No Accident

All it took was a single industrial safety class for Barton McMillin to realize a career in safety was right for him — particularly because it didn't require sitting behind a desk 24 hours a day. “Things that I was learning in the safety class, I could apply during my normal day of work,” Barton, who maintained a job throughout college, says. “So it was like, hey, this stuff's making sense and it's interesting. And I couldn't say that about a lot of the other classes that I was taking.”In this episode of the No Accident podcast, presented by TRUCE, we hear from Barton, who's worked in the industry for more than 25 years and currently serves as the Vice President of Environmental, Health, & Safety at Swedish multinational telecommunications company Ericsson. He discusses why engagement with a safety culture is a great measurement of a company's success, why it's important to think of safety in the proactive sense rather than simply compliance, and why safer employees are more lucrative for the business.“I am the safety guy, but I'm also here to help the business,” he says. “And helping the business is to make sure that the business understands what risks we're taking and how it's affecting our people.”He also explains why a good safety professional is someone who genuinely cares about their employees' safety inside and outside of work rather than simply being focused on productivity and how much money an injury could cost the company. Barton believes in expanding our definition of safety to include other elements of an employee's wellbeing, such as mental health. Especially in the past year and a half, he's noticed that the pandemic brought everyone to a new level of stress that inevitably affected safety. But it's important to overcome the stigma around mental health in order to address these stressors in the workplace. “One of the things I think that gets overlooked in the safety world is the wellbeing of people,” he says. “Fatigue and mental wellbeing is probably an associated cause with 90% of all injuries and incidents.” Featured Guest

Whenever Tony Wallace's wife chops vegetables, he can't help but put his safety professional hat on. “I'll gasp, and she'll say, You don't trust me,” he says. “I'll say, No, I trust you: I don't trust the knife.” Tony has tried to explain that this helicopter approach to safety is an overflow from his workday. “She goes, You must drive people nuts,” he says. “I do, but I just want to make sure that she's safe. If she were to cut her hand, that would be horrible, but there are a lot of other ramifications. And this is where it comes into the workplace too.”The cost of an accident is just one of many topics Tony, the Global Vice President of Safety, Health, and Environmental Quality at industrial gas company Linde, speaks on in this episode of the No Accident podcast, presented by TRUCE. He also explains why Linde's leaders take a hands-on approach to safety, and the importance of viewing it as a disciplined group effort that helps the whole business, not just individuals. “When our senior leadership goes into the field … they'll walk around and ask questions like, How are you doing on your safety?” he says. “Talking to the employees and asking the question, What are some things we can do to help make you and your site safer? and then following through. It's making that connection with our employees and our lineman.” In Tony's more than 35-year career, he's never had to deal with anything like COVID-19. But the pandemic reminded him of the impact that everyone's safety decisions have on one another.Tony says that he'd never hire anyone who doesn't wear a seat belt, for example, and that translates to people who don't take COVID-19 precautions, such as wearing a mask on an airplane. The people implementing such rules are still seen as “safety cops,” but he believes he can overcome that mindset by reminding people that following these protocols makes everyone's lives better. “My background is being able to understand how and why we do things — not simply what the safety answer is, but how we do it together to ensure we can accomplish all of our goals,” Tony says.  Featured Guest

When Robert Schindler started his career in construction 18 years ago, he remembers the safety and operation teams working on opposite sides of the construction site. The safety team didn't talk to superintendents, or project managers. Everyone did their jobs independently.Now, as the Vice President of Safety at Arch-Con, Robert has seen the benefits of integrating safety across departments and working groups. He believes the best results come from having safety closely intertwined with daily operations.“It's a part of our DNA,” Robert says of the commercial construction company, which has an award-winning safety program. This mindset has helped play an important role in the success — and profitability — of the company. “Safety directly affects your bottom line. Safety directly affects how you can bid on certain projects. But most importantly, safety is your biggest tool when you're selling something,” Robert says.Sure, a good safety score will increase project opportunities, but it goes beyond that. To Robert, safety is equated with efficiency. To reap the benefits of safety measures, the approach has to be proactive. A good safety program should create smooth workflow processes and prevent issues before they become a problem, which saves time and money.But, proactivity is only possible when the whole team is on board with safety protocol — and when it's made simple. Don't be fooled, though; simplicity does not mean cutting corners.  Featured Guest

