The importance of people skills in safety management

In this episode, Mary Conquest speaks with Jerry Smith, an HSE expert with over 20 years of experience in workplace safety across a wide range of industries.

Jerry outlines why strong people skills are essential for modern HSE professionals, and shares his wisdom on inevitable challenges, such as overcoming leadership apathy towards safety and having difficult safety conversations with employees.

His starting point is always people, and Jerry’s human-centered approach to safety management focuses on qualities such as honesty, compassion, trust, empathy and continuous self-improvement. He genuinely cares - and eats, sleeps and breathes safety.

Jerry is currently HSE, Compliance & Risk Manager at Vanderlande in Australia.

♪ [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] ♪ Today I'm joined by Jerry Smith, all the way from Australia, to talk about what people skills are necessary to be an effective EHS manager. Jerry, I'm so glad you could join me.

- [Jerry] Thank you [inaudible].

- I'd like to start by asking you to give the audience a bit of your background. Can you tell us about your safety management journey?

- Safety management has been pretty much in every single job I've ever had. I've always enjoyed it as we go on, but for me, I've taken on the roles from each position I've ever held and built upon what we've been doing. I've learnt through that what works, what doesn't work to the point where I even started my own business on the side, working other places doing safety.

From that point on, I started doing safety full-time, and employed in several locations doing the safety management roles where I'm at now.

- Awesome. So, you eat, sleep and breath safety.

- I'm afraid so. Even my wife is...

- Well, there are worse things to eat, breath and sleep. So, at this stage in your career, what do you enjoy most about being a safety manager?

- The ability to influence and help others. I wanted to, at first, do something in nursing and things like that, but that's not the way my mind works, not the way I went. But, this way, at least, I can help others still, and at the same time, still make a living.

- Yeah, that's interesting that you mentioned nursing. It kind of puts safety in the same sort of service realm, right? It's a service job in a sense.

- Yes.

- We'll get into the nitty-gritty right away. What is one frustration you've experienced on the job that you think most safety managers can relate to?

- Apathy. A lot of people feel that safety is important. They'll tell you it's important, but when it comes down to it, it's not that important. The dollar is more important. And that [inaudible] issue, and not that the dollar isn't important, my belief, they both have to work together.

Production and safety. It's not something that you can do one without the other, in my opinion. Yes, they do offer that, where they try to do just the dollar and try not to include safety, or they do what they believe safety, therein goes to another issue is awareness, or what they actually know, what they don't know about safety.

So when I say apathy, it's more about people who do know about it, than these people who don't care, and then they come back and say, "You know, well, I really didn't understand safety, to be honest." So, there's the awareness side of things that you have to consider. It's all mixed together. It's not just one.

But I'd say apathy's the worst one.

- Yeah, education can be changed, right, is something that you can change, whereas apathy is likely a little bit harder to influence.

- Right.

- So, I have a quote from you here, just from one of your comments that we saw, and it is, "Safety is not a necessary evil, nor is it just a support function." So, you mentioned this, just to contextualize, when you were talking about what you wish senior management understood about safety management. Can you tell me a little bit more about that and what you meant there?

- Purely based on my experience, I've had supervisors or managers throughout my career that they feel safety is just a side function. It's a necessary evil. It's something they have to do because the law requires it. They don't disregard that people need to be safe, but they would rather cut corners as best they can, rather than funnel the process.

And again, I'll have to go back, a lot of it comes back to awareness, they're just not sure what they should be doing. If the people with integrity will say, "Okay, I may not know. Let's find out and work that way," however I've had some managers that the integrity level just didn't go all the way up in those fashions, and they feel like they have to have it, okay, they understand that because the law requires it.

But, yeah, it's just a side function to them.

- Yeah, just the sort of minimal required safety protocols and such. So, when you encounter that kind of apathy really, or that sort of bare minimum attitude from higher ups, from the people who are making the typically budget decisions, which is a little bit ironic because injuries are so expensive, but how do you approach that?

I'm sure it's happened more than once.

