I am amazed at how technically incompetent our profession is becoming. I guess I need to praise my old bosses/plant managers once again as I grew up being the safety hero in the plants I worked at. You see, it was NOT my role to drive safety (although I was often the one picking up the flag and leading the charge up the hill in battle). My role was to plot the path and develop the safety process, procedures, training, (e.g. a safety management system) that would make us “successful”. The management team, often spearheaded by some of the finest engineers to walk among us, was responsible for implement this safety management system. I was the “resource” when they needed help implementing THEIR SAFETY process; sort of like a “safety architect” which is how the late great Claude Bloom taught me.
Because of my role and the managers, I was privileged to work with, I still get marriage invitations, graduation announcements, etc. from people I have not seen in over 20 years, but the bond we made while I was working with them over 2-4 years is still there. Sure some of them wanted to beat the hell out of me some days, but they realized I had ONE GOAL even when they did not share that goal or expectation… make damn sure and do whatever I had to do to send them home to their loved ones in the same (if not better) shape than they arrived at the plant that day! We (safety professionals) took this creed seriously and it was beaten into my head by my safety mentors and my bosses from the very first day I stepped into a chemical plant.
Today it seems that a safety professional’s passion is not appreciated, respected, and most certainly not revered like it was for me when I spent over 16 years in plants as a safety engineer and manager. Today, our profession worries more about “our delivery” and “being inclusive” and being a “team player”. Claude Bloom, my first plant manager, once told me on a day I was ready to go back to fire fighting… Bryan your job is to lead them to the watering hole along the path you have charted, my job is to make them drink. And for those that we have to drag kicking and screaming to the watering hole, well WE, you and I, will climb on their damn heads and drown them in safety until they decide safety is the way. So you have my permission to drown this place in safety. Get in their face with safety, make it happen.
That is how you STOP a bad culture, TURN IT AROUND, and then HEAD in a safe direction. It is not easy, even not pleasant while the battle rages, but we have ONE THING motivating us – we want NO ONE to get hurt! We take injuries personally, even when the employee was trained and knew better, we hurt (not like their pain) right along side. Our relentless efforts, day and night, are observed by all those around us – WE LEAD BY EXAMPLE.
I got complaints filed on me at least monthly in both Union and Non-Union plants because I never backed down from a proverbial safety battle with those who wanted to challenge my efforts. I have been told countless times that
I am too “literal” in the reading of the safety standards and codes.
My expectations are a fairy tale.
I don’t understand business or better yet… I don’t understand my place in the business.
But I always had the unwavering support from my plant manager who each one took time out of their busy schedule to sit down with me and reminded me at least weekly that he will let me know when I have crossed “the line” – until then pay no attention to doubters and charge on! My boss and HR would call me in for a complaint ONLY to pull back the reins ever so slightly and to provide actual COACHING to me, BUT they NEVER EVER held me back or discouraged me from being the safety professional I so desperately wanted to be.
So I was fortunate, my bosses wanted me/needed me to be THE technical safety engineer, not some cheerleader/feel-good guru. They had the “management” (i.e all the touchy-feely crap) handled; they needed me to be the chemical hazard expert, standard and codes expert, emergency response expert; so when things went bad I had the skills needed to answer their questions WITH CONFIDENCE THEY COULD BELIEVE IN. They, every single one of them, invested a hell of a lot of money in sending me to AIChE, CCPS, NFPA, API, Fire schools, HAZMAT schools, Rescue Schools, etc. to make sure I was the best I could be at my game, so when they needed me I was there and PREPARED. God only knows the amount of money they spent on me, not counting the hours my engineering managers and process engineers spent with me teaching me REAL PROCESS SAFETY. They invested in me because THEY KNEW MY ROLE in the business!
