How To Enhance Safety With a Stop Work Culture

In this episode, Mary Conquest speaks with Rey Gonzalez, a consultant and coach who provides expertise on sustainable performance improvement and human error reduction. He's worked in high-risk industries for over 40 years and has spent most his professional life working to improve safety through ehancing human performance.

Rey explains why empowering co-workers to stop work when they sense risk is such a powerful tool to create a positive safety culture. However, he shares the key reasons why this option is often under-utilized and helps safety professionals ensure this initiative is successfully adopted.

Additionally, he has identified the key role triggers play in predicting safety incidents and explains how you can educate your co-workers to spot these warning signs and reduce risk.

Rey strongly advocates empowering people to proactively contribute to safety management and outlines (with practical tips) the key role HSE professionals play in fostering a psychologically safe workplace.

♪ [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." In high-risk industries, empowering employees to stop work when they feel that something is awry is a great way to get them involved in their safety.

But often, workers don't take advantage of this potentially powerful tool. Why not? What are the human tendencies at play here? To explore why people proceed in the face of uncertainty and how we can ensure that people actually do stop work when they spot a dangerous situation, I'm joined by Rey Gonzalez. Mr.

Gonzalez is a consultant and coach providing expertise on sustainable performance improvement and human error reduction. He's worked in high-risk industries for over 40 years, including the nuclear industry, the electrical generation and distribution industries, and in chemical production. Rey has been passionate about human performance, industrial safety, and organizational effectiveness since the early '90s when he started a position as a human performance coordinator.

After 29 years of working for utilities, Rey started his now 13-year-old consulting career. As the president of HOPE Consulting and CEO of High Reliability Training, he currently coaches and presents for a variety of industries, including the Department of Defense, Oil and Gas, and Healthcare.

Rey's specialties include human error reduction, performance improvement, peer-to-peer and executive coaching, and the development of performance improvement action plans. Rey joins us from the Dallas-Fort Worth metroplex in Texas. Hi.

- [Rey] Hello. Happy to be here.

- Yeah, well, we're happy to have you here. So, let's get right into it. Let's start by defining what Stop Work Authority means. It's also known as Stop the Line in some healthcare settings. What is this kind of permission intended to do?

- Well, I'll tell you that anytime high-risk industries provide what they call Stop Work Authority for their employees, what it's intended to do is to stop whatever task is at hand when they believe something wrong or risky is happening. The situation is going wrong or risky, or maybe even wrong or risky behaviors are being identified.

In the healthcare industry, the Veterans' Administration hospital group came out with Stop the Line back in 2013 and they did an entire campaign called Stop the Line. It's based fundamentally on what we just said. It allows workers to stop anything that's going on should they perceive something is not right, or could be wrong or risky.

So, they made a huge effort for that. I don't know how successful they've been. What I do know is that in other parts of the healthcare industry, Stop the Line is still not known. After nine years of being out there for the Veterans' Administration hospitals systems, other medical professionals don't know what Stop the Line means, which is kind of disconcerting. However, Stop Work Authority is what's generally used in other high-risk industries.

Those you mentioned that I have a background in, people know what that means. And that's kind of what it's about.

- The issue and the reason we're having this discussion is that people don't always use it. I'm sure there are lots of reasons, but in your view, what are some of the more common reasons that people don't stop work?

- Okay. Well, you know, I'll go over four specific reasons that I believe people don't usually use their Stop Work Authority though it's granted to them, or they don't Stop the Line. And it really boils down to two things, it's hesitancy and uncertainty is fundamentally the two big reasons. But we'll talk more about that. Some reasons include that workers feel uncertain that their concerns rise to a level of stopping the job or the task.

They've never had a gauge for where their concerns may be. And does this rise high enough for me to stop work right now? So they don't really have a gauge. They're concerned about that. Another reason is what if...you know, they're concerned about what others might think of them if they're wrong, especially if they're wrong. They stopped the job and all of a sudden, you know, they didn't need to be stopped.

What would they look like? Still, others have never been trained to know how to determine that they're standing in the space of uncertainty and it is time to stop. They just don't know. They've never had that kind of training. We'll talk more about that. And others may just fear repercussion from speaking up, you know, and stopping work. They could be labeled as that guy or gal who's just that troublemaker who's always slowing things down.

And they fear that. There's a lot of different reasons for that. We'll talk more about that when we talk about human nature drivers that exist with that. But really it boils down to just a lack of training and an understanding of knowing when it is time to stop. Again, as I've said, they don't really have a gauge.

Another thing that is lacking other than just knowing the knowledge, the training behind it is just not feeling psychologically safe to speak up. As I mentioned, you know, may fear repercussion or may feel that coming from their peers, peer pressure. So the psychological safety does not exist for people to feel comfortable enough to say, "Hey, let's call a time out here," and not look bad.

