Expert Views on the Role of a Safety Professional

In this episode, we’re conducting a thorough investigation of a EHS practitioner’s job description to help you focus on the areas of workplace safety that matter most.

We've compiled a collection of thoughts, opinions and ideas about Safety professional’s key responsibilities from 20 of our previous guests.

All agree that practitioners are no longer “Safety Cops” but what should they be instead: facilitators, conduits, coaches? Are they best placed to write policies, implement procedures or conduct investigations? Do duties need to expand into workplace bullying, mental health and full psychosocial risk management? And is Safety even the HSE professional's responsibility??

This Safety role special presents multiple perspectives on these crucial questions from experienced HSE professionals, consultants, authors and academics. It doesn't conclude with a definitive job description, but will help you decide what to do more of - and what is no longer in your remit.

Featured guests (in order of appearance):

James Junkin (Episode 37): What is a Safety Professional?
Tanya Hewitt (Episode 7): What do we think the Safety manager's job is?
Sam Goodman (Episode 27): Redefining the role of Safety
Subena Colligan (Episode 34): Organizations don’t understand what Safety practitioners do
Chris Smith (Episode 2): Safety is the ultimate change leadership position
Chris Moulden (Episode 31): From Safety Cop to ultimate team player
Mikel Bowman (Episode 51): The power of Safety professionals
David Provan (Episode 58): Safety professionals can’t be everywhere!
Bob Edwards (Episode 53): Safety practitioners can’t fix everything!
Tony Muschara (Episode 70): Safety is not the Safety professional's responsibility
Brye Sargent (Episode 11): Safety practitioners shouldn’t implement Safety policies
Bridget Leathley (Episode 19): Safety professionals aren't solely responsible for procedures
Dr Gary Namie (Episode 41): Safety should be responsible for workplace bullying
Jason van Schie (Episode 33): Safety’s role in managing psychosocial risks
Mark Alston (Episode 16): Facilitation is more important than Compliance
Tim D’Ath (Episode 61): Safety professionals are conduits
Cameron Stevens (Episode 62): Safety practitioners' role as a concierge
Nicolai Massyn (Episode 63): Safety professionals are ideally placed to manage ESG
Dr Todd Loushine (Episode 74): The heightened value of Safety practitioners
Rosa Carrillo (Episode 57): Safety is an overlooked resource
David Provan (Episode 58): The future role of a Safety professional…

- [Mary] Hi there. Welcome to another Safety Labs by Slice special. This time we're investigating the broadly defined, wide ranging and constantly evolving role of a safety professional.

- HSC practitioners use a range of skills where a number of hats and overlap with other organizational functions. But is this generalized approach effective? And if not, what is effective? And how can you navigate your responsibilities when coworkers and leaders have a safety fix it mindset?

- Responsibilities vary according to your organization's industry, size, structure and needs. But is there a consensus that can help you focus and prioritize your work?

- We've compiled a collection of thoughts, opinions and ideas about the role of a safety professional
from previous guests. These are the voices of experienced HSC professionals, consultants, authors and academics. We hope their views bring you more clarity about your role as a safety professional.

- James Junkin, Chief Executive Officer at Mariner-Gulf Consulting & Services.

- [James] When the HR, human resources department is looking for a safety professional, there's like, well, what does that mean? So, they go to other organizations and copy and paste and copy and paste. And I think that's holding back the profession a little bit from getting qualified individuals into jobs that they need. And it's really been a battle that we've fought since the really advent of the term safety professional. When I say attorney, everybody knows that that's somebody that went to law school and minimally passed some type of bar exam. The same thing's true if I talk about an accountant or a CPA, I know what that means. But when I say safety professional, that's everyone from an entry-level person that maybe only have a year's worth of experience in an OSHA 30, and Dr. Linda Martin, who's got a Ph.D., CSP, CIH, and a bunch of other letters behind her name that I can't remember off the hand, but everything in between, right? So, what is a safety professional? And I think we as an organization, or a profession rather, need to really start trying to tighten up and define what it means to be a safety professional.

- [Mary] Tanya Hewitt, Founder at Beyond Safety Compliance.

- I understand that safety managers have a high burnout rate. Do you think the structure of organizations has any effect on that?

