. They're a big part of...you know, almost everything was like, here's an issue.

Well, that should have been put in the terms of reference. So, I'll just open that up and say what, what are they, and how do they relate to community effectiveness?

- Sure. Well, the terms of reference, depending on where you are, you know, sometimes in legislation, it says you have to cover these things. But really the terms of reference for any committee, not just a health and safety committee, is really the handbook or the manual by which the committee operates.

And why is that important? Well, when someone comes onto a committee, they should be able to read the terms of reference and understand how the committee works and what it's for, what it does. You know, when you're recruiting people for a safety committee, you know, you have your little elevator speech or your pitch, but when they come onto the safety committee, they should be able to read the terms of reference and say, okay, well, how does the committee go about reviewing incidents, or how does the committee do inspections, or how are meetings organized?

And, you know, how are the co-chairs established? How long am I on this committee? That's often the first questions we might have. How long do I have to do this for? And when people get appointed to committee, in a lot of cases, the terms of reference will say, well, we need a member from this area or from this discipline. And so, you know, we are getting the right mix of people in the room.

So, the terms of reference is very, very important. I talked earlier about an accountability system. Well, the committee has to be accountable to that terms of reference. Are you doing what you're meant to do? And the terms of reference doesn't just have to be a bare-bones document that meets some legislated requirement because the terms of reference is also the employer's opportunity to say, this is what we expect from you, a health and safety committee.

And this is what we expect from the members. Because, you know, some things are intuitive. You say, well, who's going to take the minutes for the health and safety committee? Does it have to have a secretary? Well, usually, no. Usually, the management co-chair has some administrative resources that they can assign to do the administrative side of the health and safety committee.

But in some cases, you know, I've seen committees where the co-chair that's not chairing the meeting is doing the minutes, and it's very difficult to participate in a meeting when you're trying to do the minutes, you know, as the meeting is going on. So, it is such an important document. We wouldn't, you know, ask somebody to, oh, I don't know, conduct an excavation or to climb a tower without having assessed the risk and have a procedure for that.

So, it's not really fair to say to someone, you should be on this health and safety committee, and all we know is that you get free glazed donuts.

- Let's talk about...I'd like to pull out, you've got more than these, but I'd like to pull out some of the pitfalls that you've seen in committees and just sort of talk about what they are and how to prevent them, I suppose. So, the first one is poor communication with the workforce.

- Yeah, that's a huge one. You know I work with a lot of companies and sometimes, you know, I'll say to somebody, "So, do you guys have a health and safety committee?" And they'll say, "What's that?" So, I explain what that is, and they're like, "No, I don't think so." Then later, I find out they're on the committee. That's a true story.

But anyway, but people don't often don't know there's a committee, they don't know what it's for, they don't know what it's doing, they don't know who's on it, you know? And I mean, if you say, well, look, it's posted on the wall, there's a list of people. Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. But, you know, when a committee's purpose, you know, and really the purpose is, you know, to have frontline workers talking with the employer about resolving health and safety issues, keeping the workplace safe, it's probably important that the people they represent know who they are, know what they're doing.

And so how does that happen? And I think as part of the terms of reference, I kind of lean on that a lot as you say, but we should be defining how does the committee communicate with the workforce? Is it going to a quarterly meeting or a monthly meeting and saying, "Hey, we just had a meeting?" So, it's up to the co-chair to say, hey, when you go out there, here's the things you need to tell people about.

This is what's going on. This is what we're working on. And solicit people, you know, if you have an issue, we're here to listen. So, you know, why is it that a workforce or most of the workforce wouldn't even be aware they have a committee? Well, that's ineffective communication. If people knew there was a committee and they perceived it as doing something and perceived it as a good forum to get results, then they'd be much more engaged in that process.

So, communication is very, very important. And, you know, the legislative requirements are often something like you must post or make available the minutes to the workforce. Well, that's not good enough. You know, in my view, health and safety committees do important work, and they should be informing the people they represent of the work that they're doing or what it is they're attempting to accomplish.

You know, it's the same old thing you see in business. You know, you might have the best product in the world, but if you're not marketing it, no one will buy it. So, you have to advertise. You have to communicate. It is so critical that, you know, and it's really great when you talk to somebody, you know, you're in a workplace and you say, "Hey, do you have a safety committee?"

And they say, yes, so-and-so is my representative. Great. Oh boy, that's good news. And if you're very, very fortunate, they'll say, hey, and they're working on this issue right now to get it resolved. So, it's not hard to determine whether or not your committee's communicating effectively.

