Recruiting and Building Effective Safety Teams

In this episode, Mary Conquest speaks with former Marine Michael Flynn, Corporate Safety Director of Barnard Construction, who’s held safety roles in construction since 1995.

Hiring in the safety profession is a crucial process for any leader looking to build an effective safety team. At the same time, new safety professionals need to know what skills are required to attract potential employers. Mike can help safety professionals at either end of the spectrum. He’s been recruiting and developing safety teams for decades.

Mike explains why soft skills are particularly important for safety managers. He believes that teaching the technical elements of safety is relatively straightforward. Therefore, he encourages recruiters and candidates to focus on areas such as relationship-building and communication.

He gives top tips on where to look for candidates, how to spot potential and what questions to ask during the interview process.

In the second part of this engaging interview, Mike focuses on building effective safety teams. He recommends concentrating on team members’ strengths and explains why role fit is so important in safety management.

Ultimately, he reveals that the secret to success in workplace safety is caring about your people. And Mike has cared for a lot of co-workers over the last 30 years.

♪ [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." Today's guest isn't afraid to ruffle a few feathers. He's been a safety professional for 12 years and has worked in the oil industry since 1995. In that time, he's seen a lot.

Today, he'll share his opinions on safety education, compensation, safety conferences, and more. And we'll get into a topic that's very difficult and very important, the emotional toll of dealing with injuries and fatalities for workers, and especially for safety professionals. Our conversation will be wide-ranging and you'll hear his passion for improving the occupational health in safety industry by staying focused on one goal, taking care of people.

James Junkin is the CEO and co-founder of Mariner-Gulf Consulting and Services, an international boutique risk management and occupational safety and health consulting firm. Mariner-Gulf helps clients implement safety management systems. The company also maintains an active emergency response posture in the Gulf Coast region and a nationwide incident investigation team.

Mr. Junkin is a U.S. Navy veteran and an advisory board member for the American Society of Safety Professionals. You may have heard his voice on our friend Dr. Linda Martin's podcast, where she describes him as a candid safety rebel and a no-nonsense consultant. And if that doesn't intrigue you, I don't know what will. James joins us from New Orleans.

Welcome.

- [James] Thank you for having me, Mary. It's kind of interesting Dr. Martin referred to me that way. I guess I'm sort of the safety outlaw, so to speak, but that's okay. That's okay. Sometimes we need some outlaws.

- So let's start. Talk to me about the state of safety education. Are safety programs adequately preparing future safety professionals, and where do you think there might be some opportunities for improvement?

- Well, that's an outstanding question. I have a degree in occupational safety and health. I'm finishing up my master's degree in occupational safety and health. And I've really enjoyed the journey from an academic standpoint. I'm also an advisory board member to a very prominent university that has a well-utilized occupational safety and health program.

So, I'm very, very familiar with the academic side of occupational safety and health. And I'm going to answer this question in two parts. I think we're doing a really good job educating people on ISO 4001 and safety management systems and Z10 and theories. And whether it's behavior-based safety or HOP or safety one, or safety two, we're doing a really good job of getting people into the literature, where I think we could have substantial improvement is how does all that apply when I get a job?

Because if there's a gap in safety right now, the gap is between the theorist and the real practitioners. And when I say real practitioners, I mean people that go to work every day in the field, where people really do get hurt and they really do get killed. How do I apply all these theories that I've got?

And somewhere we've got to bridge that gap. It seems like every other day we're getting a new theory on workplace safety. Let me tell you my theory on workplace safety. It's about identifying hazards and implementing controls, and that's it. And that's a cross-industry philosophy. You know, the terminology may change, but hazards are hazards, controls are controls. So, how do we get better at identifying hazards and managing risk, defining what risk is?

So, I think we're doing a pretty good job from an educational standpoint in preparing workers, or students rather, with the framework, but we're not doing such a good job of going out there and implementing this.

And not to be long-winded about it, Mary, the numbers tell us this. The numbers tell us this because we've killed the same number of people every year that we've been doing for the last 15 years. So, if what we were doing was working, we would see a decline in serious injuries and fatalities, but we're not seeing a decline in serious injuries and fatalities. In fact, we're starting to see a little bit of an uptick.

So, I'm on a passion, a mission to change the way we think about safety and to try some new things that filter down to the field level and don't just exist in academic journals and debates.

- That actually brings me right into my next question, which is about qualifications. So, there are formal qualifications, obviously, but there are things like mentorship, internships, years on the job, conference attendance. What do you think should qualify or could qualify someone as a safety professional in a way that's more helpful on the ground?

- It just depends, right?

- Okay.

- And this is a debate...I was talking about this just yesterday with a colleague. In full disclosure, I hold a lot of certifications from the Board of Certified Safety Professionals. I'm a CSP, SMS, and ASP. Now, does that make me any better of a safety professional than maybe someone that doesn't hold those designations and certifications?

And I say, no, the industry has struggled and the practice has struggled for years in defining what is it that qualifies someone to be worthy of recognition in this practice. And it's sort of unanswerable because I know people who are...been doing this for 47 years in the oil fields of West Texas, in the oil fields of Louisiana and Oklahoma, and they've been my mentors, right?