- [Tanya] Oh, absolutely. I mean, I can remember attending a talk years ago where they had shown the org chart of an organization where the safety manager was given office space away from everybody else, you know, organization where the safety manager was given office space away from everybody else, you know, organization where the safety manager was given office space away from everybody else, you know, and it was just okay. So, what do we think the safety manager's job is? I mean, is it truly just to sit in an office and create charts all day, or is it to actually engage with the workforce and understand what's going on and to be a resource to people? I mean, a lot of the revised safety manager-type role could be seen more as a facilitator because a lot of safety managers do have contacts throughout the business. They know the different business lines, and they could actually be a facilitator and introduce people to each other who can help one another as opposed to being, you know, the savior of all kind of role.

- [Mary] Sam Goodman, Human & Organizational Performance Consultant.

- [Sam] Anybody that's been around the profession for a second automatically know exactly where I'm going with that. They hear, "Safety, fix it," they know. That's that safety person there on-site, at a location, in their office. I mean, beats down the door and goes, "Oh my God, I've just walked past somebody out there about to kill themselves. You need to go do something about that." And, of course, the first thing that pops in our head is like, "Why didn't you do something about that if they're about to die, right? Why didn't you say, "Hey, you might want to come down here? Let's figure out what's going on." It's that. It's that desire for the safety practitioner in an organization to be basically the safety Easy Button for the company. Safety, fix it, is really about the safety professional being the Easy Button and/or the kind of counterweight for incompetent leadership in the organization. It's that, right? And we see that play out a lot of times in organizations where it's like, our leaders are not really good at dealing with people. They're really screwing things up. Let's not focus on that. Let's throw a safety professional on the other side of the scale to balance that out. So when they're out there, you know, kind of running people into the ground, we'll send out the safety professional to say, "Look, there's no such thing as time pressure." That's part of that kind of safety fix-it mentality. That's part of that kind of safety fix-it mentality. It really comes back to the Easy Button thing. Is it's that organizations are looking at that going, "We're going to hire someone to manage safety for us." And we all know how that kind of works out. It ends up with crap safety management systems, crap safety programs, and it ends up with a burnout safety professional that you're going to go through at least one or two a year almost at that point. You're just going to cycle people out. And that could be down to something as simple as, "Hey, you know, there was a trip hazard out there, you need to go do something about that. Hey, there was an event, you're the punching bag now. Hey, there's this? Hey, there's that." If there's anything that's even remotely, could even remotely be tied into being safety-related, it automatically goes to the practitioner to manage, to take care of, to own, to run to ground. The one that sticks out to me is I was at a site years back, early on in my profession, and they're like, "Hey, listen, we need more chairs in the lunchroom. That's a safety thing. You need to figure out how to order more chairs and get more chairs in the lunchroom." It's that?

- [Mary] So how do you overcome that now that, you know, our newbies are listening to this? What do you do to shift that?

- [Sam] So for me, it was kind of back to a point that we're just talking about is redefining the role within your organization. So if you're in an organization that's... And that's not always possible. I'll throw that in there as well. Right? That's not always possible, but I can touch on that in a second. But it's defining a role that's based on actual positive influence impact, right? So let's probably start there is that, a role that's made up of safety, fix it, is just ineffective. It just doesn't work.

- [Mary] Subena Colligan, Principal at EHS Transformation Consultants.

- [Subena] A lot of organizations still do not have a clear understanding of what we do, and they don't understand fully how to provide us resources and how to support and how to delineate the responsibilities. Because when it comes to well-being, it's a full organization function. Part of like the base level is that people are physically safe at their job. If you're not physically safe at your job, that's a problem. That's where we come in, we're a part of the foundation. But if leaders across operations, human resources, if they don't have the right training, the right skill set, the right soft skills, and they're not being held to that requirement of ensuring that people are adhering to policy, that they have what they need, that they're doing the things that they're supposed to do, and that they also have the voice to express that they are not feeling well within their environment, then it increases the likelihood that they have a physical incident, which then falls right back on the safety professional. So, it's just this cycle.

- [Mary] Chris Smith, Author of Intrinsic Stability.

- One thing that you said that caught my eye in your book immediately was that you called EHS the "ultimate change leadership position."

- [Chris] It is.

- [Mary] Yeah, so can you tell me a bit more about that?