- Yeah, as you're speaking, I'm thinking of, you know, younger workers who are just starting. One of the reasons they don't have that gauge is there's just a lack of experience. If someone's been doing that job for 30 years, they know what rises to the level of danger, but unfortunately, they probably know that through accidents and mistakes that have happened. So, yeah, I can see that that would be a concern.

- Well, that's a really good point because I'll tell you, I can't tell you the number of times I've investigated an incident or an accident that has happened where during the interviewing process, we asked, you know, what was going on? What was happening there? And some of the younger or more junior people said, you know, "Yeah, that didn't look right to me, but I didn't speak up because the guy's got 30 years."

And so again, they're succumbing to something else, another human driver that we can talk about later when they look at this person who's been around forever and they think they can do no wrong. So they're not speaking up for it. That happens a lot. And yet even the newest and more...what would that be? The new worker that comes, the inexperienced worker that comes to work, everybody is born with intuition, you know, and our intuition is very powerful.

And it actually helps us determine things that are right and wrong. And intuition is built on life experiences, not necessarily professional experiences. So when that gut feeling, if you will, tells you that something's not quite right, even if it's for the junior worker, you know, the less experienced worker, they need to understand they have full authority to call a time out and stop and ask their question and they have to feel secure enough to do that because oftentimes they are correct.

- So how do people typically deal with risk? What kind of fallacies are involved and what's the role of confidence in our relationship with risk?

- Well, you know, risk is an unusual thing because risk is based on our own perception of risk, how much risk we're willing to take. But there is certain factors out there that influences our ability and our perceptions of risk. And I'll give you a couple of examples.

There's this factor called origin. Origin is seen when people are less concerned about risk that they incur to themselves than the risk that others pose upon them. And an example of that would be when we get really angry as we see someone who is talking or texting on their phone while they're driving, and yet we don't think anything about doing it ourselves.

We think that, you know, the origin there is different. It's a risk perception. Another one is control. Another factor of risk perception is control. And it's founded in our perception of control over the outcomes. For example, people aren't afraid of driving a car, yet they could be scared to death of flying in a plane. And yet millions of people, hundreds of thousands of people are injured or have accidents, you know, every year in the United States.

Some fatalities from injuries from cars and automobile crashes yet, I mean, I'm sorry, the airline industry is very safe and yet you don't see that. So, control. It's like a perception of control. So there are various factors that people use to gauge their level of risk and risk perception. I hope that makes sense.

- It does, and I think just inherently, people have different risk tolerances. I think it's part of your personality really as well.

- I agree. I agree with that wholeheartedly.

- So, you've said that Stop Work Authority is not enough, but is it still a good first step?

- Yeah, absolutely. It will be. In fact, I always encourage people, you know, because I will go to some places where they are high-reliability organizations, but their maturity level is really low on their journeys toward high reliability. And in that case, they may not have a program or a process that says you have Stop Work Authority or you have Stop the Line authority.

So, if they don't have one, I always encourage them to start thinking about putting it in a program, start a communication campaign so people understand what that means, but there's more to it than that. I mean, you really have to line up management and get them to understand what's needed and how to support something like that to build that psychological safety, you know, for people to be willing to stop and all of that.

So I do say, yeah, it is the first step. If you don't have a program, set one up and start looking at the ways some of the best high-reliability organizations execute theirs. But, you know, next to that, workers have to be equipped with the knowledge. They have to understand. They have to be trained to know when they need to stop. They need to be able to understand what they can leverage, what they're seeing, and does this rise to a level of me stopping work?

So they do need that training because I'll tell you, you know, human nature by itself doesn't lend ourselves towards stopping our task. You know, we come to work and we have pride in our jobs. You know, we take pride in what we do. So we come to work to get our jobs done. We come to work to finish the tasks we are. So we don't lend ourselves to, you know, I'm going to stop here and take a break or whatever.

I mean, I want to get those things done. So because of that pride, there's just an inner drive to continue to pursue. Even though things might not be quite right, we may rationalize our way through it. That's another human nature type thing. We'll rationalize our way through things to say, "It's okay to continue. After all, this paperwork was signed off by the supervisor, so it must be right," as one rationalization, you know, could look like.

But I'll say that not only does pride kick into effect, but pride will also lead us as good workers to wanting to get our job done, to also be very efficient. You know, we will optimize our jobs and our tasks. And what I mean by that is we'll kind of streamline what we're doing so that we can be more efficient. We can get our tasks done timely and all.