And so I don't want to denigrate their experience, their knowledge, their education just because they didn't have an opportunity to go to school or an opportunity to sit for some of these higher designations from some organizations. Now, that being said, I'm very proud to represent the Board of Certified Safety Professionals, and I have my CSP and those other things and I was very proud to get it.

But that does not necessarily mean that I'm a better safety professional than those that don't have these different designations. And I'm not sure that moving forward that certification is the bee's knees for everything when it comes to safety, so to speak. Some of my biggest mentors didn't go to college. Some of the people that I still call today as colleagues when I have a question, I have a lot of questions, are people that have been doing it for 50 years.

So, whatever we come up with, just recognize that sometimes not everything's learned in a classroom, and those people are worthy of respect within our industry. But that flows both ways because I know people that also have been doing it a long time that kind of look down their nose on folks that have formal education and certifications and stuff.

Look, education cannot hurt you. It cannot hurt you. It can only help you. So, I encourage whether you're going a designation route or you're finding what you're doing right now inside the practice, continue to learn. Education cannot hurt you.

You don't have to sign up for a college class to be educated. We have periodicals that are out there, there's wonderful thing that's called the internet. Google Scholar is your friend. There's a lot of information I see on things like LinkedIn because, you know, sort of relating this to American football, you're either getting better or you're not. So, either backing up or growing as a profession.

So, focus and have a professional development plan that works for you.

- Sounds good. So, my next question is a little bit different. We have listeners from all over the world, and this will vary across industries and countries, but do you see any salary trends for safety professionals? Do you think that salaries in your experience or, you know, from what you've seen are adequate, are they attracting the right people?

- I think there is a huge misunderstanding in some HR departments about qualifications and salary range. So, I'll give you an example. I was on LinkedIn the other day, and I saw this organization. They wanted you to have at least 10 years worth of experience, CSP or CIH preferred, you know, some of the other most notable certifications from BCSP were on there.

And then they wanted a salary range between $55,000 and $61,000. And I just laughed. You know, I'm like, I bet you prefer that if you can go get a CIH to work for you for $61,000, good luck. Tell me who they are. Maybe we'll hire them at Mariner-Gulf.

So, sometimes 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 to bring some of those salary requirements into range.

- I guess that's where certifications can come in, right? I mean, that's...

- And that's why I don't want to denigrate that. I don't want to denigrate certifications.

- Yeah. I mean, accounting and law are older professions, right? I mean, so although accounting isn't as old as you would think, but they've had those certifications for longer. So, maybe it's a matter of, and again, depends on the jurisdiction, but just advocating, I don't know, for this understanding of the credential or maybe just advocating with HR.

- I think so. I think so. And longer term as this matures, you know, not everybody went to a formal law school if you go back and look at the practice over a couple of hundred years, it's matured into that. So, I think your point's well taken that maybe we need to mature into this as a profession and that the future's going to hold a lot better from the past.

But when you say safety professional, man, what does that really mean? It means a lot of different things to a lot of different people. And it's a very broad term. It is a huge practice with a lot of specialization in there. So, I look forward to the discussions with the practice leaders and some of the societies that are out there now and to helping formulate what the future could look like for the next generation of safety professionals.

- So, speaking of the profession, as a profession, as an industry, in your time, I'm sure you've been to many safety conferences. I know you've spoken at some. When it comes to moving the profession forward, where do you think safety conferences, in your experience, again, are getting it right?

And where do you think they're missing the mark?

- I think the conferences are getting it right in that they are bringing together a broad, very broad, very diverse group of individuals to network to each other, and usually, the speakers also represent the diversity of the society. Where I think we're getting it wrong is I don't hear a lot of innovativeness in these conferences. A lot of times when we attend a conference, sometimes we're just hearing the same speakers that we heard last year with just a different title.

So, I think for conferences to have value, networking is part of it. But at the same time, the conference needs to deliver something that I can take back. If I'm going to spend the money to attend a conference, I want to come home with something, something of value, something I can study, something that challenges the way I think, something that adds to my practice that I can go and then apply that so that it gets workers that are in the field in a better situation to not become a statistic or a serious injury or a fatality.

So that's what I look for in a conference. Something that brings us together, that doesn't divide us, that challenges the way we think that I can have something to take home. So, I think we're doing a pretty good job. On the front end of getting people together, numbers across conferences are up, they're covering from COVID, but by the same token, are we delivering value, or are we just standing around preaching to the choir?

In a lot of conferences I go to, we're preaching to the choir. We're saying the same things to the audience and the audience's like, "Yeah, that's great." But are we delivering value? I like to go to conferences when we leave that conference from that speaker, man, we're having a hot debate about it out in the hall because it's challenging the way we think.

- Do you think maybe that conference organizers then when they're kind of vetting or putting out a call for speakers, they could bend a little more towards practical topics? Or like, how do you think they could address this?

- I think one of the things that they could do to address this is have more opportunities for more people.

- To speak.

- To speak.

- Okay. Yeah. Agreed.