- [Chris] Ow, absolutely. So Mary, the EHS position is a very powerful position inside of an organization and it does wield a lot of influence because many of the things that we touch are really the core of what the business values. Not just the people side, and certainly, that's most important, but the equipment, and the processes, and all the things that intertwine, all the connective tissue that an organization has to maintain a strong health around really runs through the EHS position where we touch it at almost every level. There's no doors closed to us. There's no meetings we can't have. So I think that's a very unique position in terms of how an organization values a specific function. So inside of that we do meet with upper leadership. We do meet with leadership that are lower in the business. We meet with team members, and really we have a platform and we can set a stage and a cadence that is unique to this
profession. And I think that's really... If we understand that going in, then really we can leverage a lot of that in a constructive way to help the organization improve and grow the cultures and the types of things that we want those organizations to reflect. Training in all of those things are very, very important, and I don't have to tell this audience. It's important we maintain compliance. That certainly is part of the luxury of having the EHS people, professional EHS people in those organizations. We don't leave it to chance so we hire very smart people and they understand the compliance. But the compliance by itself doesn't get us a world-class culture and that's really the soft skills that you referred to, Mary. How do we refine that?

- [Mary] Chris Moulden, Vice President of HSE at Primoris Renewable Energy.

- Do you think it's changing in the wider industry, again, within your experience?

- [Chris] Yes, it 100% is. But you can't take away the fact that we all have it ingrained in us just kind of slightly take a... We're going to take an off-ramp right now. But if you think about it, when you're driving on a freeway and you see a police officer, what do you do? You're probably checking your speed, you're looking down and looking up.

- [Mary] Most people look at their speedometer right away.

- [Chris] Look at speedometer right away, right? You probably have all your pores open up and close
really quickly and you're like... And you're looking in the rearview mirror when you pass that guy, that cop who's sitting on the side of the road, and your blood pressure went up, your heart... And you didn't even do anything wrong. Like, where did that come from? Where did that come from? And so early in my career,
safety professionals were viewed like that. I mean, you could see where you'd go out to the field and you can hear the radio racket happening, and they'd have these little code words and da da da, you know, whatever it was, you know, "Hey, mama's making pie," or whatever it is, and the next thing, you know, like, people knew to scurry around or do something different. So, back then, at the very least, you knew that they knew how to do it right. So, you would see good working behaviors, but if that word didn't get out, then you're able to see, okay, some things maybe are being done a little bit differently than the expectation. And so, I believe back in the day, like, the safety cop would come out and say, "I'll write you up." I can't remember the last time I've heard of a safety professional writing someone up to be honest with you. We're talking probably 10 years since I've heard that.

- [Mary] Well, that's good. It's just sort of a stereotype that I hear guests referring to, and I think they use it as shorthand to mean traditional command and control.

- [Chris] Yeah. Again, if you're in the safety business, you exist to serve an operational function. Again, if you're in the safety business, you exist to serve an operational function. Like a safety professional, you know, unless you have your own private consulting firm, you're not out there for, say, generating income like maybe the folks in the warehouse on the construction project. Your sole job is a servant job. You are a servant of the corporation. To advise and to make sure that the folks understand expectations, to coach, to correct where necessary. That, to me, is a recipe for success. You literally put on the same jersey as the folks in the field, and you could be the, you know, in terms of a football team, you could be considered the physical therapist or the coach on the side. But no matter what, it's a one-team mentality and it's
a mission-first mentality. And I think that we've come a long way from a belief system in terms of, like, safety is over there and operations over here. And so,I have really seen a
convergence of what that looks like.

- [Mary] Mikel Bowman,  President at Bowman Legacies.

- [Mikel] I would like to see also from businesses, I would like to see businesses take their safety people more seriously. I'm very weary right now of the story of getting safety people calling me or talking to me about their leadership team not actually engaging in leadership as if the safety...there's a safety director, he's got that handled. We talk about production, we talk about the next job, but we're not really a part of any of the safety initiatives. If you're a CEO or president and your safety director comes out with a safety initiative, you need to have the integrity and the wherewithal as a leader to know what it is and be engaged to eat it so you can empower others as a part of it. It shouldn't be a section that's different. I would also like to see every entry-level worker truly conceptualize and understand that safety is not the safety director's job. As a safety director, safety is not your job. It's the employee who's doing the works job. It's your job to monitor it. And you wouldn't even have a position if people, one, were disengaged when they came to work, or two, the, you know, production wasn't pushed above that of people. And so what's phenomenal is you are a superhero. And so lastly I'll say this, I want safety people to really see the power. And so lastly I'll say this, I want safety people to really see the power of their position. To lead from the middle cannot only change someone's work life, but their home life as well. You have an opportunity to grow people in such a way with what you do that it can literally revolutionize their lives. You know, I talk about legacy a lot people, and I'm here to tell you right now, that is legacy. That is legacy, not money that you leave behind, not statues that were made in your honor, none of that means squat because after the annals of history is over and you'll be far forgotten and the deeds that you do will be far forgotten. The intentions you put forward in life will perpetuate themselves for an eternity. And I'm here to tell you the safety people are the true heroes of the industrial complex. And if you'll conceptualize and understand that and grab ahold of it and walk in it, you will see cultures change. You will see mindsets change. You will see what you thought was impossible Move, because I know it, because I've lived it. It's not easy. It's the harder way. It's not about the box that gets checked, okay? It's bigger than that. It's much bigger than that. And then when you lead in that way, I'm going to tell you, you're going to see your citations go down. You're going to see compliance go up because you've got engaged, empowered people and they're doing things for you because they're willing to march to hell with you and back because they've watched you walk it and it's inspired them to do the same.

