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SafeTalk with SafeStart
SafeTalk with SafeStart
S12Ep 7: Living a Culture of Safety Beyond the Workplace
Discover the transformative power of a safety-first mindset and how fostering a 'zero harm for all' culture isn't confined to the workplace—it's a life philosophy.
Host: Tim Page-Bottorff
Guest: George Irving
And welcome back to Safe Talk with SafeStart. I'm Tim Page-Bottorff and occasionally we'd like to invite exceptional clients in hopes that we can actually get a benefit from their wisdom. So full disclosure. I've worked together with today's guests and so did other teammates of ours, but we want to welcome today NAES Corporate Safety Director, Mr George Irving. George, welcome to the podcast, my friend.
George Irving:Thank you.
Tim Page-Bottorff:So you to me, you've done so much in the world of safety. I've been a part of your conferences and I want to just say thank you for that. And I want to also say a little bit about NAES. They're a household name in the power industry and they're you know, for your benefit, our listeners power generation. They're the power generation's industry's largest independent service provider and they are also responsible for managing more than 50,000 megawatts of generation.
Tim Page-Bottorff:The NAES family of companies. They're comprising of about 4,000 or plus even more team members, and they've got an unparalleled wealth of experience and operations maintenance, fabrication, grid management, regulatory compliance and technical support to build, operate and maintain traditional and renewable resources. So their primary office is in Washington state, but they have operations everywhere, like Delaware, Texas, Florida, New York, Colorado, Pennsylvania and Oregon. They also operate up in Canada, Mexico and the United Kingdom. A couple of months ago, George presented zero harm for all If you see something, say something at the NAES Corporate Safety Meeting, and they did that last year, and then we brought them in a couple of months ago to present this to our team internally for Safe Start. So, George, when you say zero harm for all, you actually mean it. Can you explain what you're talking about to our listeners?
George Irving:Well, let me just clarify something you know because I am in the power industry. But this presentation, you can use this anywhere. It would fit with any facility, any organization. You know, if you want to talk about exclusive, like you know, energized systems and that, then you're you're into the power industry. But this, this presentation that I developed, is really for any industry and we also do other industries other than just the power industry, so it does fit for everybody. So if anybody in the listening to this doesn't, you don't get the idea. Oh, this is going to be something for the power industry and I, you know it's not going to be a value to me.
George Irving:But I approached the subject of zero harm for all and part of that was off our program.
George Irving:We started with Safe for the Right Reasons, and then we took that program and we moved it into home safety, because I'm a firm believer that safety is 24/7 and it's just not at work, it's just not an eight- hour thing at work and then people go home and get injured. It's really to try to prevent injuries 24/7, not only to our employees but also to their families and other family members and even neighbors. Because my whole thought process behind zero harm for all is it doesn't matter whether you get hurt at work or you get hurt at home, or one of your family members gets hurt. It's all the same. You still go through the same emotions, you still have the same feelings, you still have the same trauma, you still have the same worry, and if you're the employee and get hurt, your family goes through that, and if it's a family member, you go through that. So there really is no difference to me when it comes to injuries, whether they're at home or at work, or if it's family members or it's one of our employees.
Tim Page-Bottorff:I appreciate the input there and the explanation and, for zero harm for all, you're expanding that out of the employees, you're going towards the families and the people that they love and the people that they take care of, mainly the people that motivate them to go to work in the first place, and that's an incredible approach and I think I agree with your philosophy, specifically when it comes to what we you and I safety professionals should be talking to employees about. So what should we talk to our employees about?
George Irving:Well, the first thing that and I learned this from my days in metals manufacturing is I had a group of employees. It was almost a badge of honor to have injuries. They were blue-collar were workers, back then. That's what you know. It was just a badge of honor to have these injuries.