- There is a circuit, you know, I'm just going to call it like it is. You got me on here, so I'm going to tell it. There is a speaking circuit in safety. And sometimes I'm on it and sometimes I'm not, but that's irrelevant. What I'm talking about is all the speakers I know are very nice people, they're very knowledgeable people, but a lot of times the topics they're delivering on are the same topics that they did last year, or the year before, or the year afterwards with just some tweaks to it.

Let some new ideas to the table. Bring in some of the younger safety professionals that are willing to speak. Let's hear about some studies that have been going on in the academic circles. Let's bring together more people, more seats at the table so we can have and grow this profession.

If the conference is only going to be we speaking to the choir, then why are we going to this conference? I don't need to travel to go to a conference, to go to a bar and sit around safety professionals. I can do that in New Orleans. If I'm going to go to a conference, I want to go to a conference and hear from diverse opinions so we can improve as a practice and I can change the way I practice. If a safety professional tells you that they've been practicing for years and they've never changed their mind, then they're not a good safety professional.

I've changed my mind on a lot of things in my career. And so some of that comes from attending these conferences. So, we're getting some things right, but could we improve? Absolutely, we can improve. And I think it begins by having more seats at the table.

- Yeah, absolutely. So, on this show, I talk about safety to all kinds of people, not all safety professionals, sometimes like business ethicists or psychologists. And the idea is to give new ideas to safety professionals. But sometimes I wonder if it's all too much. Are we, and I'm not sure, I guess we, the safety profession, expecting safety professionals to be teachers, technologists, counselors, diplomats, legal experts, engineers?

Like, is it too much? And if so, what's the solution?

- It is too much. It is too much. Because as a practitioner that is a generalist, which is most people, most people are generalist practitioners, meaning they're not subject matter experts in everything in the regulatory side of the house, but they know a little bit about most things. Sort of like when you go to your general practitioner doctor, your family doctor, he's not going to do heart surgery on you, but he knows when you got a clot and to get you the right expert.

So, we have a lot of those that practice in the safety field, but at the same time, there's not a lot of us. The ratios in companies that we deal with sometimes are 1 safety professional to 50 or 100 employees. And we have to be knowledgeable in HR issues. We have to be knowledgeable industrial hygiene issues. We got to be knowledgeable in physical hazards and risk matrixes and insurance and workers' comp claims and case management.

And that is a lot. That is a lot. So, back to kind of your earlier question is, what defines a safety professional? Well, the first thing we got to understand is it's a practice. And someone with one year experience is not going to have the same knowledge and the ability to apply as someone that's got maybe 10 years' worth of experience. And so it really depends. But how do we get better at it?

That's where that professional development comes into play. So many people get involved in the day-to-day of being a safety professional, and they may grow through experience, but we have to wait for them to experience whatever incident, accident, near miss, god forbid, serious injury and fatality for them to learn from that.

And I think we could do a better job as individuals in trying to hone our skills in the practice with some sort of individual professional development plan. Now, like I said, there's nothing wrong with education. Pursue education. Education can't hurt you. But a lot of people can't go back to school. They just can't.

They have family responsibilities. They may have economic reasons. Their job may just be so much that they don't have the opportunity to do it. But plan something, be reading something. And all of us can read. We can get up 30 minutes early and read a little bit of something in order to improve the way we go about performing our practice. Get better every day regardless of how you do it.

- So, that's a good answer for individuals, but are there any systemic solutions like, of course, this is, you know, everyone thinks that their profession needs more funding, but should there be more funding? Should there be larger...like I think a lot of practitioners work alone. Should there be safety teams as the norm rather than just one safety person, or working on those ratios maybe?

- Working on the ratios would be extremely helpful. Those ratios can only work, Mary, if safety is part of the systematic approach of an organization. Meaning the application of safety is something that the supervision's doing, right? It cannot work if safety's just the safety person's job. If safety is being performed by the safety person and they're the ones doing the audits, they're the ones doing the inspections, they're the ones out there doing the instant investigations and the root cause analysis and they're all doing it by themselves, safety then is a silo and it's not a systematic process for the organization.

I'm a big system safety guy, right? But too many times what I see is safety is siloed. And that becomes too much for one individual to hand. We've got to get buy-in. You also have to have beyond buy-in, what does that mean? People tell me all the time, we need to get buy-in, we need to get top management involved.

So, from a systems approach, to answer your broader question is we need to start being able to take some of these things that have been taught to us such as safety management systems, and start really discussing how to apply it. I mean, it's great. I ask you a question, okay?

You ask me your question, I ask you a question, Mary. When you hear we need to get top management engaged, what does that really mean?

- To me, that means developing relationships with them and persuading them usually with numbers, a business case that whatever it is that you're advocating for is important and needs resources. Because in the end, that's the language of business, resources, money, people.

- Absolutely. I agree with you. I agree with you. So, shouldn't we be teaching people how to do that?

- Yeah, I was just thinking persuasive, I don't know, skills.

- There you go, persuasive skills. So many people that practice in the safety profession understand the regulations. They understand hazards and controls, but they don't understand the business side of safety, the ROI side of safety. We're not talking about that enough. When I have 30 minutes of time with the CEO of a multimillion-dollar, maybe hundreds of millions of dollars organization, how do I make my case for my budget?