- I'm going to take a little side detour because you're talking about communication. One thing I was curious about, you've mentioned, and certainly, this would be the case in really large companies, in some cases, it's not just a safety committee. You've got subcommittees, you've got councils, you've got...it can be a complex organizational structure and communication is really important.

So, what is the best way, or what are some good ways for complex structures to communicate well and work together effectively?

- It depends on the organization, to be truthful. I think that workplace committees representing specific workplaces must communicate with that workplace for sure. But in large organizations, for instance, you may have a division that has six safety committees. So, it might be wise to have what an aggregator, a regional or a divisional safety committee that sort of aggregates the activities, the concerns, and takes care of things that get elevated from the workplace committees, because workplace committees can't necessarily solve all the issues, but if they do solve an issue, it's nice to tell someone, you know, in the division, because that might not be a unique issue.

And, you know, but if they learn something and they're able to solve this issue, that's great. If they're not able to solve an issue, they can still escalate that. So, you can have sort of a regional committee or a division committee that's an aggregator, and that committee may communicate with senior management.

And so you establish that link and that communications link. Or in a larger organization, you may have five divisional committees that each have four to six workplace committees under them that, you know, really run into a health and safety council, or a health and safety policy committee, or something like that, which would primarily be, you know, staffed by senior management.

But even at each level, so the divisional committee would pull members from the workplace committees, usually, the co-chair, the worker co-chair, and the council would pull people from, you know, these divisional committees into the council. But because you have to keep these committees, you know, fairly small, like around a dozen people, you don't want to run away with you.

And that committee at the corporate level would be the one that deals with policy issues, would be the one that deals with organizational issues. And in some cases, that would be the committee that would communicate with the board of directors on health and safety. Sometimes the board of directors has a health and safety committee, or they have a human resources governance committee, or something like that.

So, in that way, you can establish an aggregator to really bring the issues and the salient information to each level of management. So, the divisional level, obviously, you would be dealing mostly with middle management, but at the corporate level, at the policy committee level, you'd be dealing directly with senior management.

So, a workplace committee might meet once a month, a divisional committee might meet once a quarter, and the corporate or a policy committee might meet twice a year. So, that allows for communication, but timely communication. And it also allows for, you know, really getting the salient information because, you know, senior managers in an organization with 10,000 employees really aren't concerned with whether or not somebody did every single monthly inspection at Facility X.

They just want to know that we completed 99% of our inspections and we didn't find anything particularly dangerous.

- Yeah. At different levels, different people need to know different things. How eloquent...

- Well, people have different focuses. At different levels of the organization, the focuses are different. And so at the workplace level, you know, are there hazards? Is it safe? At the, you know, middle management level, it is, are we providing the appropriate resources to facilitate a safe workplace? At senior management is, is the health and safety system working? Is it doing what it's supposed to?

Are we on top of the risk profile?

- Yeah. I'm going to go back and mention another pitfall that you had pulled out. And that was, the committee is overwhelmed. So, other than the committee saying, hey, we're overwhelmed, what are the other signs of this? At what point is a committee just working hard and doing great stuff, and at what point are we maybe giving them too much?

- Well, it often isn't the committee being given too much, it's often the committee taking on too much. And when a committee's overwhelmed, you know, you tend to find one of the co-chairs has a messiah complex and they're crusading for, I don't know what. And so, the terms of reference is so important to keep the committee focused.

And so committees can get into, you know, we're going to do everything. We're going to be everything to everyone. And one of the ways that committees get overwhelmed is in a unionized environment, you get shop stewards on the committee, which sounds like a good idea, but they like to talk about labor relations issues, not health safety issues. And sometimes if you get people, you know, from human resources on the committee, again, they want to talk about things that are important to them.

So, you know, the committee can easily get overwhelmed because let's face it, you know, most committees you're going to meet, I don't know, 10 times a year for an hour. So, that's 10 whole hours in a year. Sure, there's a bit of pre-work and everything. So, let's say there's 30 hours in a year that you're going to spend on this committee doing some kind of committee activities.

That really isn't a lot of time. You know, and that's why the committee needs support from the employer because the committee can't run around and do all these things. I mean, if the committee says, hey, we've got a couple of solutions here, we need to get those costed out. Does that mean someone from the committee's got to make all these phone calls and pull together these quotes? I mean, that's certainly something that the health and safety committee could do or some other part of the organization procurement could do because the committee members' time is valuable.