- [Mary] David Provan, CEO at Forge Works.

- When you were talking about being the safety cop, I was thinking, "Man, that must be exhausting." And it would be because you'd have to do it continuously, whereas with this kind of alliance building, people I imagine then come to you, you know, you've created partnerships basically.

- [David] And it can't be everywhere. So, an average organization in a high-hazard sort of environment with an operational footprint will have between 1 to 100 to 1 to 500 safety professionals for other roles in the organization. So, you got somewhere between maybe 0.1%, 0.2% of staff to 1% of staff in your safety team. And so you can only ever be involved in 1% of things that are going on in the business, even if you're full-time involved in things in the business. So, 99% of activity is going to happen in your organization without the eyes and ears of a safety person purely through available time. So, on one hand, it makes the choices that a safety professional makes about how they spend their time really, really important. And on the other hand, it also means that you can't have a compliance-based approach because you just can't mobilize the surveillance that would be required to do that. You'd almost have to have a one-for-one, you know, one safety person on the shoulder of every one other person in the business if you were going to try to do that reliably and effectively.

- [Mary] Bob Edwards, Human & Organizational Performance Consultant at The HOP Coach.

- For many of us, the natural inclination is to want to, "Okay, now I understand all the things." Of course, it'll never be all the things, but now I understand many, many more things and the inclination is to want to fix it all. Which is it can be a little intimidating too, I imagine.

- [Bob] Well, yeah, it's terrifying, actually. Yeah. It's not possible. So as a matter of fact, because it is
complex as we're working to make things So as a matter of fact, because it is complex as we're working to make things better for the conditions now, things are shifting, things are changing. And I've seen this, once again, I didn't study deep theoretical stuff. I'm just a practitioner and stuff. I just do it all the time and I started realizing, you know, we would say, "Hey, they didn't sustain what we put in place." Which is sometimes true, Mary. Sometimes we put a pretty good thing in place and people don't sustain it. But then my question now is is it really a pretty good thing if it's hard to sustain? And then second of all, I started
realizing that in some cases it's not  a sustainability problem. It's sort of a failure of safeguard evolution. Like the things we put in place, we put them in like, I fixed it but the work's still changing and shifting, and something more to key now. We're working differently now. We're still expecting this solution from six months ago to still work now when in fact it needed to actually change and evolve as the work has. And so that's another reason why I don't think we have to fix everything. We certainly want to make things better but I think you overwhelm yourself if you try to fix everything and I don't even know if that's necessary. I definitely want to fix the things that the operators believe will make the work better and of course, any compliance that we always do. I don't want to be out there. What about compliance? So it's compliance things that serve us, we need to straight that out too. But we got to make sure that the work is actually better, right? We're more likely to be successful in the conditions that we have or with the conditions we have out there.

- [Mary] Tony Muschara, Author of ‘Risk-Based Thinking’.

- [Tony] It's the manager's responsibility for quality. It's the manager's responsibility for safety. And so I want to make sure that they understand that if that's their responsibility, they have to have an understanding of how safety happens or how quality happens in their production process. And so I believe that the safety professionals, part of the safety professional's duty is to help And so I believe that the safety professionals, part of the safety professional's duty is to help the line managers understand that safety is not the safety professional's responsibility, he or she is a facilitator to help the line manager
understand what needs to happen when critical or safety-critical activities are being performed or functions in various operations are in progress. Too often, I've sat in planning meetings where the line manager said, "Okay, let's start with our safety moment. We're going to start with a safety moment." And someone speaks for about two, maybe three minutes about safety, and then everybody can breathe a sigh of relief. "We've accomplished our safety objective, yep, we've checked that off. Now we can talk about production." And that mindset is antithetical to safety. Safety happens exactly the same time production happens. I always talk about work. Work is a use of force to create value. And so if you're creating value,
you're producing something, you're manufacturing something, some operation is occurring, that means that there's a hazard in play. If there's a hazard in play to create work, which is force over distance, in other words, something changes, then you better be thinking about safety at the same time you're doing production. So, I see the safety professionals... one of the safety professionals' primary duties to the organization is to educate and train the line managers, but not to take on the role or the responsibility for safety. That's not their purview. It's important for managers to maintain that responsibility.