And that's just one element from a systematic approach. So, when we talk about risk assessments, I mean, I've got books on risk assessments, but how do we apply that down to the field level so that these great ideas that are being put forth by a lot of knowledgeable people in our practice, we actually able to take that and put it in application, right?

I don't want any more theories, no more safety theories. I had somebody call me the other day, ma'am, we need to come up with a theory that is for safety that counter to what this other theory is. And I'm not going, the last thing we need in profession's another theory to debate. What we need to do is get back to the blocking and tackling, to use a football term, of safety. And that is identifying hazards and putting controls in place, understanding risk based on severity and probability.

And then how do we get the "top management" other elements of our safety management system in order so we can have continuous improvement? So, all I'm talking about is taking some of these ideas that are out here and breaking it down to a level that can be applied, not in a global company, but how about a company that has 150 employees and 1 safety professional.

It's hard for that group to institute ISO 45001.

- I was just thinking I hope that some safety conference organizers are listening because that might be an excellent topic, right? Your persuasive skills, how to get more resources for your safety program.

- Absolutely. Absolutely. I'd love to come sit in there and learn about, not the theory of it, but hey, I worked for X, Y, Z organization, we had a bad culture, we had a lot of injuries. I came into that organization, I sat down with the CEO and the board of directors, and these are the five topics I went through and that changed their minds and created buy-in.

And then we created a plan and we executed our plan. And two years later, this is what the results. You want to know what's like, and what it's like. The application of the theory with documented results.

- Case studies, case studies people.

- There is not a lot of research going on which is not...

- That's too bad.

- I want to move on a little bit. The last time we spoke, you mentioned that there are some generational issues, and specifically the massive demographic of the boomers, they're starting to retire. And that means there's a loss of knowledge in the industry. I mean, this is an inevitable change. How do you think the safety profession can respond to this?

- That is an excellent question. And I see it not only at the strategic level, but at the tactical level. And COVID just enhanced it. It fast-forwarded a lot of experience transitioning from various businesses. Really it's across all business units.

So, you had a generation of workers who worked hard, who understood the processes. Many had been in the same job for many, many years. And internally, they understood what the hazards are, what the risk were from a safety standpoint, but more importantly, they knew how to do their job. But in vast majority of cases, that how to do their job was never memorialized.

So, the process is in their head, and then COVID came and we shut everything down. A lot of people got laid off. As we are coming out of COVID back into economic recovery. Those same people that were leaders in these organizations retired or either chose not to come back or went to work somewhere else.

And that has left a generational gap. And it's just kind of interesting because I'm a Gen Xer, right? Nobody cares about us. We didn't even know we had a name for years, right? But we followed along behind the baby boomers' generations. That was our parents' generations. And then our generation interestingly enough there were not a tremendous amount of birth statistically as compared to the two generations that we're in between because we were the first generation of birth control.

And I think it has a lot to do with it. So, as we get to this situation where we have boomers, if you will, leaving the workforce, there's not enough of us that are in our 50s to replace them. So that normal mentorship, or I come into an organization, I work under someone, I get taught very well, that's not going to happen.

There's not enough of us to fill those positions. So, less experienced individuals, younger individuals are going to have to fill some top managerial positions, right? So, what do we need to do to ensure their safety? Well, when I worked for Mercedes-Benz U.S. International, the CEO told me this one time, "James, make it about the process and not about people."

He said, "We want to hire good people. But if the process is in their head, what do we do when they leave, when they retire, when they get a better job?" Now we end up with all sorts of quality issues, risk issues, unidentified hazards because we don't have a process.

So, I would say right now's the time. We need to fix that. We need to be creating processes so we can have training programs that address those needs so people understand what it is they're supposed to do. You ask me, one of the reasons why we're seeing uptick in injuries and serious injuries and fatalities is because that knowledge has left and we're paying for it in people's lives and people's blood. So, if there was a goal within an organization, let's go back to the basics, to the blocking and tackling of this thing.

What are the steps I need to know to do this job? What are the hazards and what are the controls? And that really needs to be done before we send people out into the field.

- You know, each job is very different. You know, a safety job in a pharmaceutical lab is not the same as one on an oil rig, for example. So, I guess documentation is a big part of that too, right? Just getting that stuff out of their heads onto paper in some fashion before they retire. Is that fair?

- I think that's fair. And that's what needs to be done. Because a lot of times now from a productivity standpoint, we're recreating the wheel. If we don't have a written process about the way we go about doing things, then the folks that come after us will make the same mistakes that we made that led us to the process that we have adopted to begin with. But, you know, there are a lot of different organizations, business verticals that could benefit for this.

Manufacturing pretty much has this down. They have a process, right? We're going to do this, we're going to do the other. Other industries could benefit from some of the influences from those manufacturing industries. The PDCA that you hear about all the time, the Deming cycle, Plan Do Check Act. Let's actually do it. Let's actually do it.

We talk about it, but do we do it? Do you have a plan? The plan is what we should be following, right? The steps we need to know how to do our job. And do we have a continuous improvement process at the tail end of that in order to see what went wrong from a safety standpoint and put controls in place? Now, this is very forward-thinking, most of us are reactive.