- The way I've had to approach it is you just still do your job. You inundate them, you make them aware. You report properly and you just keep putting it in their face. It keeps coming back up. It keeps coming back up until they finally get it, or they understand it, or they just agree to you to get you out of their way, as long as you

[inaudible] own integrity and know you are trying to do the right thing, even if you don't have the power, if you wanted to say, all you have is influence, you just keep putting it in their face. For some companies, you would have to generate a, what am I trying to call it, a newsletter or something like that, and just keep sending it out and keep sending it out.

And people may get tired of it, make you see it, but the fact that they see it, they're still thinking safety and it gets in their head. Eventually you can back off. I've had to do that through companies, where the newsletter worked, the reporting. People didn't want to know, so you started reporting to everybody to be transparent.

Then once everybody knows, then you're kind of forced up to manage rather than managing down. There's a lot of different ways to do it, just depends on the situation for the company and how they react and what the culture is.

- Yeah, so it sounds like keep your own integrity, of course, and persistence, it sounds like, is really the strategy there.

- Absolutely.

- Okay. So, let's move a little bit to talking about managing staff now. Trust is intertwined with safety, so how do you develop trust with staff members?

- First step is to look at yourself. You need to make sure you are self-aware, you know what's going on. Don't appear like, even if you don't know the answer, you got to appear like you know how to find the answer at the very least. So you need to appear trustworthy.

You need to appear knowledgable, experienced, even if you don't have total experience, you need to be able to be self-confident, let's just put it that way. Once you're in that respect and you understand yourself and what you can do and how to better yourself, then you start allowing others in that you put trust forward to others, you extend that trust, make sure they feel it.

I'm not saying if they won't, they will let you down, but if they do, they understand that it was on them. You tried. You gave them the benefit of the doubt, the chance to be an ownership and to participate. And then, you have something to build upon, whether it be praise, if they did it right, or whether it's an opportunity to coach them or something if they did it wrong.

But you do have something to build upon.

- And do you do that explicitly? Do you say, you know, explicitly, you know, "I trust you" or is that something that...

- No, I don't...

- ...you really just show?

- Yeah, you have to show. And to do that, it comes back to what you called earlier, and that's persistence, that's time. Over and over again, same way you handle the upper management's the same way you manage down. You just have to be there on time doing the same thing over time, so they get a routine. They understand what you're going through, what you're trying to do.

And if you say you're going to do something, do it. Follow through with it. If they ask something, give them an answer. Yes, we can do that or no, we can't do it but this is why we can't do it. So, you got to [inaudible] they manner, keeping up with it, listening to people.

Most people understand what the answer is anyways. They may not know the exact way how to get it across, but they already know the answer. What they come to you for, as a safety manager, is to validate what they're thinking and how they go through.

If you let people think for themselves and then guide them in the right direction, and don't try to be a director instead of a manager, let them do it. You just guide them. Don't necessarily be a micromanager. It'll start working better. It'll take time. It's not immediate. A lot of people are looking for the short-term resolution when the long term is always better.

- Yeah, that's interesting. It's really focusing on relationships, right, and relationships, whether it's in your personal life or work life. They always take time. And so, that makes me wonder, how do you feel about safety consulting? Like, how does a consultant coming in from outside, are there pros to that?

One of the cons might be a lack of time to build those relationships, or how do you see that fitting into the industry?

- You got to be professional, up front. Consulting is one of my favorite things to do because it's always something different, there always a new challenge, so that's a personal thing. When I come to a new client, the ability for them is to understand what's relevant to them, and then focus on what's, that, and saying, "Yes, I can. This is how I can help you."

If you can show them a path and explain to them what's going to happen, maybe not in all detail because you don't know everything up front, but for the most part, if they understand that you know what they're trying to resolve and you can help them in a timely manner, they pretty much will say yes. I haven't had any trouble. I've had one belligerent client when I explained to him what they needed to do.

They said, "Well, when the court call catches us, that's when I'll deal with it." So I wrote a letter explaining the situation to him and I left him alone. Never went back. But that was the only people I've had trouble with.

- Well, it sounds like listening is a big part of it really, understanding where they're coming from.

- Yes.

- And so, whether you're working in a consulting capacity or a staff in your experience, how do you know if you've been successful? How do you measure whether, or to what degree, employees are following safety procedures?

- A lot of people will, first off, would like to say because the incident rates go down. Yeah, that's something there, but I don't trust that one. When I find that my people are looking, I can go on...I have this system, management system online, and I can tell who's going in and who's going out.