- [Mary] Brye Sargent, Professional Workplace Safety Coach & Trainer.

- [Brye] So many times, the management teams look to safety managers to hold everybody accountable for safety but safety managers have no authority over the employees. Everybody accountable for safety but safety managers have no authority over the employees.  Zero. And when I say "authority," I mean we can administer consequences, I've written employees up before, but because it's me writing them up,
it doesn't mean anything because I cannot fire that employee. That is the ultimate accountability. And when a safety manager does not have that ability to fire the employee, you cannot administer consequences that are meaningful. It's just going to be a joke, it's going to be a piece of paper in their HR file and maybe one day, they'll use against them. But it doesn't have any meaning to it. Now, I've been in the situation where I've been a safety manager with higher fire authority and I had zero issues getting my safety policies followed because I had authority. But that's not the case in most places. In most places, the person that has authority over the employees are the front-line supervisors or the department managers. So, those are the ones that actually have to implement safety policies and procedures so that way, they can have that accountability with those employees or they can hold those employees accountable.

- [Mary] Bridget Leathley, Health & safety and Human Factors consultant.

- [Bridget] I would never advocate that a health and safety professional sits on their own in a room and writes a procedure because they're not the person who's going to be doing the job. They don't understand the job necessarily, they might have learned about it, they might even be someone who did use to do the job, but they're not really the best person to understand on their own how to write that procedure now for how to do the job. So the first thing is always going to be you've got to involve other people in developing that procedure and and that should be obviously the people who are going to do the task but useful as well to involve the people who are going to maybe supervise the task, and in some cases, the people who are going to be the recipients of that task.

- [Mary] Dr Gary Namie, Director and Co-founder at the Workplace Bullying Institute.

- [Gary] OHS should be front and center because...here's why, they have an opportunity now because the headlines have gone beyond me too to talk about toxic work environments. Those three words are magic. They extend beyond the non-discrimination law compliance because what they're basically talking about is bullying. They're talking about abusive conduct that goes above and beyond sexual harassment. That's workplace bullying. That's abuse... And the name in our legislation, we don't even use workplace bullying, we use abusive conduct. But to me, that level of mainstream media attention should be the launching pad for OHS to get into the C-suite and say, we know what they're talking about and we can help you prevent this, prevent and correct any toxicity in the environment. There are psychosocial work hazards. We can help identify them. This is not something subtle, this is a big deal. So, these guys, the OHS people should be able to come in and say, I know...maybe they're too humble to say this, but we're the experts in toxic work environments. Who better? Toxic work environment has headlined sizzle. OHS, are you listening to me? You safety professionals. It's time to come out of the closet, raise, elevate your status within your organizations, and make known that you have what they need. You want to put out the headline out toxic work environment and getting branded as such in your organization, we can help you. You want to show the C-Suite how it's preventable? Ask for a seat at the table. HR's been asking for decades. They don't deserve it. You deserve it because you actually have something relevant and you can bring the science of the psychosocial safety climate research to bear and apply it in your organizations. You hold the key to snuffing out this toxic work environment so that company doesn't end up in a lawsuit with me as an expert complaining about their toxic work environment. And so I think it's really critical that they rediscover or recommit to a new...I don't know, a new status. When I used to go into organizations, I never met with the safety people. Why would I? Because it was all about preventing broken legs and taking care of physical hazards and trip hazards and MSDS fact sheets and all that other stuff. But no, no, no, now it's in the human realm. Don't you agree, Mary? I think I see an opportunity, but also I see a necessity because HR and legal are never going to fix this. Never.

- [Mary] Jason van Schie,  Managing Director and Psychologist at FlourishDx.

- You were talking about the integration or siloing of psychological health and safety. So in a typical organization, is there a department where you think the responsibility for this kind of management falls most naturally? Is it OHS? Is it HR? Is it a combination?