But what we don't realize at times is that when we are efficient and when we are optimizing, we might be taking some shortcuts along the way to get that work done. And those shortcuts are still with good intention based on our perception of risk that we can handle these shortcuts and still have a positive outcome.

What we don't understand is that taking those shortcuts over time drifts us away from the standards that were set or the safety margin that's there to protect us. So if that makes sense, you can see where, you know, pride in itself and being efficient and then trying to do the right thing over time, drift can happen.

And we get further and further away from what that safety standard was, or what that standard and expectation was for the quality of the work. And that could happen as well.

- I imagine that can happen without even really knowing that it's happening if you don't have that education, which brings me to what are the next steps? So the first is to set up a Stop Work Authority. You mentioned communicating it. Maybe what are the best ways to implement it?

- Well, you know, again, I'm big on education. You know, we have to educate our workforce. And so here, I'm going to talk to you a little bit about what I mean by that. What we found is that there are very visible cues, we call them triggers, that exist about 80% to 90% of the time just before something bad is going to happen. I discovered this years ago, kind of just stumbled across it.

And my mind was already thinking about it because one day, I'm teaching a human performance class and I'm teaching a human performance tool called Stop When Unsure or Stop When Uncertain. It helps us minimize errors that can lead to undesirable events. I'm teaching this class and an engineer stands up and says, "Hey, how can I stop when unsure if I don't know I'm unsure?"

And back then, I thought, "Wow, that's a great question." I didn't have an answer for him back then, but it was in the back of my mind that whole time. Well, later working with that same client, they asked me to stop by a causal evaluation war room. They were doing a big root cause, common cause evaluation on a number of events that they had had over time over a span of maybe a couple of years.

I went into that war room and I could see along the walls, you know, they had the timeline all laid out and they asked me to kind of give them just a cut at what was there and if they were on the right track. As I started to follow that timeline, there was something there, but I couldn't quite place my finger on it. I asked them, "Can you give me all those reports?" They had a big old stack of reports.

I said, "I'll look them over tonight at the hotel. You know, I'll look them over tonight and go through them and I'll come back and talk to you about it in the morning." And I did. And when I did that, that's when I found this 80% to 90% of the time, there was a very visible cue staring the worker right in the face just before something bad was going to happen. And that's how I discovered these, what we call triggers. So I developed trigger training as a result.

So when it comes to education, people have to know what a trigger is, what these visible cues are. And I'm not here to teach the whole class. You know, it takes quite some time, but I'll give you an example. Triggers are visible cues. The most common one is seeing something that is different than what you expect. That's one of four categories that triggers fall into.

And with that education, you can see if you spot something that's different than what you expect, well, now you've got a gauge. You know that you are now standing in the space of uncertainty and it's time to stop. Because you're seeing something different than what you expect, you expected something else. Your questioning attitude is just going off in your mind saying like, "Why is it that way? Why hasn't anybody identified that? Who did that?"

You know, there's all kinds of questions popping in your brain. This is not following this procedure or this task in my hand. So it's time to stop. And that's when visible triggers came out and came about. So education is the big thing. We have to show folks, we have to show the workforce what it means to identify these visible cues. And then once they've identified it, help them understand what a proper stop is.

That's what I call it. How to stop properly to get the support and the help they need before they proceed. Because that's huge, right? We want them to stop, get the support, get the help before they go further because 80% to 90% of the time, it's telling you, "Don't take another step until you figure it out or else something really bad could happen."

Does that make sense?

- It does. And now I'm curious about this proper stop that you mentioned. Like, what defines proper as opposed to, I guess, don't just like throw your tools up in the air and physically run away?

- Right, right. Well, some industries have learned how to stop. Industries have put in place, you know, specific things they want people to do. For example, if they can't follow a procedure or a guideline as written, they're asked to, number one, stop, number two, place their work in a safe condition, and then number three, they're told to contact their supervisor.

Well, when we thought about that, we said, "Well, those are good, but once again, human nature causes us to do a lot of different things." So, we decided to make that three-step process into a four-step process. So, now what we want them to do is yes, we want them to stop when they see that visible trigger. Something maybe that is different than what they expect is one example, one category.

Then we want them to, yes, put their work in a safe condition, but number three, we want them to step away, step back away from their task before they contact their supervisor. Now, why do you suppose we'd want them to step back away from that at this moment? It has a whole lot to do with human nature again.

- Maybe they would be tempted to multitask and talk to their supervisor while they kept going?

- That's possibly one thing they could do. But I'll tell you as a former operator, trained in operations, I want to play with it. I want to try to figure it out.

- Oh, yes.