George Irving:And the way I was able to turn that around was basically address it with the employees to say, you know, if you get hurt, how do you think that's gonna play out in your family? And they didn't quite buy into that. They weren't into that. And then I, so I dressed it the other way and I said are you're sitting here in a safety classroom? Your spouse calls and says one of your children just got hurt. Are you just gonna sit here in the classroom and not worry about it? Or what are you going to do? You know, almost to the person that say they'd get up and leave the classroom and go and head home because why they're worried about their child has been injured, you know, and all the things that go on with that. And I said so what do you think is the difference when we call your house and talk to your spouse and you've been injured at work, and now your spouse knows and the children know. What do you think they go through? Do you really put your? Do you really want to put your family into that type of stressful situations about worrying about his dad gonna be okay. Your spouse is worried about you know we're gonna be able to make payments. Is he gonna be able to work? I said so when I turned it and made it personal. They understood that getting hurt at work was not acceptable, not so much for the work issues but because of what it puts the families through.
George Irving:And another point that I stress to everybody is we all in corporations and I have a corporate role we talk about safety stats all the time because we want to be below the industry average, we want to be zero, we want to be all these things. But to the average employee, safety stats don't mean anything. If I told the bulk of our employees and our employees are really into safety that we had a 2.0 incident rate, and I'd say that's pretty good, isn't it? And they'd probably go yes. And if I same group of employees, if I said to them I had a 4.2 incident rate, that's pretty good, right? And they'd go yes, because they don't understand what the stats mean and, to be true to them, they don't care what the stats mean, because they care about people getting hurt. They care about their loved ones, they care about their family members.
George Irving:So I see so often in companies we talk about safety stats but that's not where it's real to the employee. What is real to the employee is did somebody get hurt, what happened, how did that injury occur? Because that is real to them. They experience the pain, the trauma, the worry and safety stats. You can talk about safety stats all day and it doesn't talk about that. So when you talk safety to employees, to me what has really been successful for me is to bring it down to a personal level of what happens and what families or what the employee themselves go through with injuries.
Tim Page-Bottorff:I like that and it makes an impact. So you are always talking impact and not stats, and that's good. Now, some of our listeners, they love data, they love stats and, to be fair to you and to give you kudos, you've achieved a total recordable incident rate well below industry average, which is, for your organization, 0.47 versus the industry average of one. And so I was at both meetings your corporate meeting down in where I think it was, in Tucson, and then the in-house one you did here for us at Safe Start, and I was impressed with what you were talking about, with a little bit of a data moniker, and that was your. Four plus one equals you. Would you talk a little bit about that to our listeners?
George Irving:Yes standoff we with Safe for the Right Reason and basically what that is is the program that's out there and you're working safe for these four people and we even had mouse pads made up so they could bring their families pictures in and put it on the mouse pads, and even some of our plants made bulletin boards with family pictures. So that was Safe for the Right Reasons and then we moved forward with that program. In fact, Tina Blount I probably just blew her last name, but Tina from Safe Start helped us and we went into Safe for the Right. We went beyond that to protecting your four, because if you're really concerned about your working safely for your four, what are you doing to protect your four? So that carried the program into home safety and that program has launched itself. People have bought into that. I have plans to want all sorts of things for home safety now, but when we started looking at some of the stats that we would get from and they're unofficial stats About off the job injuries, we found our employees were getting hurt off the job and we changed the program to be protecting your four plus one, and the one is you, because there are four people that are concerned about you and you know, most years will realize this and I'm preaching into the choir in some ways that if you have an employee get hurt at work, workman's comp, it's all the good things that happen when these injuries occur.
George Irving:When you get an employee get hurt at home, what's the difference? The only difference is I don't have to do the investigation, I don't have to file workman' s comp. All the same thing still apply. The employee is injured. The employee potentially one of them that I can think of recently can't come to work. It actually became a life-threatening injury, fell off a ladder, why I was doing some work on a roof. He is going to make a full recovery. But what was the difference if he fell off that ladder or work or he fell off that ladder at home? There is no difference, it's all the same. It's all the same.
George Irving:We go back to what I talked about all the stress on the family, all the stress on kids, all the stress on parents and could be neighbors who are. There is no difference whether you get hurt at work, you get hurt at home. So we really institute this to get the employees to think wait a minute. You're trying to protect your four or your family? What are you doing yourself to get yourself out of harm's way? And we use the SafeS tart stories a lot. Even plants that will not use a SafeS tart use that same concept. Because where do most of the stories come from? It comes from off-the-job situations..