- [Jason] So this is the thing. So traditionally, workplace mental health has really been in the portfolio of HR or employee benefits. So traditionally, workplace mental health has really been in the portfolio of HR or employee benefits. What this standard really signifies is actually, no, this should be managed like any other health and safety risk, and so really health and safety should be taking the lead. I liken it to how a health and safety professional might work with an engineer. So a health and safety professional might identify a risk based on the environmental conditions that employees are exposed to, or maybe there's a particular hazard like lack of guarding on machinery. So they can identify those hazards. But then they don't go out there with their hammer, you know, and their tool belt to go and fix a duct tape. They get an engineer in, right, to go, "Can you engineer out this hazard?" In the same way, health and safety, I believe using the structured approach can help to identify these hazards and bring light to them, and actually assess the risks associated with these hazards. But then bring in their HR or an organizational development counterpart in order to help engineer out those hazards. So we have heard pushback from some health and safety professionals saying, "I'm not a psychologist, I'm not an OD practitioner." In the same way, we don't expect them to be an engineer, we don't expect them to be an architect, we don't expect them to be electrician, right? All these other hazards where they have to draw around the normal kind of expertise or professionals to be able to deal with those hazards once they've been identified. So yeah, that's something that should be very clear, hopefully, I can make very clear.

- [Mary] You're not expected to become a psychologist, but to learn enough so that you can even just identify the risks and raise the problem, right?

- [Jason] Yeah. So being familiar with the main hazards is actually very useful. There are tools out there of which we design and develop one. There are tools out there to help them to more easily identify and monitor hazards and risks as well. So they don't need to be psychs, they can leverage some of the existing tools and knowledge that's out there, yeah.

- [Mary] Mark Alston, Executive Director and Facilitator at Investigations Differently.

- [Mark] We’re not a cop. I left those days behind years ago, not a cop. I'm not there to do a regulator's job. At the end of the day, what I want from my investigation is to reduce the actual systemic risk within my organization to make it a safer place to work. That's my outcome. If I've done that, I've achieved something. I can be proud of that. And however, how we get there, is by harnessing your people and that's what it's all about. I think defining the role of what a safety professional is, I think they could do a better job there. We're highly focused on compliance when really, we need to be focused on facilitator. We're highly focused on compliance when really, we need to be focused on facilitator. So I think facilitation skills are key. I would encourage any safety professional to really develop their facilitation skills. I would encourage any safety professional to really develop their facilitation skills. How can they bring...you know, identify help. So how they can help organizations discover what their issues are, firstly, not assume what their issues are. Because too often in safety, we come and say, "These are your problems." How about we discover from them what their needs are? Then facilitate, then connecting with the right people to assist with fixing those needs. Or it might be the organization help build the capacity within the organization to fix their own problems. So I think as a safety professional now, we've got to move from compliance. And look, there's always going to be a bit of that, you know, that's part of our role. But I think it should be like a minor part of our role, a major part of our role should be about facilitation. Facilitating organizations improving their own capacity and capability to improve their work. And notice I said work, not safety, right? Because we know it's just an outcome, right, of the work.

- [Mary] Tim D’Ath, Head of Safety at Yarra Valley Water.

- You’ve also described yourself as a frusrated safety professional. So at the time, at least, what is it that was frustrating you about safety?

- [Tim] Yeah, sure. So when I wrote that forward, I was a frustrated safety professional. So when I wrote that forward, I was a frustrated safety professional. I still am sometimes, but it's really about these traditional approaches to safety that so many safety managers or safety professionals are clinging to. So, these paternalistic approaches that really reinforce this parent-child relationship between a safety team and the workforce. And those sort of approaches really undermine a lot of the great work that's happening in safety circles, you know, with progressive safety leaders who are really trying to understand the people more so than trying to impose safety processes or procedures on the workforce with little or no consultation. So when I was frustrated or when I become frustrated, I often go back to this question that I used to ask myself to bring me out of this mode, you know, which is stop trying to look scientific and get on with the job of understanding your people. I feel like so many organizations when it comes to safety are so preoccupied with these endless reports on safety metrics and measuring the lag indicators that don't really tell us a lot. They forget to identify, you know, with their people and really recognize that the people hold the solutions. We hire experts to do expert work, and we shouldn't be developing safety programs on behalf of them, and then trying to implement them in the field without their involvement. It just doesn't work. And it really undermines what I think the safety profession is about, which is engaging with people, helping them identify solutions, and then being a conduit between them and senior management.

- [Mary] Cameron Stevens, Digital Safety Transformation and SafetyTech Strategy Expert.

- You've talked about your role as that of a hotel concierge. I think this kind of dovetails with what you're saying here. So what do you mean by that?