And so committees get overwhelmed by trying to do too much, but they also get overwhelmed by not having well-organized meetings. And what I mean by that is there's an agenda that comes out that says, we're going to have a meeting, it's going to be at 10:00 on Wednesday, and we're going to talk about safety stuff. Boy, you know, the co-chair has an important role in putting out a clear agenda.

And, of course, at the beginning of the meeting, saying, this is the agenda, does anyone have anything to add because we're going to decide right now if we're going to talk about that this time? So, co-chairs have to structure the meeting so that they are going to last about an hour because people's time is valuable.

And to appreciate that time and show that that time is valuable and make sure the meeting is properly organized. Because I've been to health and safety committee meetings that lasted four hours and they accomplished not much. So, it's easy for a committee to get overwhelmed, but it's important that committees understand that they can pick and choose what information they want, what issues that they're going to address because not every issue is the end of the world.

Not every issue is high risk. Not every issue really bears the committee's full attention. In some cases, committees can just hand off an issue to the health and safety department, to a manager, and it'll be resolved. So, it's easy for committees to get overwhelmed. And I mean, I really can't stress that enough because if you have an engaged committee, they want to do a lot of things, but keeping them focused is so important.

And that's why I talked earlier about, does the committee have a project. Because that helps keep the committee focused on the work it's supposed to be doing, not on the work they would like to be doing. And, you know, it's about wants and needs. The committee wants certain things, they need certain things, but really they're required to do a fairly narrow scope of things.

- Well, and you talked about training as well. So that occurs to me that, you know, facilitation is a skill, keeping things moving at a clip, making sure no one person is dominating the conversation, that there's not sort of this scope creep in terms of topics. So, that might be a good place for training as well.

- Absolutely. I think, you know, we kind of miss that. You know, it's not so bad if you're a manager and they say, hey, you're going to chair this committee, plan the meeting, do what you need to do, no problem. But what if you're a truck driver or a welder? That's intimidating. And if there isn't sufficient guidance or even some training to assist you in chairing a meeting, you know, it's not a monkey see, monkey do sort of thing.

You really do have to think about that. And it is, in some cases, quite demanding to keep control of a meeting. But as I alluded to earlier, you know, people take this mandated legislative training, it doesn't cover things like that.

- So, a lot of the discussion is about setting up a safety committee, but I would think that, in many cases, safety professionals are inheriting existing committees. And those existing committees may not be at all effective. So, what is your advice, like, where to start for someone who has inherited what they can plainly see is an ineffective committee?

Should they revitalize it? Should they stop it and then rebuild it later?

- Well, I think that health and safety professionals, unfortunately, often walk into these situations where, you know, you have a dysfunctional health and safety committee or committees. You need to go and sit in a meeting and not say anything unless someone asks you to, and try and understand the dynamic in the meeting.

In some cases, the chair of the meeting just completely steamrolls everyone, doesn't get any input, and they have their agenda and that's all that's important. So, you need to understand the dynamic. And, you know, going back to basics, you can ask people on the committee, "What's the committee for? What does it do?"

And you'll often get very, very different answers from people. And, of course, the all-important question is, what would you like it to be? What would you like it to do? Because, you know, people do have expectations when their time is being taken up. And, you know, some people are just waiting to get off the committee, you know, I'm getting replaced in six months, that's all I know.

But understanding the dynamic and really understanding what people think the committee's purpose is, and often I can tell you that companies and employers don't really have a good idea of what the health and safety committee is supposed to be doing. So, they have no idea why it's not effective. And small wonder, the people on the committee, since the employer has no idea what they're supposed to be doing and has no expectations, it's pretty hard for you to be effective because there's no accountability structure and no one's really sure what it is really you're supposed to be doing.

So, the place that you could really start once you understand what is happening, how this came to be isn't to revamp the committee really and write new rules and everything, but, you know, the health and safety professional would work with the employer and say, look, you've got all these people, you know, you've got 100 people that are going to all these meetings, what do you expect from that?

Do you want some kind of output? Do you think they should be doing something constructive? If that's the place to start, you know, you can't blame people for being ineffective when they haven't been given any clear direction. I'm going to mention a couple of pitfalls that you mentioned in the book as well for when a committee is sort of already ineffective, some different ways, and maybe you have some advice for listeners who have seen this.

So, one of them is a committee has difficulty reaching consensus.

- Yeah. You know, committees, not just health and safety committees, but any committee normally runs by consensus. You know, do we generally agree? That means that people may disagree, but, you know, as the chair, you would say, well, we've addressed those concerns, or at least we think we've addressed those concerns adequately.