- I'm going to start pushing buttons and hitting things and doing things. I'm going to kind of troubleshoot, if you will, you know, with no plan at all. I'll just go after it trying to figure out what is wrong. Well, that's the worst thing you can do is to proceed like that and start touching things and trying to...you know, I mean, really that is... When you're in that space of performance where you're troubleshooting and you're trying to figure out what's wrong, you're in what's called knowledge-based performance.

And the error rate in knowledge-based performance is 1 in 2. So, you have a 50/50 chance of getting it wrong or right. And that's very high risk. So, we don't want people to do that. So step three says, you know, back away. Step back from the work you just put safely, you know, in order, step back away, and now contact your supervisor.

Don't be standing there, you know, trying to fiddle with it, step away and contact your supervisor. And that's a proper stop. That's how we defined it.

- Yeah, and it seems to me too that more times than not, when you're stopping, you might be frustrated. And so troubleshooting when you're frustrated is a terrible idea. I know that from working with computers, which is not at all high risk, but, you know, you start trying things and then your supervisor comes and say, "Okay, well, what did you do? What were your steps?"

You're like, "I don't remember the last five things I did because I was just jabbing at, you know, buttons." And it's an excellent point.

- Well, you know, you mentioned working with computers and it may not be high risk, okay, well, it may not be dangerous to you at that point, but the outcome of what you do working with computers could be very risky for a corporation or all that. What if the whole computer system goes offline for a large company? Now, all of a sudden, they're in a world of hurt if they don't have their computerized systems working properly providing the safeguards or the information people need to get their work done, right?

So I love talking to IT people because they don't feel like they make mistakes and they don't feel like that their mistakes have any real impact, but they do. It could be very difficult. It could really put a black eye on the company brand if their systems don't work for their consumers or their clients or their, you know, customers.

- That's true.

- So yeah, there's all kinds of things. It is high risk in that way.

- I was just trying to fix my email and I accidentally released all of the company's IP and transferred all their financial information to...

- Yeah, that would be sad. That would be very sad. Okay, so going back a little bit, tell me more about your view of psychological safety. So, I think we understand because you've talked about it, what you mean by that, but practically speaking, how does a safety professional go about fostering a psychologically safe workplace? It's kind of an abstract.

- Yeah. Well, you know, I think that's a great question because, you know, we do rely on our safety professionals to help any organization set up the right culture. And by that, I mean set up the right behaviors, right? I mean, if you look at the definition of culture, it's all about the behaviors we use in any organization. It's how we grow up together and how we influence one another to behave in certain ways.

That's really culture in a simple definition. And we rely on the safety professionals to foster an environment that provides safe behaviors going forward. So I think one of the biggest things they can do right off the bat is show a tremendous amount of gratitude for when workers come to them and want to stop work, right?

Show a tremendous amount of gratitude and appreciation, recognition, however they do it, when people do stop work and they have questions because they're trying not to proceed in the face of uncertainty. So safety professionals could certainly reinforce that positive behavior through gratitude, recognition, reward, those type of things.

I think also that once a worker has been brave enough to do something, raise a concern, stop work, or whatever, it's imperative that the safety professional follow up with them to let them know how these things were resolved or handled or, you know, what we need to do for next steps before we proceed, they start collaborating, working with them. Or if it's just a concern they had, make sure we follow up with them to let them know how things were, you know, handled.

Another great thing a safety professional can do is learn how to coach up. And what I mean by that is to coach their management team up the chain of command. To help them understand their roles and responsibilities for fostering that psychological safety throughout their organization by doing exactly what I'm asking safety professionals to do. Show that gratitude and expressions of recognition and reward when people stop work because they're concerned about things.

And also following up, by all means following up and letting workers know what we've done to resolve those things. Or if they're on a timetable, maybe they can't get fixed or resolved this year, it's not in the budget, but at least they know that we're thinking about it and it's planned for the next years coming forward. Those type of things. So I think safety professionals have a tremendously difficult job.

And I think one of the things they need to do is have the courage to be able to coach up. Now that's not necessarily easy. So, when it comes to coaching and engaging, that's another form of education that I believe a lot of safety professionals need to shape the behaviors they want to see in their organization.

- Where else or in general, where in general do you think that the safety profession can improve in terms of training?

- They need to be very good at observing work and giving feedback to the work that they saw to really, really result in shaping the behaviors that they want, those safe behaviors that they want in any organization. So they really have to be good at, number one, observing, doing observations and really picking up on things.

And number two, being trained well to have effective feedback. It's not all about telling people what you did right and what you did wrong, it's about engagement with the workforce to really, really shape their behaviors. I think another thing they need to understand is clearly, they need to understand this whole concept behind visible triggers and proper stops so they can continuously mentor and foster that and reinforce that with other workers as they go.

And as I mentioned, I think the skill for handling management and working with management and just being a leader in that regard is very important for them.