Safety professionals were an ASSET back then, companies invested in our training, but it was TECHNICAL training to make us better safety engineers because that is what we went to school for and trained for. We did not go to these “feel good”, “look deep into your soul” courses. If our Lockout program was wrong and we trained our workers wrong, how I made everyone feel while they were in the training is the LEAST of anyone’s concern. Today it seems this concept has been reversed! Both Claude and Dale refused to send me to Behavior-Based Safety courses, and trust me in the 1990s that was the trend! Instead, they sent me to LOTO training, PRCS training, as they wanted/needed these baseline safety programs to be SOLID and NOT just OSHA compliant. They wanted to rest easy at night knowing they personally had done all they could do to make sure we were doing the Life-Safety practices as best we could. We did not need a behavior-based safety process, we needed a WORLD-CLASS safety process. Behavior-based safety was the Plant Manager telling workers annually… these are the programs/practices/procedures, follow them 100% of the time and we will get along well. Don’t follow them, and I don’t care why you will be collecting buggies at Walmart by the end of your shift! There’s a “behavior” for you! Sure we eventually got into BBS because of the VPP push, but it was always years after we had a FUNCTIONING safety process, and we NEVER took our eyes off the fundamental safety practices and we/I never had to be a cheerleader to get employees to “feel good about safety”, because safety was a condition of employment.
In the 90’s we learned that “employee participation” was the key to having a world-class safety process. I was young and dumb, but with the plant manager and op’s managers and engineering pushing safety, I had all kinds of employees wanting to help me with my safety programs/procedures/practices. It was really a way of life in the chemical plants to get your best operators and maintenance hands on the safety committee and run all the program stuff through them even before management got their chance at revisions. These workers were motivated because they knew the business was serious about safety and if I wrote a bad program/procedure/practice they would still have to follow it or suffer consequences, severe consequences, like career-ending consequences. So they were all too eager to help me and man did I learn a ton from these folks. Some of the things I learned scared the heck out, but it opened my eyes to just how far a worker will go to “get it done” and in a chemical plant/complex “gettin’ it done” can be catastrophic for a lot of folks. But the business SUPPORTED the time it took to do this right! More often than not, other employees would be brought in on overtime to cover the work of the safety committee members because we needed to have one of our off-site brainstorming sessions to get this program right and management rarely balked at my request. I remember my LOTO committee at Great Lakes chemical was 18 employees, most of them hourly and we had a 2-day session at a local Omaha hotel with breakfast and lunch provided to work out what our LOTO process was going to look like and function. And on Day 2 our Plant Manager, Dale Fannin, led the entire exercise just because he was a safety nut and LOTO was his hot button. That would have been 1995/6 time frame and I still remember the moment the room realized this was for THEM – not “us”. Folks we never looked back from that day on and we made some magnificent safety gains at Great Lakes Chemical.
Safety professionals and I mean educated and trained PROFESSIONALS, that will be a safety professional for their ENTIRE professional career are a bit of a different breed of professional. We think with our head and from time-to-time, we may be led by our HEART and PASSION to serve others. And if that gets in the way or offends someone, managers need to recognize this a character trait they WANT in their corner when shit goes bad!! They want to know that you are not an inflatable dingy, but a battleship that is on course and is not easily steered off course. You are ready to fight to make things right and folks that is guaranteed to offend some non-believers. We are not worried about offending anyone, we are worried about not making an impact on the very people we have been hired to PROTECT!
So cut out all the kumbaya crap and learn LOTO, PRCS, Machine Guarding, Fall Protection, Process Safety, Hazardous Materials. There is no way we can be a “jack of all trades” and be successful in this profession, so find your love in safety and become the very best safety professional you can be in that arena. Knock their damn socks off. When you walk away they will never forget that day, moment you touched them and made them a safety believer. We do this by being the “go to” person, the leader, the expert in your arena. Your passion and unrelenting energy in safety is a point of light-hearted jokes among the workers. They may even call you some unflattering nicknames, but remember this when they are talking about you… they are talking about SAFETY and that folks is a battle won!
I’ll leave you with this final thought… one common characteristic that both Claude and Dale had was they wanted every single worker on their plant site to be “touched by safety every day”. They would constantly pound on me to ensure that everything that came out of the safety group was set up such that every single worker had an opportunity to be involved (e.g. touched by safety). And looking back on it, the leading indicators we measured were all around the safety activities that impacted the workers. They always said that for anyone to believe us that safety is our value, we had to make it an equal to Production, Quality, and Costs. And as they would say… “Trust me, these workers are being touched by those three business elements every day”. So my job was to design a safety process that was all inclusive, including our contractors. And it worked! We NEVER said or hung banners or made e-mail signatures saying “Safety is #1”. We did not have to say it because our employees already knew it BECAUSE OF OUR ACTIONS and DECISIONS.
Sorry, just needed to vent and I hope we can get back on track and let safety professionals be safety professionals that are the technical experts on safety work practices and leave the cheerleading and kumbaya moments to management where it belongs!