You know, do we generally agree? And, you know, there's often people who are argumentative on health and safety committees. You know, they have very strong views, and that's often a function of them not getting the information. I'm sure we've all been to meetings where somebody says, "Look at this. I need you to make a decision on this. Yes or no."

And you're like, "Well, this is a 30-page document that doesn't tell me anything. I need more information." So, committees often end up being...and I see this happen where the chair takes a vote, which is really a good way to divide people and make people unhappy instead of a more respectful approach and saying, "Does anyone have any comments on what's being discussed?"

And it's okay if the committee can't reach a consensus at a meeting and needs to defer, but consistent deferrals and, you know, vacillating, that's always very bad. That really harvests the committee's effectiveness. And that really goes back to training and making sure that people understand how the committee works. It is not a popularity contest.

You do not vote on things. People get their say and have their concerns addressed. And generally, you know, does everyone agree? And normally, I call it polling. You know, when something's been discussed, you go around the table and say, "Do you have anything to add? Do you feel your concerns have been addressed?"

Or, you know, and maybe not resolved, but just addressed. And that's a good way to get consensus because some people will say...I mean, I've been in that position myself on boards and committees, you know, I understand, but I don't agree. And we're moving on because I got a chance to voice my dissent, but, you know, most of the board or committees said, "Oh, yeah, well, we think this is okay."

Fair enough. So, you know, people come into the committee and they seem to think sometimes that everyone has to agree, not true. There's always going to be people that disagree, and frankly, that's healthy. That's what you want.

You want people who don't agree. There's no need to get into a fight about it, who just acknowledge that they have concerns. And maybe later, they might get to say, I told you, this wouldn't work, but, you know, the committee must move on with its business. So, you know, a lot of times committees get deadlocked on issues, and they're like, no, where, you know, half of the committee says this, half of the committee says that.

If you're in a larger organization, that's a good opportunity to escalate something and say, look, we can't agree on the right path here. Maybe this goes to the divisional committee. We need a decision from them. Or the committee can make a recommendation to the employer and say, you know, we're not sure what to do here, but here's some options and let the employer make the decision.

But if a committee can't reach consensus, that kind of means there's some infighting. And frankly, that eats up a tremendous amount of time and energy when really, you know, it's not necessary for everyone to agree. And I think it's very important for the co-chairs, in particular, to understand the whole concept of consensus rather than trying to get everyone to agree to everything, because, you know, most committees have 10 or 12 members, and you're never going to get 12 people to agree on anything, other than the meeting should be over now.

- I was going to say that that's maybe also a good rule for terms of reference. Like, you know, if we reach a deadlock or whatever, these are the options we can take, or this is how we typically handle this sort of thing.

- And lots of terms of reference would have something in there to resolve those kinds of issues. You know, some kind of a resolution process that's required in some places, but it is a good idea, as you say.

- Well, I'm going to move on to some questions that I ask all my guests. And this one is about training tomorrow's safety professionals, which you know a little bit about having done so. If you could only focus...if you could only teach soft skill training, which is to say human relationship-type skills as opposed to technical skills, what do you think the most important of those skills would be for future safety professionals to master or, you know, work on?

- I think one of the most important skills is how to have the difficult conversation. Health and safety professionals are often not delivering good news. You know, this is not in compliance. We had an incident.

You know, this isn't working right. And, you know, you really have to be able to develop the skills to have that difficult conversation. When you see somebody doing something that is risky or downright unsafe, calling them a name might feel good, but that certainly isn't the way to go.

You know, one of my favorite, you know, opening phrases is, can you help me understand why you're doing that or why you're doing that that way? I'm not sure I understand why it is you do the job in this manner because you're not the expert. You're never the expert.

And you need to understand you're never the expert in that conversation. The person you're talking to is the expert. And you're trying to get information and cooperation. So, the way to get information and cooperation is to be respectful, to be curious. It is not to be judgmental or tell them they're breaking some kind of law. That's not where the conversation should start or end.

And so having those difficult conversations, but being respectful. You know, when you show up and there's been an incident, your first question should not be, who is the idiot who did this, or what the heck happened here? Your first question should be, "Is everyone all right? How can I help?"

Safety professionals sometimes look upon themselves as some kind of an enforcement person or a compliance person, or, you know, we've all heard the safety cop, but being able to relate to people and have those hard conversations where you are basically telling someone, I don't think you're doing your job correctly.