- Yeah, I think consistency is probably really important if you're trying to have the stop work culture. You can't be the only person saying, "I'm so glad you stopped. I'm so glad, you know, you noticed this and you stopped. Even if it's a false alarm, I'm glad that you said something."

But if you have that and then you have like the C-suite getting angry about the stoppage, then there's an inconsistency, right?

- Oh, big. It would be big. I'll tell you now that when I go to clients and they ask us for trigger training, I'm asking the highest level at that organization to kick off the class. And I usually ask them to equip themselves, if they think it's appropriate, with something. Some of them have come up with little stop coins. You know, they'll introduce the class to the training and say, "You're about to take trigger training, here's what it's about big picture.

And I give you full authority to stop work when you see things that you don't understand or you believe is wrong or risky. And here's a coin that you can use to just flip right out there on the table and tell people, 'We're going to stop right now and I will back you up.'" And we've had senior leader executives at the highest level talk to the class and shake their hands one at a time and give them a coin and say, "I have your back. You have my permission to stop."

That really, really starts to build that psychological safety. And once they're well trained, they understand what the gauges are. You know, what the categories are of these triggers that will allow them to stop properly and not proceed in the face of uncertainty.

- I imagine that would be really powerful. Just looking someone in the eye and having a handshake. It would be a very powerful message. More than a memo from up on high saying, "We are committed to supporting, you know, that sort of thing."

- Right, exactly. Yes. You know, I'll tell you that we've been doing this for some time now. And a lot of companies has asked us to come in and basically shift their culture. They recognize their performance is not where it needs to be, whether it'd be safety, performance, industrial, environmental, you know, or asset safety, it's not where it needs to be. And they want to shift that or they realize that their culture's not there for producing a motivated workforce, you know, that comes to work every day wanting to do a good job, but really does enjoy their work.

So we've come in to help them shift those cultures. And when we start, we start at the very top. You know, we start with the executive leaders and they go through a workshop that is this long. I mean, it's a lot of training. Then we put their management team through that, and it's still that much training. Then we put their workforce through what they need to know, and it's this much.

It's a huge difference. It's a lot smaller because it's management's role and responsibilities to sustain any kind of improvement initiatives. And they have to understand that very clearly, understand what we're going to be putting the workforce through and the training that they would expect to see, and then the coaching and reinforcement that they would use to make that happen.

So just to give you an idea, yep, management gets the bulk of the training all the time if they really want to be successful. And clients have shifted their cultures. They've improved their leadership models. They've gotten recognitions for having higher quality and better leadership models in their organization.

- Okay. So, when you were talking about trigger training a bit earlier, you were talking about visible cues, and am I right in thinking you said that there was just one type of trigger?

- There's four categories. They're visible with the exception of one. Yeah, one is not visible. It is actually...you could say it's invisible and I'll tell you what I mean by that. One of the categories is a visible cue that is actually missing.

It's normally there but right now, it's not. I'll give you a simple example. This form normally contains information at this section on this, but it's visibly missing today. It's normally there, but there's a gap.

Okay, that's different than what you expect. That's an invisible trigger, if you will, or it's a missing bit of information. So now we've talked about two of the four categories that are invisible triggers. The most common one is those things that are visibly...I'm sorry, that are different than what you expect.

But since you're thinking about visible, you know, what does that mean? There happens to be one where things are missing and it should be there.

- Tell me a little bit...we spoke earlier and you were talking about the halo effect or the Pollyanna effect that sometimes influences people's behavior.

- Yeah. Well, let's talk first about the halo effect because we kind of talked a little bit about it already. You know, when we talked about workers who are not as experienced, they maybe just started with the organization or whatever, they look up to those 30, 40-year veterans, you know, for guidance and direction and all of that and rightfully so. However, I'll be quite honest with you, sometimes some of us older folks who've been around for a long time, we may take more risk than others because of that.

We get a little complacent because of that. But here's a junior worker looking at someone who could do no wrong. You know, you look at this person that's got 30 or 40 years. We're giving them the halo. We're giving them the halo. They have a halo. So we don't think they can do anything wrong.

The halo effect was really seen in the airline industry, you know, back in the '60s and '70s. Because back then, in the cockpit of the airline industry, the captain could do no wrong. It was very hierarchal structure and whatever the captain said goes, and you never question the captain. So the co-pilots and others, if there was a third like an engineer in there, they couldn't question the captain.

The captain had final say and always gave direction. And if you tried to challenge him, you would get your head bit off. Well, that led to a lot of events back in the '60s and '70s. You may recall that we had more airline crashes and more frequency of that until they got smart and they came up with something called crew resource management. Well, crew resource management does not give the halo to any one individual, but yet works together in collaboration to talk about any things that might be going wrong to work together as a team to get that resolved.