Tim Page-Bottorff:That's great input, four plus one, and make sure you look out for yourself. I will give out a shout- out to Tina Blount. I just saw her yesterday in the middle of nowhere, took a picture and sent it off to a good friend of ours colleague and we're like how often do we run into each other? I'm going to see Tina twice this month, ironically, but it's like in the last two months or two years I haven't seen her but once. So I appreciate you giving her a shout- out and explaining the protecting, the four plus one. But also and you're right, if somebody falls at home, it's going to make an impact at work, and if somebody falls at work it's still making an impact at work, and now this time it goes home, the impact Is is crazy to think about and I really appreciate you spelling that out now you've also go ahead, George one of the funny stories I always make a conference is or I even do it in training programs because when you first say it sort of takes people back of the chair a little bit.
George Irving:I always say, I always look at somebody and I'll say, hey, Jack, if, if you break your leg at work, is it going to hurt and he goes. And you can see that, like this is going to be a trick question and it's not a trick. It's not a trick question and the answer is yes. I said so. If you break your leg at home, is it going to hurt because he goes? Yes, I said. Well, let me tell you. The only difference is if you do it at work I got more work to do because I got to do an investigation I got a file workman's comp da-da-da. Do me a favor, at least if you're going to break your leg, do it at home.
George Irving:And everybody laughs because it sounds so ridiculous. But when you think about it, what is the difference? There is no difference. I got a broken leg and I'm going to go through the same with. I did a work I did at home. And people have come up to me years later and said you know that example you use. That was hilarious. But let me tell you about an injury I had at work and then I had one at home. And you're right, there is no difference.
Tim Page-Bottorff:Yeah absolutely, now in terms of information that you give out to your employees. You actually put in the hands of your employees each month a flyer about of course I'm a huge fan of this taking safety home, so talk a little bit about that and then tell us why you were surprised by your responses.
George Irving:Well, because when we started this project with Tina about, you know, safety at home we figured we had to do some type of communication. So my self and one other employee in the company, we basically put together a safety and it's a one- page thing. It comes to be a safety briefing, a safety topic of just safety issues at home and we send that to the plants so all the employees get it by email and then in a lot of cases the plant employees themselves will take the things home because they get copies of it. All the plants themselves will actually mail it to the people's homes. And we look for different themes and it's usually one a month. We did one on fire prevention at FBA Fire Prevention Week. That's a great theme, so we were able to do something on that. We got a number of plants that done home evacuation plans for the people to do evacuation with their children. I got some plants that have actually providing smoke detectors, fire extinguishers, from Home Depot, Lowes for Fire Prevention Week as part of that. And then, like when his kids started back in school in August, we always do one on bus safety and one for the children on what they need to do. So we look at things 4th of July, as always fireworks, and then we always do one for cooking, so sometimes we wind up with more than one in a month, but it's always a theme we send home.
George Irving:We had an incident at one of our plants where an employee's daughter she was working at a fast food place went out at night to put the trash in the compact, and they're not supposed to do that, they're always supposed to be two. There was only one and somebody tried to abduct her and she fought her abductor off and from that incident that plant actually put together a safety moment for distribution on employee abductions and what to look for and what not to do and things like that. So it's been, it's really been beneficial and I sort of I'm extremely satisfied to see how the plants have taken what we did to people in corporate and we send these things out and how they have adopted them and actually they're doing their own now in some cases from certain incidents that may happen in town, certain incidents that may happen to an employee, things like that.
George Irving:The other thing that we do in NAES is we have what we call safety improvement plants. So every year every plant has to pick out at least five or six things for safety improvement plants and we always I don't want to use the word mandate, but they know we always strongly suggest they have one off- the- job activity as part of their safety improvement plans. And so it gets. It also gets the plants actively involved enough in off-the-job to job safety activities also.
Tim Page-Bottorff:That's good to hear and I like those surprises. Those are good. And having a plant step up and do their own, you know one point, lesson or whatever whatever they ended up creating for child abductions, that was a. That's a moment in and of itself and I appreciate that. So you'd mentioned earlier that your team talks with Safe Start stories, but then we also remember that your team starts some of their mornings with Safe Start moments, so I was a little bit surprised, but I also want to know what's the value that you find in having these stories being shared.