And I'm talking about some of the largest companies on this planet are reactive. We have to get somebody hurt, we have to get somebody killed, or we have to get an OSHA citation or some governmental body or some bad press, and then we react to it and we put controls in place. If we could follow the PDCA process, if we could have processes, you know, how am I actually supposed to go about doing this job?

How do I pass the knowledge down as we're exiting out of one generation into the other? I think we can be in that serious injury and fatality trend. Until we do that, we're going to be in a period of time where people are going to have to learn. And unfortunately, when you learn on the job like that without guidance, that's where people get really hurt and really killed.

- When I think that connects a lot to advocating for more resources because one thing I know in my own profession is that writing things down, people say, "Oh, I'm so busy doing the work. I don't have time to document the work." I think that's really common. And yet it's a little bit of forward-thinking to say, we're going to give you the resources to write this down because if we don't, you're going to leave. And, you know, we're going to wasted time, money, and, unfortunately, maybe people in order to make up for that.

- Look, I understand production challenges. I understand that. I came out of being an executive in the oil and gas industry. Trust me I understand the pressures because time is money. But you know, the surest thing to stop production, the absolute number one thing that will shut down the job is when you get somebody seriously injured or you get somebody killed. Now, after that, we all have time. We'll have time to prepare for the deposition that we're going to get to go into and explain why we didn't do these things that we're talking about with you today.

So, it's going to get done. It's just a matter of when you're going to do it. Are you going to be proactive about it, or are you going to be reactive about it? Inevitably, if you do enough stuff long enough, sooner or later, there's going to be an adverse event. You ever heard somebody say this, Mary, I've been doing this 25 years and I I've never experienced an injury or whatever? Well, maybe that person's just lucky.

Luck can be a factor in that. Maybe they had a certain amount of skill that was able to prevent it. But what we're seeing statistically is more people are getting hurt and more people are getting hurt seriously, and some of them, unfortunately, there's a lot of fatalities associated with that. For example, hand injuries...I saw something from OSHA the other day in Oklahoma, hand injuries is in the oil and gas industry is up like 22%.

Why is that? Because we're sticking our hand where we shouldn't be sticking our hand. We don't have controls in place. We haven't learned the process yet, right? And so since the process was not written down, we don't have a process for them to follow. People are thinking they're doing a good job and we're leading them into incidents and accidents. Somebody else that may have been here before may know not to do that.

So, we need to take some responsibility as leaders, as managers, as supervisors for the safety of folks that go out there and power our industrial complex, right? And not just assume that people know these things. There's a lot of an assumption going on that we assume people know these things.

Well, I don't know how to use this phone, right? But my staff who's a little bit younger than me, man, they're champs with this and apps and technology and all that stuff, but they're not so good with their hands. You know, they couldn't change their oil if they had to.

So, we just need to acknowledge where people are, put some systems in place, put some practices in place, be willing to admit that maybe the way we've been doing, it's not the right way to do it because people are really getting hurt and they're really getting killed. And I got a passion for that. I got a passion for that.

- Well, and speaking of that, I want to take a little bit of time to set up my next set of questions because they're difficult and sort of touchy. But in some jobs, it's a given that workers are going to be exposed to terrible situations, so paramedics, military personnel, firefighters, that all comes to mind. These professions have tools and systems to help them minimize the long-term psychological impact of difficult incidents, critical incident stress management, post-incident debriefing, resiliency resources.

Those are all examples of what I'm talking about. They even in some cases have training for family members because they know that a spouse is often the first person to notice psychological symptoms. Safety professionals spend their whole career trying to prevent fatalities and bad injuries, but sometimes these things happen, right?

We can't control everything. And I know, again, jurisdictions differ, but in your experience, what kind of support do safety pros have to prevent or mitigate PTSD?

- None. I've taken hundreds of classes, hundreds of classes. Not one class ever prepared me for the emotional and psychological safety side of working a fatality. And, unfortunately, I've had to work several fatalities on my own.

And there's not a tremendous amount of resources that say what you should be doing to decompress and deal with that as an individual from a mental health standpoint and a psychological safety standpoint. And there's even less resources as to what the safety professionals should be advising the company management to do for the staff.

I mean, you get close to people you work with. Let's get real. I spend more time with people at work than I do with my own family, okay? When you think about it, even if you just work an 8 to 5 job, 8 hours a day or 10 hours a day, you get up and you see family for an hour or two. You rush off to work, you go to work, you come home, you eat dinner, and then you're in bed, and you do the cycle all over again.

So, you get tight with people at work. Right now, I don't know of anything that we're doing that's meaningful as profession to prepare us for when we have someone die or is seriously injured in the workplace. What am I supposed to do as a safety profession? I just worked a fatality back in December in North Dakota, an explosion, right? And one person was killed, another person was seriously injured.

No one wanted it to happen, but it did happen. And we really lacked the resources internally with that organization to deal with that. So, you know, the fire department doesn't come and clean up the scene. You can imagine what the scene looked like in explosion, right? You can imagine shrapnel and blood and those type things, I don't want to get too graphic, but it was a very, very graphic scene, right?