So the halo effect is just that. And we've seen a lot of events in high-risk industries, various ones, where people were given the halo and no one questioned it. No one questioned him or her as they continued to decide they were going to go down this path and then disaster struck. We don't ever want to give up the halo to anyone. And you certainly don't ever want to take the halo from someone.

If someone comes and asks you a very important question that may have risk, you're going to want them to go validate that. My best response is always, "Well, what does the guidelines say, or what does the procedure say, or what is standard protocol? What does the vendor manual say? Let's go look it up and let's make sure we're on track with what the experts are telling us. And don't give me that halo. We're going to go check and find out what it looks like."

Does that make sense? So the halo effect is one concept. The Pollyanna effect is different because Pollyanna was the little girl who went around looking at life as if everything was rosy. Everything was always positive. Nothing could ever go wrong. Sometimes wearing rose-colored glasses or whatever is the term used in the Pollyanna effect. And, of course, that's also an issue.

And how that translates in higher-risk industries is when you hear people say something like, "Well, that's the way we've always done it," right? They're anticipating nothing could go wrong. And that could not be further from the truth because every day, every day, work is different. The work environment is extremely dynamic.

Things change over the course of the day. And certainly from day to day, they change. And the largest variable is us as the human being. We're not the same at the beginning of the shift as we are at the end of the shift. We change over time. So we don't ever want to go there. We don't ever want to just look at things like, "Well, if we were successful yesterday, so we should be successful today."

Yesterday's success does not guarantee today's success because of the dynamics within the work environment and ourselves. So you can't take that for granted. You always have to proceed with high-risk work with a sense of unease so that you're always anticipating what could possibly go wrong.

So that's the Pollyanna effect and how I talk about it.

- As you're talking, I'm thinking again of that example with someone who's texting or looking at their phone while driving. They might justify it and say, "Well, I've done it, you know, a million times," which doesn't make it less dangerous this time because this time you've got different vehicles around you and, you know, maybe the sun's in your eyes and... Anyway.

- Exactly.

- So you talked about some of your successes with trigger training. Are there other types of training that you think are particularly successful or useful?

- Yeah. You know, trigger training was such a novelty. No one's ever discovered these visible triggers staring people right in the face just before something bad's going to happen. It was so unique and so successful that I copyrighted it. And I'm the only one that provides that.

And I'll say that it has helped many clients in itself stop people from proceeding in the face of uncertainty. I mean, you know, you have regulators go into a high-risk industry and grade them and they see that they're having events where people are just proceeding. You know, they're just moving forward with things and they see that. They've called us in to do trigger training and that completely gets turned around. But, you know, what that's doing is that's helping you take a proactive approach to trying to combat these undesirable events from happening.

Eighty percent to 90% of the time, you're literally preventing something bad from happening if you do that proper stop. If you identify the visible trigger and you do that proper stop, that lends itself for a measure that's never before been done in the human performance realm where you get to measure the events you don't have based on the number of triggers you find and you identify and you resolve properly.

If you still have an event, some type of, you know, undesirable event or an accident or whatever and they do a cause evaluation, you might find that there were visible triggers that were missed or were not adhered to. So you look at the ratio of the ones that you identified where you stopped properly and the ones that you missed and you had an event, and that's a clear measure of being proactive and preventing events.

That's one. The other training that we are very proud of is called coaching to enhance performance. And I did that because years ago, one of the regulators in the nuclear industry kept telling the nuclear industry that supervisors were not engaging their personnel properly. But they didn't define what engagement meant.

They didn't define what that looked like. They just said, "You're not engaging your supervisors correctly." So, you had the gander, you had people engaging at morning meetings and you had people engaging in the afternoon, you had them send out those communications. And that was engagement. You had engagement, whatever, you know, nobody knew. But what I thought was, why don't I take these high-level executive professionals who were all complaining about getting a finding, you know, and a lack of coaching because they felt like, hey, our supervisors have had coaching training?

You know, they know what to do. And if you put a gun to their head, I bet they could coach. You know, I just hated that when they said that. And I just laughed. And I said, "Well, since you guys are so good at this, let me take all of you out and we'll see how well you engage and coach." So, as I watched them, I developed coaching to enhance performance. And so because the regulator never told us how to engage, I created a very engaging system.

You know, back in the day, I was going to automobile university. I don't know if you know what that means, but what that means is I was listening to books on tape. And, I mean, I'm a big proponent for always getting...I had long drives, you know, I had really long drives. So I was always listening to more...