I see that they're looking for whatever, and I see them looking, and if they can't find, the next thing I see is the email that come through or a phone call that come through. Jerry, I can't find this. Jerry, where is this located? I've been looking for it. That's when I say, when people are trying, they understand the system there, they're looking for those type things, I'll go to the ends of the earth to help anybody who actually tries.

So, that's my goal, and yeah, if you want to put a number to it or a quantitative, it would have to go to the lagging indicators. But for me, it's a leading indicator. When they go to the training sessions and I got to everybody, and it has a month to do this particular training, and I'm at 90%, I think people are doing really good. If I'm at 60%, I think , you know, we got an issue.

What was it? Could it have been circumstantial? Everybody was on holidays, whatever. But you got to judge it from a leading indicator, sideways, so there's reporting, there's training, there's auditing, there's the people just trying. That's my goals.

That's how I judge whether I'm doing the right thing and it's successful.

- So it is then, yeah, a bit of a more qualitative and almost, you know, a gut check experience. And you kind of answered my next question, but I'll put it to you in case you want to add anything, is what metrics would you not use to measure the success of the safety program?

- There's a lot of things. All of it can be huge. There's not anything that's just negative to use. I think probably the one of the, a good way, but it's not something indicative that, in surveys. I use a lot of surveys.

I send them out on a monthly basis, asking questions or comparing them from a worker's perspective, from a manager's perspective and they're useful. The problem comes with having who's replying, who's not replying, how many replied, those type things. So, while the surveys are good, they're not always indicative of, they give you some guidance but not a full direction.

So, I'm saying use the surveys, do them as best you can, but that'd be one thing I wouldn't put a lot of stock in, we'll put it that way.

- Okay. Yeah, I mean, I've seen this elsewhere too, where different metrics, different lenses can give part of the picture, but very few can give the whole picture so... Okay, so what is, in your opinion, the best way to have a difficult conversation with an employee?

- Be honest, be up front. And I'll call it this way, I rip the Band-Aid off at front, and start and then build up from there. That's the way I try to operate. There is what some people call a sandwich method, where you say something nice, say the bad and then say something nice again. That's not for them.

That's only for you to make you feel better, that you trying to do something and the end result. The point of having the negative discussion is to resolve the problem. The only way to resolve it is to get straight to it, in my opinion. But, you need to do it in a tactful way, in a structured way. So, you talk to them, say, "Listen, we've got a problem. Here's the problem. How can we resolve this?"

Have a solution but don't give them the solution straightaway. Ask them how they would solve the problem and build on that. It may be a totally different way that you thought it would go, but if it's [inaudible], if it's logical, and it works, go that route. That creates ownership.

It creates participation. If it doesn't work, come back to yours. Just don't always think you're the right way.

- That's excellent, and something unfortunately we don't always see in the business world is people who don't assume that they're right. People who listen first. So, that's excellent, not just in safety. And that's why these skills are really transferable. What aspects of being a safety manager do you think can really only be learned with on the job experience?

- Definitely dealing with people. The only way to deal with people is to get out there, make mistakes. You're going to make mistakes. Learn from them. That's the only issue. If you're not making mistakes, you're not trying. That's what I tell my HSA officers.

They're out there, they're doing this that... You did a good job. But we didn't do what we need to... Yes, you did. You tried. Those people understand, they're thinking safety. They came back to you.

They had something that showed you, you were wrong. That's fine. That shows they were thinking just as much as you were trying to lead. As long as you learn from it, I don't have an issue. Let's make a mistake. That's how we move forward.

- Yeah, that comes with maturity and experience. So, I have a few segments that I like to do, sort of the same question that I ask everyone. So the first one I'm going to call, it changes each time, but the University of Jerry. So, if you were to develop your own safety management training curriculum, where would you start?

And within that, what core human skills are the most important that you think to develop in tomorrow's safety managers?

- Funny enough, I have done this.

- Oh, well, there you go.

- Safety [inaudible] course but it builds a lot, it starts with everybody and this is a culture. So, you got to let people understand what culture is and how to get around it. The next step would be to understand risk management. Then after that, then we talk about roles and responsibilities. Actually, I have that backwards.