While some safety leaders measure success or failure by the number of injury reports, Bianca Castagna, leader of the Environmental, Health, and Safety (EHS) program at the GE Aviation plant in Auburn, Alabama, prefers to think further ahead.“If we define safety by the strength of our defenses against hazards, rather than just avoiding injuries, we will have better outcomes,” she tells the No Accident podcast, presented by TRUCE. Bianca has been with GE Aviation since she enrolled in a co-op program during her junior year at Worcester Polytechnic Institute, where she earned a Bachelor of Science in Environmental Engineering. She's now responsible for ensuring the safety and wellbeing of the plant's 180+ employees.Instead of fixating on the number of injuries, Bianca focuses her attention on identifying potential dangers, and building procedures to eliminate these.One very effective way to do this is to ask the employees on the floor what hazards they are aware of, and what steps they've taken to protect themselves. Once Bianca and her team have identified these defenses — as they call them — they investigate further to make sure they're effective, sufficient, and being properly maintained.“Those are the things that we should be focused on, because if you're just chasing zero injuries, you're too late,” Bianca says.Obviously no one wants to see someone get injured on the job, especially when a simple conversation with the people using the equipment could have prevented the accident. Bianca says that an added bonus of this kind of collaboration with employees is that it proves to them that the company is looking out for their safety. This in turn makes them more motivated to work harder and produce good results.“If people are safe and healthy at work, they're more likely to make better quality parts, and to be productive and feel a sense of ownership in what it is they're producing,” Bianca says. “It's all about getting products out the door to our customers, so they can be satisfied and we can make money.” Featured Guest

Alex Guariento is Trimac Transportation's Vice President of Safety. The Calgary-based freight carrier's 3,400 employees make sure that every shipment they're charged with delivering all over North America reaches its destinations on time without sacrificing safety. Alex has always been connected to transportation and logistics, but his transition from the operations to the safety side was something he didn't expect.He began his career in the U.S. Army where he served as a transportation officer and paratrooper. This experience, plus working as a manager of Greyhound bus drivers immediately following his military career, gave him the unique perspective of someone who has worked on both the operations and safety sides of a large organization. During a Greyhound restructuring, he was asked to work as a senior manager of duty compliance, which led to his nearly three-decades-long career in safety. Over the course of 14 years as a top safety and security executive at Greyhound, Alex helped shape a vigorous safety and compliance training program. Its driving instructors often had 10+ years and in some cases, multiple decades of accident-free miles behind them. The company's success underscored to Alex the relationship between safety and market leadership. “A company's safety record has a huge impact on its bottom line,” Alex says on this episode of No Accident. He further explains the connection between safety and a company's financial health, noting that accidents can result in costly lawsuits and that employees and customers don't want to associate with organizations that have poor safety records. Though Alex doesn't manage Trimac's drivers directly, he strongly believes that a great safety leader has to be able to influence what happens on the front lines. “Typically a safety leader has no direct operational control of the people who do what it is that the company does. In my case, I don't manage drivers and have no direct operational control on dispatch,” he says on the podcast. “But if I'm not able to influence the way the operational leaders do things, I will not be successful on behalf of the company from an operational safety perspective. I have to be present without physically being there.” Featured Guest