I kind of, you know, pat myself for being an amateur psychologist. You know, I mean, I learned so much about human nature and all of this, I felt like there's got to be better ways to engage the workforce. So, the process I developed really does that, and it does that through collaboration. So, again, you know, you're not telling them just what they did right or what they did wrong, but you're collaborating to have a good discussion on what that looks like.

And you're infusing that discussion with self-evaluation. So, you're allowing the worker to evaluate their performance and be a part of that conversation. It's extremely impactful and it will result in immediate behavior change. We see that all the time.

You know, when I say that, you know, it makes people sometimes cringe because it sounds like a sales pitch, but what it really is is this. We'll go out, let's say, on a Monday and we're taking... See, because our class is not just a classroom course. You take the class or you take it online. And then it's followed by two four-hour sessions in the work environment where you do an observation and you demonstrate competency to us that you'll be able to deliver the debriefing process as we've trained you.

So we'll go out on Monday, we'll observe work. We'll give feedback. We come back on Tuesday and Wednesday. Say, Wednesday, we walk by that same crew. That crew is waving us down, flagging us down and saying, "Hey, come over here and take a look. We've moved all these pallets over here against the wall because on Monday, we talked about that." That's immediate behavior change.

They recognize what we discussed. They agreed to everything and they've changed their behaviors. And that's what's so impactful. So that's something that we're very proud of. You know, I call it CTEP for short, but it's coaching to enhance performance training.

- Yeah, and I think that's probably one definition of engagement is that, you know, these behavior changes are coming because they were part of the discussion. They came up with some of the ideas at least.

- Absolutely. In fact, you know, COVID slowed everybody down, including us. We were always in-person, face-to-face type of consulting firm. We provided coaching, mentoring, training, everything was face-to-face. We had just started thinking and actually the fall before COVID hit, we were starting to develop online training.

So, that meant when COVID hit, we were not prepared. So, you know, we took a downturn in terms of, you know, being engaged with clients and all because everything shut down, but I took that time to fully develop the online training. And that's through the company we set up called HRT, High Reliability Training. I partnered up with a couple of gentlemen, my business partners, and with a specific company called Safety Instruct.

And HOPE Consulting and Safety Instruct created High Reliability Training, and that's where we have that video online-based training. Well, in addition to creating that and then working with our proprietary training courses first and getting those online, I was able to take time to write my book. It'll be the first book I've ever written.

It's not out yet, but I know I've got it all finished. I've had it all edited. I'm working on the illustrations. And I can't wait to put my book out there on coaching to enhance performance because COVID gave me an opportunity to actually get that done whereas before I was not making time for it. So I'm excited about that. And I'm also excited about our video-based training because it is not your mother's online training, if you will.

You know, it's not a PowerPoint. It's not a talking head, you know, up there giving you instructions or writing on a flip chart. It's all video of real work in real work environment. Most of it is all real. Some of it might be staged with actors and we put a caveat in there so people understand what you see may not meet the safety protocols of your station, you know, blah, blah.

Well, okay, you know, you get that. But for the most part, you get to see these real work activities happening and it's being narrated and you see text on the screen. What we found out was this type of video-based training is much more internalized and is much more...has better results of comprehension and retention than the other types of online training that's out there.

So, we're extremely proud of that and we're working hard to continue to build more of that into our processes.

- Okay. Well, I have a question that I ask all my guests, and for you, because you've just kind of answered it, I'm going to have to twist it a little, make it a little harder. So the question is, if you were to develop your own safety management training curriculum, where would you start when it comes to non-technical training? So, what core human skills are the most important to develop in tomorrow's safety professionals?

So I'm going to have to add the caveat, but you can't say trigger training and you can't say... I guess more like what, yeah, human interaction skills do you think are the most important?

- Well, human interaction skills for the safety professional. Is that what you're saying?

- Yes, yeah.

- Well, you know, human interaction skills, if it was just human interaction skills for all the different personality types, you're going to have to stretch...you know, it's easy for an outgoing personality like myself, I'm an extrovert big time. But for introverts, you know, you're going to have to learn how to stretch and really communicate and relate well to others.

Whether that'd be peers or people who report to you or the organization you're having to shape behaviors in, you just really have to have that soft skill to be able to communicate and build relationships very well. So, I would look at a soft skill of relationships. How do you build relationships? How do you develop trust?

You know, there are some excellent books out there with all of that type of information, the speed of trust, you know, and things like that. Those are the type of things. When they see the safety professional walking down the road headed their way, you don't want them to turn and run like they've done in the past. You want them to say, "Oh, you know, here comes Joe, and he is going to help us out today," because you've built that relationship.

They trust you and you're really good at that. So I think in terms of that. But I'll tell you that other things that all professionals need to know, safety professionals and management needs to understand is what really makes a high-reliability organization and what comprises high-reliability operations? So if they have not already gotten any kind of work or education on that, there is a book, I'll recommend at least one, it's called "Managing the Unexpected."