- [Cameron] So it's been cautioned to use. And so language matters. So the word, concierge, is one that makes sense to me, but it might not make sense to others. And I think the origin of the word, concierge, really came around in France, I believe, around the war era where the lady would...the house housekeeper, typically a woman, would hold the keys to all of the rooms. And she would know all the gossip that was going on. And there wasn't really great connotations with the term, concierge. But if you look now at sort of the hotel concierge or the flight purser in an airplane, you know, they're the person that knows a little bit of a lot, is a really good communicator with people, and they can effectively translate complex problems and find out who or what could be the solution to that problem. So, the example I give when I'm trying to fumble my way through an explanation of why I think that concierge is a good metaphor almost of the way I do the work that I do is if you go to a hotel on a family holiday or you are going solo, traveling somewhere, you arrive at a destination and you want to have Vietnamese food, for example, and you're in Calgary. So, you go to the hotel concierge and say, "You know, where's the best Vietnamese in the city?" And the hotel concierge will say, "Oh, sir, Calgary is not the best place for Vietnamese, but there's excellent Cambodian food, or there's excellent French food. What's the reason you're wanting to go for Vietnamese?" And it might be, oh, well, it's my wedding anniversary, or it's my birthday, and every year I have Vietnamese, or there's some motivation as to why I feel like it. Now the concierge may gently steer the person to another direction, or they might provide a variety Now the concierge may gently steer the person to another direction, or they might provide a variety of different options and say why they may be a suitable alternative, but meet the needs of the reason why that person asked in the first place. So translating complex technical challenges and problems with really human-centered problems, there appears a need, at least from my experience to have someone act as that mediator or the translator between the technical folks and the workers who are going to be using the technology or interfacing. And if you think about the role of the health and safety professional, we're very well-placed to be that role, whatever we call it. So we understand work provided we get out there and understand how work is done on a day-to-day basis. We understand how work is planned and designed. We understand the work systems. But the missing link is the technology side. So, with a little boost of digital literacy, we get to bridge the gap and play that role. And I think it's a massive opportunity for health and safety practitioners to explore that side of it.

- [Mary] Nicolai Massyn, Senior Vice President Compliance and Risk at ComplyWorks Ltd.

- How are ESG activities compatible with safety management?

- [Nicolai] Right. I think the cycle of managing risk, doing risk management in organizations, the phases of it, it doesn't matter which type of risks get managed. I think there's a particular phase in which these
things get managed. And ESG is no different from it because ESG is nothing different from just another set of risks that an organization needs to manage. And safety professionals by their very nature, their whole world is predicated on these cycles of identifying risks, then rating them, then identifying controls to manage that risk, implementing that control, measuring to see whether it's being effective or not. And also setting certain objectives or targets, numbers behind it, to see whether you are achieving your objectives, and then going back and deciding whether it's worked or not by seeing whether your numbers are achieving in real life what you set out to achieve, and then improving the cycle. And over and over it goes. So what we are saying fundamentally, the hypothesis is that the cycle that safety So what we are saying fundamentally, the hypothesis is that the cycle that safety professionals follow to do their work is familiar. They have the tools and they have the mechanisms available. And this approach can be applied to a slightly wider basket of risks than they are used to looking, not just the safety, let's put some more risks in that basket and we treat them in the same way. We are not saying that every safety professional
becomes climate adaptation specialist. No, we're just saying that they're good at managing the
process, identifying, okay, adaptation is a risk. What do we need to do about it? Appoint the required specialists to come and assist us with this, get them in, manage the interaction, get the feedback back to
the different business departments. And the same can be said for multiple different elements. Sure, there's a multitude of specialists involved in this, but the process behind it, establishing the risks and in managing the entire ESG management process and inputs management and outputs of the ESG process, that's similar to managing the safety process. And the other element that I'd like to highlight is that safety professionals, they've got the benefit of really being usually very close to the organization. They know what's happening on many different levels, not just in the boardroom. They know what's happening in the back offices, on the sites, in the darkest corners. They know the business, they know the clients, they know the customers, they know the complaints. So they're very well-positioned to really understand
what impacts business has on the wider stakeholders. I think they can play a really...make a really great
contribution in helping with the materiality assessments as well because they really know the business.

- [Mary] Dr Todd Loushine, HSE Associate Professor at University of Wisconsin.