Joseph Tommasi started his career clearing trees around utility lines and trained as an arborist in the early 1970s. He worked his way up as a crew leader, then a supervisor, and has been with The Davey Tree Expert Company since 1994.Based in Kent, Ohio, Davey is employee-owned and was established more than 100 years ago.From the office to the field, safety is an expectation that employees, managers, businesses and even clients expect when they do business with Davey. “There is an expectation that many of our clients — particularly our larger ones, but certainly individual homeowners — want nothing but a quality job executed well, and that there's been no harm done to anyone in the course of that work,” Joseph says on this episode of No Accident.  Joseph sees OSHA best practices as a starting point. “You can't manage your safety program by regulation alone. Your program has to start off with communication and valuing your people, and your people need to know that.” As the U.S. and Canada's third-largest landscaping company, according to Lawn & Landscape — Davey has undergone significant expansion, but not without giving safety considerations a hard look first. “Whether it's new locations or entities, safety is a key factor that the acquisition team weighs early on during the due diligence process, even before we make any commitments.”When Joseph started his career in safety, many industries viewed safety as the role of the safety department alone. Today, he sees a shift to safety as a holistic and integrated system that requires ongoing improvement across divisions. Joseph attributes an intensified awareness of safety among consumers and businesses to the events of September 11, 2001. “Now it's a two-way street. The people in the safety departments and the field, but also managers and supervisors, have to share the message of their safety programs and ownership of the process with each other.”  Featured Guest

Travis Post never intended to go into the safety field. But after a Skilsaw injury at one of his first construction jobs left him a partial-leg amputee, his career trajectory completely changed.“In the early eighties, I received my safety baptism, as we call it,” Travis says in this episode of the No Accident podcast, presented by TRUCE. “It took about two years of physical therapy to learn how to walk again.”He took a new job in respiratory therapy, then was working in the cardiac unit of a major hospital when he got a call from his old employer — the company he was working for during his injury wanted to know if he had any interest in construction safety. Travis thought it sounded interesting, and went back to work for them in a completely new capacity.As a former construction worker who considers his injury the result of “horseplay” on the job, Travis was able to go into that position with a valuable point of view. He saw an opportunity for people who had experienced workplace injuries to educate employees who hadn't, which made such trainings a more meaningful experience.“I started hiring employees that had previously shot their foot or their hand to the plywood to actually do training classes,” Travis said in one example of a response to several nail gun injuries. “The guys actually listened to them because they're active employees in the trade.”His team then took this approach one step further and started having individuals who had injured themselves severely enough to receive modified duty worker's comp payments speak to other workers about that experience to show that “you don't get rich off of it. It's basically there to let you survive.”These employee-led trainings are a result of Travis' belief in employee-based safety, which he refers to as a hybrid of behavior-based safety and education that help protect a company's profit.“You take an individual and have that individual completely buy into the system through education and clear direction,” he said. “If they have input in the whole process, then we get 100% buy-in.”Featured Guest

To Torrey Garrison, safety isn't just the right thing to do — it's a selling point for a business.Torrey is the Vice President of Environmental, Health and Safety (EHS) and of Leadership Development at Performance Contractors, an industrial construction company based on the Gulf Coast. Through his dual roles, he negotiates between the safety and business aspects of the company. “A lot of times, we get our foothold into speaking with the C-suite by saying, ‘_Hold on, let's talk about the money aspect of this_' — and then we can blend doing the right thing back [into the conversation],” he says on this episode of the No Accident podcast, presented by TRUCE.Torrey is fighting to change the view of safety from a “necessary evil” to a positive that can be used to promote the company. “It's really hard sometimes for safety to show what the monetary value is for us to be there,” he admits. “[But] where you really start seeing the fruit of the labor is when you're able to get more work, even with that organization or a different organization based off how your safety record is.”Torrey describes joining sales and marketing meetings with clients who are eager to hear about Performance Contractors' winning safety record — something that separates them from competitors.Torrey's career journey has provided great insight into the worker's perspective as well, which has aided in his dynamic approach to safety. After spending five years in the U.S. Coast Guard, his first job was in the “very dangerous atmosphere” of a foundry. But it was there Torrey learned the importance of robust safety procedures from the other side of the clipboard.    “I'm looking around thinking, ‘_Wow, this is a very unsafe place._' I was on the other side — I wasn't on the EHS side, I was actually on the hands-on side.”Featured Guest