It's a great start for understanding what HRO is all about, high-reliability organizations, high-reliability operations. And I think that's something that's really important for safety professionals and management to understand. If you're in the healthcare industry, there's a book called "Still Not Safe." So, Kathleen Sutcliffe teamed up with another author.

His name is Robert Wears, and "Still Not Safe" is a great book in the healthcare industry that talks about the patient safety movement. I hope your viewers are healthcare because there's a lot of patient safety advocates and by position in the healthcare industries that are trying to crack this nut about, how do we make progress to help?

And I'll tell you, the healthcare industry needs more help than anybody currently in any high-risk industry. So the book called "Still Not Safe" gives a great history of patient safety movement, gives you some ideas and thoughts on how to help that safety patient movement, and gives a little bit of a future outlook of where it may end up going.

Personally, I feel like the healthcare industry, if I had a crystal ball, I would say that they're going to be leading the way in a matter of a few more years. And that's based on the care and compassion that the healthcare industry already has instilled in them. And from the education levels in the healthcare industry, I feel like they're really going to get their arms and their minds and their hearts wrapped around what it means to be a high-reliability organization to improve overall quality care and patient safety.

And I think they'll be leading the way for all industries to kind of model soon. So that's just a couple of books that I would recommend for people to read. Now, it depends on how much you want to know. We've been talking a lot about risk as well, and there is an excellent book out there, it's called "Risk-Based Thinking."

The author is Tony Muschara and it is an excellent book to help management understand how to look at the organization and manage risk. Well, Tony ended up teaming up with a couple of more gentlemen and he got real specific and he says, "Hey, you need to know about critical steps." "Critical Steps," Tony Muschara, Ron Farris, and Jim Marinus wrote this book to help everyone in high-risk industries understand what those critical steps are that must be done correctly.

Because a critical step is defined as an action if performed incorrectly will result in immediate, intolerable, irreversible harm. So critical steps are very important.

So if you want to know some detail, and those are a couple of good...that Critical Step book is a very practical, well-written book, but will give you some practical understanding of getting it down to, how do I manage my work when I've identified these are critical steps that when I do them, there's no turning back?

They're irreversible, right? And if I do it wrong, it's intolerable and could cause immediate harm. So, anyhow, you know, those are a couple of things that I would recommend for safety professionals, management teams, and anyone else who's just interested in trying to learn about overall process and performance improvements.

- Awesome. Well, thank you for all those recommendations. I've got just a couple of more questions. One is more on the fun side. Again, is if you could travel back in time and talk to yourself at the beginning of your career and you could only give young Rey one piece of advice.

- Wow.

- Yeah.

- What would that be?

- What would that be?

- One piece of advice. What would that be? I think I would've advised myself to get into this space of human and organizational performance enhancement sooner. I kind of kick myself for waiting 29 years before I put myself out there as a consultant. And I'll tell you that my peers were pushing me for many, many years to do it, but, you know, I'm human like anybody else.

I like a secure paycheck. Consulting, you know, you live and die by contracts. You know, so I didn't know if that was going to be very secure. So even I had hesitants. But if I was looking at myself in my younger career, you know, I learned about all these things pretty early on and I could have started much sooner. You know, and here's why I say that because I know every day what we do saves lives and livelihoods, and I would have really wished that I could have gotten an earlier start to help more people.

- You know, I'm sure in some way, you're better anyway because of the experiences, you know, that you gained in those years. But yeah, you know, it's tough to take a risk, I think, especially when we're younger.

- It is. It's a little scary.

- Yeah. So where can our listeners find you on the web, and also do you have a title for your book yet or?

- No. I'm still working on a title with that book.

- Not yet, okay.

- It'll be all about coaching to enhance performance. So that'll be somewhere in there somehow. But you can find me on LinkedIn. Obviously, Rey, R-E-Y, Gonzalez with a Z on the end, not a S. And LinkedIn's there, but, of course, we have our websites. We have HOPE Consulting at...so the website is hopeconsultingllc.com. That's the website.

And then we have trainhro.com is for HRT, for High Reliability Training. Those are a couple of websites you can go to, but I am on LinkedIn. And, of course, we have Facebook business pages for both HOPE and HRT as well.

- Okay, awesome. Well, I'm afraid we are running out of time for today, so thank you so much for joining us.

- Well, thank you for having me. This was fun.

- Yeah. And as always, thank you to our listeners for tuning in. And I would like to acknowledge the high-reliability organization that is the "Safety Labs by Slice" podcast team. There's a lot of people who work behind the scenes to make this the great podcast that it is. ♪

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