Well, that's not only something that we see visually, those are our friends that that happened to. So, I kind of relate that also to maybe some of the scenarios that we see in the military. I'm a veteran of the United States Navy, and they're getting better at preparing veterans and service members like that.

We hadn't always have that. And some of that preparation and knowledge and feedback and programs they had in the military have filtered down to where you see emergency responders getting that. But to answer your question, we don't really don't have anything of a serious nature right now that prepares safety professionals for dealing from that from a psychological standpoint. Oh, we teach them how to deal with the OSHA inspection that follows, but how do I deal with a CEO who got up the next day looking in the mirror and asking, "What could I have done to prevent that?"

What do I get with a bunch of safety professionals that say, "How did we miss this?" How do I deal with employees that have to go back work in that space tomorrow? How do I deal with the survivors that live with survivor guilt? And I've seen that in all these different scenarios. So, if you ask is there something that the conferences, the societies could do? Hey, get us some experts to talk about that because in the United States, it's happening 5,000 times a year.

We're killing 5,000 people a year. In the last 12 years, we've killed more people in the United States than we had in the Vietnam War. We've killed 60,000 people. With those kind of fatality rates in the 1960s, Americans marched on Washington, D.C. and demanded the government do something to end the war in Vietnam.

But we just seem to accept it as a normal course of business. So, I'm kind of passionate about that because, look, I'm not going to say fatalities don't happen in the office. They do. But statistically, they're more likely to happen in the field. And I come from a blue-collar background, right?

My great-grandfather was coal miner. My grandfather on both sides worked in the fields in dairy farms, and one went in the United States Navy and retired. My dad always worked in some type of blue-collar field. That's where the people get hurt. That's who's dying, right? That's who is getting amputations.

Those are the people that are getting buried in trenching and excavation. So, one, we need to try to prevent it, but God forbid, if it happens, how do we deal with it and move forward?

- You're saying there's not enough support, but do you have a sense of why there's not enough support? Like, there's a recognition in these other things that I've mentioned, like paramedics, obviously, they deal with injured people, but why do you think that's not there yet? Because we're very judgmental in safety, extremely judgmental.

We measure people's safety performance in order to get contracts. And we gauge that based on total recordable injury rates, which is not very statistically invalid for predicting future events. EMRs, if you participate in one of the third-party verification systems, as soon as you have a fatality, they want to turn you red.

We equate these incidences as a moral failure of the company, as if the company did something wrong. Nobody comes to work to kill their employees. Now, they may have made judgments, but I don't know that there's a CEO out there that wants to get up tomorrow morning and realize one of his employees or her employees has passed away. But we create this moral judgment of people's actions and we're real quick to say, "Well, that must be a peach crap company.

That must be, you know, a terrible company to work for because they didn't properly identify a hazard and they exposed people to this hazard and it resulted in a fatality or serious injury or adverse outcome to the environment. But are we any better?

- Well, it won't happen to me because I'm not as fill-in-the-blank, you know? I'm not as lazy or just, you know, I'm better at my job. I wonder if there's a danger too about for safety professionals, I mean, your job is literally to take care of people, to get people home safe. And when things happen, and as I've said, it's often not your fault.

I mean, it could be weather conditions, there's all kinds of things that happen. Do you think that safety professionals take it upon themselves? They feel guilty as though they're responsible. And maybe that is what prevents...no one likes to feel that way. No one likes to admit that bad things can happen.

It's the same reason why lots of people don't make wills or make arrangements for their funeral. I mean, death is pretty inevitable. Do you think that that might have something to do with it?

- Yeah, it could be. Absolutely. Having gone through this in my career, I've worked six different fatalities. And one of the situations, it was multiple fatalities. And even though in most of those, I'm just being brought in as an outside consultant, it takes part of your soul because you meet oftentimes the families, you definitely talk to the co-workers, people that were there that night.

And it is very difficult to deal with, right? Because it becomes so clear how these things could have been prevented once the fog of operations is over with, right? I think it's even worse on people who are internal safety professionals of that organization because there's always a question of, what could I have done better?

What did I not do from a system standpoint, you know? And they internalize that and they take it personally, and sometimes they shouldn't take it personally. You know, I just think we're ill-equipped to deal with that as a profession on what we should do. And look, despite the improvements we've made in mental health over the past decade, and really to be honest with you, in the post-9/11 world dealing with our veterans who are coming back from combat in Afghanistan and Iraq, there's still a stigma associated to it, right?

And so the safety professional feels like they have to be strong for everyone and be the one that they come to. But who does the safety professional go to for help? So, I encourage people to reach out to the resources that they have, but as a profession and as a society, we need to address this.

We need to address this. The suicide numbers in construction are horrible in the United States. People are just killing themselves on the job. How are we dealing with that?

- I wonder if the judgment has to do with, you know, people don't want to deal with it because they think, "Oh, well, all I have to do is be a better safety person and then I won't, this won't happen. And so therefore, I don't need to know about PTSD." I don't know. Do you think that's a factor?