I don't think this is safe." But you can't say that because they think they're doing the right thing. So, you have to be able to engage that person and say, "Look, I am not an expert here, but can you explain to me why it is you're doing that in that manner?" I think health and safety professionals have built a reputation for themselves over, I don't know, the past 20 or 30 years that I've been in health and safety as people who are far too judgmental and, you know, they need to be more inquisitive and respectful.

- That would be an excellent start. Yeah. And I mean, difficult conversations are difficult for a reason. And so, you know, it's a good idea to learn how to deal with them. If you could go back in time to the beginning of your safety career, and I know you had a lot of military years, they may have overlapped with safety, but the beginning of your safety career, what's one piece of advice that you might give to yourself?

- I think that, well, it's kind of counterintuitive. I think don't be afraid to take credit for successes. But I would temper that with saying, don't dare take credit for safety performance successes because that's not you, that's the organization, that's the people in operations. But if you have a success, you know, you redo a training program and you put in place an initiative, don't be afraid to take credit, but don't take credit for the organization's success, and certainly don't take credit for some giveaway of hats and jackets like that makes things safer.

And I guess the other thing I would say is, you know work on the relationships. You know, I'll tell you a bit of a story about that. I was part of a very high-powered safety team in a large organization. And there was, you know, I think five managers. And at the time, the CEO was very, very concerned about where the company was in terms of health and safety, and it needed to improve.

And we did some fantastic work to bring the company along. But in some cases, what happened was certain areas started saying, we're perfect. We've got perfect score on all of our safety metrics. We're doing all the stuff. Everything's great. You know, and there was sort of a zero-tolerance approach for any kind of infractions or deviations.

In my area, we always had a lower score than the other areas. And, you know, with my management team, I said, you know, this is honest. We know where the problems are. We're working on it. We need to solve the problems. We need to understand where we are and solve the problems.

And that was our focus. No one was running around saying, you know, somewhat deviated is terrible. It's the end of the world. Safety trumps all. And, of course, as with all things, you know, the wheel turned and safety became less important as our safety performance improved. And so there came a time when they felt that, you know, we had accomplished the critical or the crucial turnaround of the company, and now we needed less horsepower in the health and safety department.

And all of those other managers got laid off and I remained because I took a different approach. Don't think you're the smartest person in the room and don't think you're always right. There's always someone in the room that's smarter than you are, and there's always someone in the room that probably thinks you're wrong, and they might be right.

- I've had a lot of guests point out that, you know, a lack of incidents, it could just mean a whole lot of near misses that no one is comfortable...is speaking up about. So, better to know where improvements are needed than to have no information really.

- Absolutely. Absolutely.

- So, how could our listeners learn more about some of the things we talked about today? Obviously, there's the book, but are there any websites or concepts or places that you think have been maybe really helpful to you in your own journey?

- You know, I wish I could say there are, and that's why I wrote a book because, you know, it was really difficult to find good material. And, you know, that's why there's not really any references to other publications in my book. It tends to be an overlooked area when it comes to health and safety committees. But I do, or at least I do try to keep my website up-to-date in terms of all the blogs that I write, you know, and I do write blogs on topics related to safety committees.

A lot of people will go to whoever their regulator is and say, hey, what do you have to help me look at my safety committee or improve my safety committee? And sometimes those are good resources and sometimes they're not very good. I think that, you know, in terms of looking at safety committees and improving safety committees, you have to understand the dynamic, understand what the organization wants, and try and assist those people in feeling valued.

It's not as important as what it is that, you know, these little things that committee does or has to do, it's about making people feel like they're doing something that is important and that their contribution is valued. No one wants to be part of a committee where no one cares about what they do and they can't accomplish anything.

- Well, you mentioned your website, where can our listeners...and we'll have this in the show notes as well, but where can our listeners find you on the web? Is LinkedIn also a good place?

- I'd say rarebit.ca, that's connected to my LinkedIn profile, of course. And, you know, with a last name like Rebbitt, I am not hard to find.

- I don't know anything about that with a last name like Conquest. Well, I'm afraid our time is up. I'd like to thank our listeners for tuning in, and thanks so much for chatting with me today, Dave.

- It was a real pleasure. Thank you very much, Mary.

- As always, I'd like to give my thanks to the "Safety Labs by Slice" team, best committee ever. Bye for now. Safety Labs is created by Slice, the only safety knife on the market with a finger-friendly blade. Find us at sliceproducts.com.

Until next time, stay safe.