George Irving:The value is that the initial value is they get talking about safety right away. You know, the first thing in the morning they get talking about safety. And then the other value is they get the share stories of real events. It's I really discourage this and I know some companies do this is they'll buy these canned programs where here's a five minute safety briefing. You give dah, dah, dah, dah dah and employees sit there and they just roll their eyes. They can't wait for that to be done.
George Irving:But there's a it's a major difference and a major and it's much more important when you get one of your employees to get up there and say let me tell you about what I saw or let me tell you what I did.
George Irving:That's even worse sometimes, in some cases, but it's now the employees talking about safety and it's not somebody up there reading some five minute little spew that they probably the first time they looked at the sheet when they got in front of the employees and then it's like now let's go back to work, because it's what you also see is when the employees are talking about events they be the scene or happen to them, that other employees start to start to ask questions and they start to talk about these events and when they're walking away they're still talking about the events.
George Irving:So it sort of carries that theme of safety through them through throughout the day. And we have some of our plants have changed from going from a safety moment in the morning that they do it at lunchtime. They do it just before lunchtime because they want to know what went on, what's already gone on at the plant for the day. That might be important, but it's just to reemphasize safety for the day that. You know, we want to talk about safety, we want to make sure we were focused on it and it just refocuses them by having it at like 11:30, 11:45.
Tim Page-Bottorff:Got it and I'll tell you this, you've had some really good stories and moments come out and it's good that you share those with us and but also that you share with your team. So let's switch gears a little bit. You talk a little bit about Rate Your State. You've admitted to me that you weren't a fan initially to Rate Your State, but your employees found somewhat of an organic use for it. Do you want to explain that a bit?
George Irving:Yeah, I'm not a. I'm not a great well, I shouldn't say not a great. I actually like safe, safe, safe, rate your state. For probably a different reason, but I'm not a fan of safety observations because employees don't wanna sit there and pick out another employee for doing something wrong and that's not the whole purpose of safety observations. I get it, but when you talk to the average employee out there, that's how they view safety observations, which is it's unfortunate it has a negative but Rate Your State.
George Irving:We have that in some of our plants and one of our plants which really was successful with it is they took the concept of rate your state, which is Safe Start, and they took it and said to the employees use it at home. Because, again, we're trying to do this 24/7 safety culture and if you can do it yourself internally at home, there's more of a buy-in. And then again the next day or a week or whatever it is, they come in to tell Safe Start stories. They talk about rating your state, and the one that really struck me the most was we had an employee. She was rushing to get a whole bunch of work done and this is basically what she was saying at one of the safety stories. And she said I'm rushing around doing things, I'm trying to get things done because I'm busy, I gotta get all this done.
George Irving:And I finally said rate my state. And she rated her state and said why am I rushing, why am I doing this? And as she was talking to herself about that and she basically calming herself down, she started to walk down a set of stairs and, sure enough, there was toys on the stairs and she said if I hadn't done Rate Your State and really started to slow down and think about it, she said I can tell you right now I would have hit those toys and I would have gone all the way down those stairs. And she said who knows how I would have been injured? So it was interesting to see how we were able to take Rate Your State, tie it into our off- the- job safety activities, tie it into an overall safety culture and how it all came together. And it's not by we're mandating it. We get the employees to buy into it themselves because they understand it.
Tim Page-Bottorff:And they're taking ownership of it. And I, quite frankly, use Rate Your State more often when I'm traveling, and I know I do that a lot in my work. But if I didn't do that, I'd be running into passengers, other passengers at airports and doing all kinds of silly things, and so it's been, I would say, organically. It's helped me out in that regard too, and I think that you had just mentioned the same. We're already quickly running out of time, George, so I've got just two quick, important questions to ask you. At your corporate event, you came up with that a tremendous and impactful way. We talked about impact earlier to underscore the dangers of texting and driving. Can you give us a brief explanation of what you did there?
George Irving:Yeah, what I did. I always do a presentation at corporate office corporate safety conferences. So what I did was I actually looked at texting and driving, because texting and driving I don't say we all do it, most people do it because you can see it all the time and kids do it, teenagers do it. I mean you just see it all over the place. So what I basically did is I myself and one of the employees I put down, I put a presentation together on what happens when you're texting and driving, and what I basically did was I laid out a black tablecloth on the table, I laid down with flowers on me and the guy that was with me the two of us drive to work every day and that was pretty much the scenario.