- I think it's a factor. I also think sometimes admitting we failed. It's caught up in the potential litigation in the penalty phases that are coming perhaps from OSHA. There is a tremendous stigma in mental health and reaching out for help and knowing where to reach out to. In my entire career in safety, I don't know I've ever encountered until recently companies even talk about it, before an incident or even after an incident.

Or it's talked about like this, "Sorry about Joe. We feel really bad about that. If any of you guys need to talk, here's a number you can call." And that's it. Or we bring in, you know, somebody from the religious community to speak to them, you know, when they come back to work and then we put them back to work while the blood is still in there on the floor from the incident.

So, we got to get better at that and how to deal with it. And I think that leads to potential burnout of really qualified safety professionals and problems for them because in one aspect, they've got their own mental health to deal with, but they're also mental health and psychological safety is part of their job for the workforce. So, let's have some training about it.

I've never had a class on it, I've just lived it.

- Yeah. I was going to ask, based on your experience, what kind of support would be most helpful for the safety professional? And I don't know if this is the same or different, but what do you think would be helpful for the co-workers, the crew, and even the family members?

- Well, based on my experience in the military, the best thing for people is to talk. We need to talk about this. We need to talk about it. We need to get it out there. We need to not keep it bottled up inside, but we need some structure to that. Blame is the enemy of understanding, okay? Now, I'm not talking about criminal acts, criminal acts, terrorist acts, that's a different thing.

That's a whole different conversation. But nobody comes to work to get killed. Nobody, right? So, with that as a premise, we need some training, I think, on how to conduct those conversations and who's best suited to conduct those conversations. Is it the safety professional, or is it someone from outside that's trained and a professional in those type of matters?

Too many times, this ends up in the lap of the safety professional to deal with. And I'm going to tell you, I don't feel very qualified to walk people through mental health issues that they may be having as a result of serious injuries and fatalities in the workplace. So, we can be better. There are more resources that are out there, but those resources are gained through private initiative.

You want a topic to get a society event or a conference, here's one. Write the next book, right? I don't need a new safety theory book, write me a book on how to deal with death in the workplace from a perspective of a safety professional. Give me some information and resources beyond here's a phone number to our employee assistance program that can also help you with your drug use, but they also provide a little counseling, blah, blah, blah.

Because that doesn't seem to be enough. It doesn't seem to be enough.

- I think too, one of the biggest challenges for the safety professional is regaining the trust of, you know, like the crew has to go back to work after a day or two, however long things are shut down. And is there a challenge of regaining sort of credibility that yes, you're doing everything you can to keep people safe right after something bad has happened?

- Well, I don't know in my experience that people turned on the safety professionals there. In my experience, as soon as somebody is seriously or killed, everybody looks to the safety professional for guidance. You know, you are now the most important person in that company. Management wants to talk to you, employees want to talk to you, so that something like that doesn't ever happen again.

Where I think the hazard lies or the risk lies is the further you get away from that incident and you don't put right controls in place, the more distance you get from that incident, the less impact it has on affecting change, okay? Many instances, and I'm going to use an example here.

BP Texas City, 2005, explosion killed 15 workers, injured over 200 people. Chemical Safety Board in the U.S. and OSHA came in and they conducted investigations and they came up with a litany of cultural, systematic, and operational failures by BP. BP spent billions, not millions, billions of dollars retooling their safety program, changing personnel, bringing in new personnel.

I even think the CEO at the time lost his job and they replaced him with other CEOs. Five years later, Deepwater Horizon incident happens, blows up in the Gulf of Mexico. We kill 11 workers. We put 5 million barrels worth of crude oil in the Gulf of Mexico and the worst environmental disaster in the history of the oil and gas industry.

But if you go back and look at those incidents, the CSB cited some of the same problems, systematic problems, that were five years later, right? So, why is that? Why is that? A lot of times when we have a bad accident or near misses, we write a report, we get to a conclusion, we put it in a drawer, and we don't do anything about it, or the people that we're involved with it, do something about it and it's fresh in their memories till they leave the plant.

Dr. Trevor Kletz has a great quote that I love repeating from time to time. "Organizations don't have memory, people have memory." And when people leave the organization or the plant, the memory of that instant goes with them. And that's why you have, you know, situation like BP where five years later, we have another tragic incident.

They didn't want that to happen, but it did. It did. So, it's a systematic approach to dealing with adverse incidents. What are we going to put in place? How do we sustain that? And that kind of circles back to what were talking about earlier from a process standpoint of a having a procedure that we follow. But dealing with death is hard and I hope no one ever has to do it.

It's very difficult.

- I'm going to move on now from that. I have some questions that I ask every guest, and I think you'll have some interesting answers.

- Okay.

- So, one of them is if you were to develop your own safety professional training and set aside all the...I'm sure you would do all the regulatory and technical training, but when it comes to teaching soft skills or core skills to tomorrow's safety professionals, what do you think your focus would be? What do you think that would help them the most?

- How to build a relationship. Safety's about trust, right? Nobody cares what you know out there. They want to know that you care about them. And that's not something we teach from a formal standpoint. We talk about it all the time. I mean, it's easy to say safety culture, which I despise that term, by the way.