- [Todd] I do think that we are starting to move past what I think for like maybe 30 or 40 years was the way to practice. And here's the thing, at least in the U.S. if you look at the injury rates. And we can't trust those numbers, so let's not say that I'm saying it's gravity, but they've been stagnant. When something is stagnant, what do you have to do? You got to change the way you... Yes, that's exactly right. And I think people are starting to realize that. And I also think that newer technologies, use of the internet, you know, just a different perspective on what the practice does, especially I think the pandemic, you know, kind of heightened the value of safety professionals and have them reporting to higher-ups in the organization versus when you report to a lower level, your sphere of control is very limited, especially then also your resources are limited. But what I see is our ability to really understand, what are we really here for. What are we trying to do? It's not just eliminate injuries, it's to make the work more successful, reduce the risk as much as possible, and hopefully, workers can elicit satisfaction from the work they do. reduce the risk as much as possible, and hopefully, workers can elicit satisfaction from the work they do. I hope that becomes more of the, what does safety do versus the send people home in the same condition they came in. Because they can come in and act a fool and go home in the same condition they came in. What have we done? You know, it's the little things we do that add up over time. And if we can express that...you know, I go out and I talk to the workers. I spend some time with the engineers and I help them out. My boss is having a bad day, so I talk them through it. You know, these are the things we can do. We can be the positive influence like we're supposed to be versus the, you know, let's just, oh, as long as no one gets hurt, we can have that pizza party. Come on you, guys. Let's change. But I see a lot of change. I see a lot of change in the language. I do see some resistance. And I think it's really interesting that it's so quickly on the ESG approach. I see a lot of people against that. And what they're saying is safety has its place. We've done some environmental stuff, leave us alone with this thing. And, you know, initially, I thought, well, you know, we're already there, but you're right. We already have enough on our plate. We do have a lot on our plate. And I think the more we try to pursue this idea of how the things we do every day contribute to worker success, to, you know, leader success and understand helping them communicate as well, I think we will then really substantiate what our field is, and I think then it can get more of a structure to the discipline itself versus like what the original antsy Z, whatever it said, that identify problems, fix the problems, train people, build a program. You know, it's sure, but there's so much more to it.

- [Mary] Rosa Carrillo, Author of The Relationship Factor in Safety Leadership.

- [Rosa] I started interviewing safety professionals and learning about the stress that they were under because they were really carrying the load for COVID and prevention of spreading the disease. You know, when I went out to the sites, the managers were all working from home but the safety professionals were on-site. They were essential...we call them essential workers, right? And then it came to me because I've been working with them for so many years, and I have so many good friends that at least the people that...you know, I have met some that didn't fit this description, but most of the people I met that work in this field are very caring. They want to help people. They want to take care of people. And so I thought to myself, this is a really overlooked resource in our organizations, the whole safety and health field because they tend to feel isolated, unheard. They're not invited to operational meetings the way they should be. All the things that we've talked about in terms of psychological safety, they tend not to have that experience. You know, a few do. And I've talked to them as well. It's really wonderful when you find a job where some
people value what you really have to contribute to the organization.

[Mary] David Provan, CEO at Forge Works.

- So what's the future role of a safety professional?

- [David] I think there's a lot that safety teams need to need to do. I guess, and this is probably a whole separate conversation, but just to be clear, is, you know, the purpose that I gave the profession was to create foresight about the changing shape of risk and facilitate action before people get harmed. So, this idea that the safety professionals got to have an understanding of what is the current risk landscape in my organization today in real-time, and what does that mean for the risk landscape next week, next month, next year. What trajectory are we on as an organization, and what action needs to be facilitated to make adjustments before people get hurt? And so it's this idea that we really need to be far more centered in what's happening today and proactive about what's happening in the future. And the challenge that we face as a profession is that most safety professional activity is reactive, or it's planned and scripted. So, things we do is responding to incidents or nonconformances or regulator or customer requests, or it's a planned meeting, a planned audit, a planned inspection, or some other planned activity. When I talk with safety professionals, I say, look, to be really effective in your role, or to be effective or to do the best role you can is you should have 50% of your week on Monday completely unallocated, and completely unallocated for white space. And that's the space that you need to spend roaming your organization, connecting with people, understanding what's going on in real-time, investigating weak signals and other sort of things that are happening, getting involved in work planning activities, and real-time decision-making and things like that. And when I talk to safety professionals around that, mostly they just say, that's just a pipe dream. I'm 40 hours a week, wall-to-wall meetings all week every week. And so I guess when we talk about the future of the profession aligned with that role purpose, I've come up with a whole bunch of activities that safety people should do to do those things that I've...you know, to be focused on those things that I've just mentioned, but it has to start with having more space. And that means stopping doing a whole bunch of things that safety people are currently doing on the safety work, safety clutter side of their role.

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