It's culture, roles, responsibilities, then risk management. Then it's integration and the final step is, I call it safety economics, understanding where you come through, and what it costs and those type things. Building the person, building the person, I would treat them like themselves, like I would treat myself, sorry.

Just make sure we can coach them, guide them. This is how you be self-aware. This is how you need to show self-respect. This is how you need to develop yourself and use your examples of what you know, whether they're good or bad. Example, this is why, explaining that to them. Demonstrate respect.

What else could I teach someone in the course? From a personal, well, makes them understand what their own risk tolerance is, what is fairness, and it's not necessarily what we believe is fair. That's difficult because we all have our own opinions, and I say difficult, difficult for me to stop and say, "That's not exactly what I believe it should be, but that doesn't necessarily make it right or wrong."

Try to keep emotion out of it. And when I say, "Keep emotion out of it," you have to be professional and be in a business, but from a safety manager's perspective, you have to be stable and you have to care about the people. So, there is a bit of emotion that'll be in there, which means you may not have sympathy, but you have empathy, just a matter of your perspective.

Biggest thing I would say is listening first and teach people how to listen. Teach people how to be mindful, which is difficult. So is the struggle on your own self and try to keep stable, I mean, everybody likes to perceive that everything's, they're doing the right things, they're always perfect, but they're not.

I'm not.

- Well, yeah. One thing I'm hearing you saying that I haven't really thought about before, is self-knowledge really, you know, understanding your own risk tolerance, understanding what you do know, what you don't know, where you need to learn. That's an excellent point. Now, let's get, this is a little bit more personal, so let's turn back time for a minute. If you could turn back time and speak to yourself at the beginning of your safety career, and you could give young Jerry one piece of advice, what would it be?

- Learn more. Be more patient, probably show more respect. I knew what I knew and I knew what I knew was correct, but that didn't necessarily mean the way I presented it was properly.

I didn't, when I was younger, I didn't consider other people. It was just, this is the way it is and this is the way it should be, so this is the way we got to go. There are more ways to get from A to B than just Jerry's way. Just to be a little more respectful.

- That sounds like a pretty common piece of advice that I think most of us would give to ourselves. Just be patient. You don't know everything.

- Really [inaudible] it's tough. Some people are naturals. I'm not.

- Okay. So, let's get practical now. I like to call this tool time. This is where I ask our guests for their best, most practical tips or resources for safety managers looking to improve their work relationships and their core skills. So, this could be a book, a website, a concept.

What would you recommend?

- I recommend review. In a lot of what I do, I document pretty much everything. It's a legal requirement on some things. It's a due diligence requirement on those things. But, I regularly go back and review what I've done and even what others have done, and say, "Well, why didn't I do it that way?"

It's a continual self-gap analysis. What could I have done better? So, I would say review, going back and making sure you don't think you know everything. I'm 50 something years old and I'm still learning. The minute I stop learning is probably time to die, so I'm going to try to learn something the rest of my life.

- Sounds good. Yeah, and evaluation, going over what some people call postmortem, which is a little bit macabre, but really just an evaluation.

- Yeah. An evaluation. Always go back and learn, learn from yourself. Learn from others.

- Yeah. Jerry, where can our listeners find you on the web?

- LinkedIn. I used to have some websites and things out, but I've kind of dropped them all. Definitely LinkedIn. That would be the one place to find me. If they wanted to, they could send an email. My personal email is ja7smith@bigpond.com. And I'm happy to reply, or assist or whatever I can do to help others.

- That's fantastic. I'm sure people will be interested to hear that. And if you're looking it up on LinkedIn, folks, it's Jerry with a J.

- Sorry.

- Yeah. No, that's just making sure that's in there. In Australia. Well, thank you very much. That's all the time we have, and I really appreciate your insights, your humility, you're very, sort of, very centered.

I think people would feel safe around you because you seem very calm and centered. There's a difference between bombastic confidence and true confidence, and I'm feeling the second from you.

- Thank you, Mary.

- You're welcome. ♪ - [music] ♪ - Safety Labs is created by Slice, the only safety knife on the market with a finger-friendly blade. Find us at sliceproducts.com. Until next time, stay safe. ♪ [music] ♪