There's no safety culture. If you want to bring on another guest and I'll debate them that there is no such thing as a safety culture. There's only a culture within your organization, right? And this is kind of part of that. So, I'm going to go a little bit of rant and I'm going to come back to your question. You cool with that?

- All right. Yeah. Oh, yeah.

- All right. Safety culture, when you say that, it's like it sits over here by itself, and then you have an accounting culture and then you have an operations culture, and then you got an office culture, and then you got some other culture for the dudes in the warehouse. You know, it's your company's culture. And the sooner we understand that, the better it is because safety and your overall company culture are the same thing.

So, if we start, you got to correct the language, right? If we say safety culture, we're implying that it's something that's separate and apart from our other culture. It's just the culture of your organization. So, how do I establish good culture? Well, the first thing is I got to establish relationships. I got to be, are these soft skills really soft skills or are they not the most important skills? Because I can go to this book, I can go to this book and I can figure out what the regulation is.

And now I can google the regulation and I can find out what we're supposed to be doing. But if you want to implement that, you got to have a relationship. One of my favorite memes is this meme of a safety profession going out on job and says, "I don't know how to do your job, but my book says you're doing it wrong. That is not the way to develop a good relationship." So, I think we could have better training in conferences and maybe in some of the formal education that we do from people that say, I went into a tough situation and this is what I did.

You know, people act like culture is changed overnight. I came in, I got a new set of policies and procedures. Why aren't these people following it? So your point, Mary, that these are core skills is a major one. If there's any one thing that we can improve on is that because we can learn the regulations, but if we can't get people to do it and we can't apply it, what good are they?

- If you could go back in time and talk to yourself at the beginning of your safety career, what piece of advice, if you could only pick one, would you give to yourself?

- I would've spent more time with people who had been doing it longer. And I was blessed, blessed to be around some of the best safety professionals in the oil and gas industry who didn't have certifications, they didn't have degrees. People like Richard Emberling, who's still practicing, Larry Bryce who passed away this past January 20th of COVID.

And they mentored me, right? They mentored me. But I would say spend all the time I could learning from people who have been doing it. And so I probably didn't take advantage of people outside my circle enough to be able to get into the literature and develop relationships and ask questions and find out who the experts in these fields are. That came later for me, a lot later for me.

So, I would say do that in the beginning of your career. Do that in the beginning of your career. Find out who the influential people are in the practice and be willing to learn. But look, that's going to take some effort. It's going to take some effort. And you need to hone your skills and hone your practice. But if I could go back in time, I'd talk to more people that have since retired, left the industry, some of them have passed away.

I wish I could have those opportunities back.

- Words for our new safety professionals how to start better. How could our listeners learn more about some of the topics that we've discussed today? Do you have favorite books or projects, groups, podcasts, perhaps where people can learn more?

- Yes, yes. This is a great podcast. Of course, I love Dr. Martin's podcast, "The Safety Struggle." If you just go online, Dr. David Daniels is a guest on his podcast and he is got some other podcasts that are out there.

Dr. Daniels is an outstanding speaker on psychological safety, which is kind of an emerging discipline within occupational safety and health and some of what we talked about today. Professional journals that are coming out. I like to read. You can get them in digital format now, but like, I'm also on the editorial review board for "Professional Safety Journal" for ASSP.

So, check us out in that organization. But that's kind of where I go to for my information. Then I'm also on LinkedIn a lot.

- That was my next question is how can people reach out to you if they want to discuss any of this?

- Hey, just hit me up on LinkedIn. I'm on there James Junkin, J-U-N-K-I-N. You can find me. We love to have lively discussions on our LinkedIn page and our company page, Mariner-Gulf Consulting and Services. We always recommend people or invite people to follow us to get involved in some of these discussions.

But let me say this about social media, if I may. That's also a good place to learn. There is a lot of good content being put out there on social media. Some of the law firms are putting out great content. Ogletree Deakins is putting out great content. Fisher and Phillips are putting out great content from a legal aspect as it applies to occupational safety and health.

And there are some other industry leaders that post pretty regular either research they're conducting or research that they've discovered. So, that's a resource, even though it's still social media, you know, it's on the internet. You remember that commercial? I'm a French model, bonjour. Remember that commercial that was on TV? Remember that?

And it turned out to being this guy. But anyway, it was a pretty cool commercial. He was not a French model, by the way, but that's what he said. He was on the internet. He looked more like me, but I'm not a French model either.

- Well, I am on the internet.

- You are. Exactly. So, you got to take some of this stuff with a grain of salt, but most of it is very well-resourced and I encourage people to do it because within two or three, four-minute read you can get a lot of information.

- Well, I'm afraid that's all the time we have for today. This was a great conversation, and thanks so much for sharing your passion and your thoughts.

- Well, thank you for having me, Mary. It's very important what you're doing. I'm probably not the best guest you've ever had, but I do appreciate being on your show and what value it brings to the safety profession.

- Well, thank you very much. I'd also like to thank our listeners for their support. And as always, the "Safety Labs by Slice" team, all the people behind the scenes who make this such a great show. Bye for now. ♪ [music] ♪ Safety Labs is created by Slice, the only safety knife on the market with a finger-friendly blade.

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