George Irving:Well, in that presentation I'm the guy that gets killed in the car accident and I was texting and driving and he was the passenger and it was a series of me talking to him, basically from the grave, saying why didn't you stop me from texting? And it was the usual, why? You know, your safety is not my responsibility. I said, that's great, I'm dead. And then it was. Well, you know, I felt embarrassed. Well, I know, George, you have a temper and you would have been mad at me. And we walked through all those what you would call it I call excuses for not stopping what I was doing. And then I carried it to the theme that's telling him that I was basically the lucky one because I was dead, but he had to live the rest of his life knowing that I died and he could have stopped it. And then I carried it to the point of you know, our kids play, the girls play on the soccer teams together.
George Irving:What are you gonna do when my daughter scores? She looks for her dad to get support and he's not there. And you know you could have prevented me from having this death. Our boys are in scouts. How are you gonna handle it when they have? You know, the father and son scout camping weekend. My son doesn't have a dad. You'll be going there with your son and you could have stopped it. How are you gonna feel? Because our wives are friendly. My wife comes over and she tells you a wife about all this problem. She's having worrying about finances and all that because I'm no longer in the picture.
George Irving:And he knows that he could have said something and stopped that. And at the end, when I said to him you know I'm the lucky one. I'm gone. You're going to go to bed nights and you're going to wake up screaming into the middle of the night because you're going to hear me saying why didn't you say something, why didn't you do something? Why didn't you stop? And that was pretty much that whole presentation and I know we talked to Tim earlier about I actually had people come up to me and say never do that presentation again and the reasoning was it was so real that they never want to be in that situation. But the purpose of taking texting and driving that's something that again, people do it off the job. People do it on the job. That's a pretty universal safety thing you can talk about now. Probably don't recommend to your audience. Maybe do that unless you really feel comfortable with it, but it left an impact on a lot of people yeah, especially me was there to see it, and so thank you, George, for that.
Tim Page-Bottorff:I really appreciate it. And so, as we wrap this up, I need your take on what you call wallpaper. Why is wallpaper valuable?
George Irving:Yeah, wallpaper is another one of my great themes that I came up with. It is we were we having problem with with plants, with housekeeping, and when you go into a plant I don't care where it is and you say to the employees, you got a housekeeping problem, they get defensive right away because they don't like to be told they have a. In fact, they'll roll their eyes nine out of ten times on a housekeeping, here we go. But what I did was, rather than calling well housekeeping, I call it wallpaper, because people don't see the clutter, they don't see the things on top of cabinets anymore, they don't see that the shovels and brooms haven't been put away, because they walk by them every day and after a while, you don't see it, it's not there. So I called it wallpaper and we started doing what I would do my safety assessments.
George Irving:We were doing wallpaper hunts and it became humorous in a lot of ways because then people would come back to the control rooms and say you ought to see the wallpaper out in the warehouse we got, you know, and they and they actually laugh at it and I have some substantial fleets that I handle for days and even on their calls, and even the owners of these plants who will talk about wallpaper and we don't. We don't even mention housekeeping anymore. But everybody knows what we're saying. You know what we're talking about when we say wallpaper and it was just a way of changing the dialogue from housekeeping to wallpaper, and people laugh at it, they smile at it, they get it and they walk around, they look for wallpaper. Housekeeping they don't want to hear about housekeeping, it is one in the same well.
Tim Page-Bottorff:I appreciate you're bringing that up, because it's always we like to end on a positive note and that's one positive way of getting people to think. You know, instead of negatively about the way things look in the housekeeping world, they think positively about, well, the wallpaper. So, George, thank you so much for your time today and sharing your wisdom with us.
Tim Page-Bottorff:We do appreciate you being here all right thank you and thank you so much on behalf of the entire Safe Talk team thank you all for spending part of your day with us remember you're free to share all of our episodes with anybody or anyone and for SafeT alk with SafeSt art. I'm Tim Page-Bottorff. I'll see you down the road.