Carrol Dugan took interest in the environment around her at a young age after realizing that “we only have this one environment that we live in.” This interest eventually led her to a successful career in environmental health and safety (EHS).“I felt it was really interesting all the different ways that people could contribute in their daily lives to make it a better place,” Carrol explains on this episode of the No Accident podcast, presented by TRUCE. Carrol now serves as the Director of Environmental Health and Safety at Hocking International Laboratories, one of the leading custom chemical manufacturers in the world. Having worked in the business for more than 20 years, Carrol is a seasoned environmental health sustainability leader, helping organizations optimize their operations and excel in environmental health and safety (EHS) as a way to grow their business. In her role at Hocking International, Carrol emphasizes how influential the EHS department can be on business practices.  “The power of influence is so critical for EHS professionals. We're not just technical resources that can interpret rules and standards or design engineer equipment. We really serve as a resource for the company to help them understand what it means to be compliant, but also move beyond that and really help drive the business.”For Carrol, safety is not a standalone department, but something that must be integrated into all aspects of business functionality in order to increase efficiency, employee and customer engagement and larger market share.“[EHS] really needs to be integral as part of an organization's operations. It should be built into the way that people work so that it's not separate,” she explains. Featured Guest

Katherine Syverson has spent 40 years in manufacturing with a variety of businesses. To say she knows and understands the risks and needs of the field would be an understatement.Now, as the Environment, Health and Safety Director at Life Fitness, the umbrella company for six fitness brands, Katherine uses the knowledge and experience from her manufacturing days to inform her policy practices. “We use a lot of lean manufacturing tools and Six Sigma concepts in safety, just like we would in quality or operations or efficiencies,” Katherine explains on this episode of the No Accident podcast, presented by TRUCE. “We use those same tools and mindsets and kind of that continuous improvement mindset to constantly get better in the workplace around working in a safe manner.” At Life Fitness, Katherine develops and integrates company-wide standardized, proactive EHSS programs and practices through collaborative leadership. In fact, she boasts about Life Fitness’s leaders’ dedication to safety.“We had a global leadership meeting this past week and talked about safety as really being a highlight of continuous improvement and performance this year,” she says. “The CEO talked about the fact that safety is in everybody's basket. It's for everybody to be participating in affecting change around safety. So I see not only my own leadership but the leadership within the organization really being authentic.”According to Katherine, it is truly in leaders’ best interests to invest in safety as a process flow because it is just as much an investment in employees as it is in the company’s future. “[Safety] is not a cost savings; it's a cost avoidance. … [That means] being able to think about it more as a business practice — like how can I make an improvement on the safety side of things that can ultimately affect business efficiencies and quality metrics?”Featured Guest

As a child growing up in Nigeria, climbing a mango tree was just the kind of risk Acho Ulu was willing to take. But his dad taught him about the importance of safety and preparation, which is why he put safeguards in place in case he fell. Acho, now the Director of Environmental Health & Safety at Unibail-Rodamco-Westfield, has learned much more about safety since then. Perhaps the most important lesson is to focus on how safety affects the bottom line. “The sole purpose of the business is money, revenue,” Acho says on this episode of the No Accident podcast, presented by TRUCE. “And if there is no business, there's no need for you [the safety leader]. So always think about the business.”Acho argues that without profitability and revenue, safety departments wouldn’t exist — so it’s important for safety leaders to explain the impact of incidents to the C-suite through metrics related to finances. Acho also discusses the crucial role of cross-functional collaboration at Westfield, the unique challenge of keeping both employees and members of the public safe and the importance of showing a genuine concern for the well-being of your workers. Lastly, keeping safeguards in mind, he also explains why he isn’t afraid to take some risks as long as his team is prepared. “Foot traffic translates to revenue,” Acho says. “So I never say no to any event, no matter how risky it may be. And that's the difference between education and training, I set conditions in place to address the worst-case scenarios, those incidents we try to prevent. How can we get this done? And if that cause materializes, how can we keep the outcome to a minimum?”Featured Guest:

As a volunteer firefighter for 13 years, Tyler Keys witnessed two ends of the safety spectrum. He saw people’s worst moments — when safety precautions were not taken — resulting in horrible, sometimes dire, consequences. But he also witnessed the heroic impact of safety, proper protocols and communication, which led him down his career path in safety.Tyler now serves as the Director of Environmental, Health and Safety at Hollman, Inc., the leading innovator in locker design and solutions. On this episode of the No Accident podcast presented by TRUCE, Tyler discusses the value of communication and being disruptive.“Innovation is one of our core values as a company,” Tyler says. “Everybody — from the person that works at the front desk to the person that works on the shipping dock — is thinking of an innovative way to make the business better. Having that mindset has really helped on the safety side because, if we run into an issue, I've got people that are used to thinking outside the box.”It is this disruptive, innovative frame of mind that keeps the safety industry constantly improving and updating. Tyler also credits his emphasis on communication for Hollman’s successful zero injuries and zero release rate. “The more you open that line of communication, that dialogue, and getting people engaged, where they feel comfortable, that's when I know that we're being successful because the workforce is engaged,” Tyler says. “They're not afraid to speak up. They know that things will get fixed, and their ideas will be heard. It brings a lot of value to the company.”Over the course of his diverse and lengthy career in the industry, Tyler has seen more business leaders lean into the value of safety. It is no longer a mandatory nuisance. Rather, safety positively impacts business, saving money and motivating expertly trained employees on the job.Featured Guest

Safety isn’t just a job to Jack Frost; it’s a commitment. In 1998, just a short time after Jack had become a safety officer at a shipyard in Pascagoula, Mississippi, he witnessed the horrific death of a fellow employee. It is a moment in time that has stuck with him forever.“I made a commitment to myself. I couldn't save him, but moving forward, I would do everything I can to save the next person,” Jack shares on this episode of the No Accident podcast, presented by TRUCE.Having witnessed first-hand the immeasurable cost of failed safety measures, Jack dedicated his life to ensuring no one else would lose their life while working at his company. He has become a trailblazer in building and leading strategic health, safety, environmental and quality programs that get to the heart of business priorities — people, profits and performance excellence. Those priorities are interconnected. When an incident occurs, companies lose time and productivity when they conduct investigations, which leads to a loss of revenue. They also lose reputability. They suffer what he calls the “death of a thousand cuts” as these disparate elements collate and create significant losses in efficiency, productivity, financial and reputation. Therefore, companies should aim to set exceptional safety mandates. Those need to come from the top.“If you set your [safety] standard high, you're going to reach measures you never thought you could. So setting that expectation, having that right attitude at the top, being consistent, and following up are critical elements to safety excellence.”Though people and their safety are his core focus, Jack also recognizes the tethered bond between safety and financial success for a business, which can only be perpetuated by those in leadership roles.  Featured Guest

Grantt Bedford always has some sort of plan. After serving in the first Gulf War, he made a five-year plan: get a job, get a bachelor’s degree, work for a major oil company and become a manager. He accomplished each point and did so while breaking company records.Just like in safety, being proactive rather than reactive yields desired results. So it’s fair to say, Grantt was destined for a job in safety before he even had it. “There isn't any other safety than being proactive because you have to be able to look at what you're currently doing and be proactive in stopping something from happening,” Grantt says on this episode of the No Accident podcast, presented by TRUCE.Knowing the value of proactivity is something that has proven its value time and again in Grantt’s professional life as the Director of Safety, Environment and Quality for the United States at Eni. Eni is an integrated energy company dedicated to achieving the total decarbonization of products and processes by 2050.Being the large company that it is and one with a higher risk of employee deaths, safety is an invaluable piece of Eni’s operation. “We have the luxury of being able to spend the money we need to spend to ensure that we do safety right. And I think for us, even if we weren't heavily regulated, we would do it just because it makes great business sense to do it,” Grantt says.For a large oil company like Eni, an investment in safety is vital. As Grantt says, “Promoting it and making sure that they're spending the money they need to for safety, that is definitely making more business sense for them.”Featured Guest

Few 18-year-olds know what an industrial hygienist is. So it makes sense why Jeremy Sawyer didn’t consider that major during his first year of college. After realizing physical therapy wasn't for him, he spoke to a counselor who opened his eyes.“I said … ‘The curriculum is really what I'm interested in — math and science — but I also want to be able to help folks,’” he recalls on this episode of the No Accident podcast, presented by TRUCE. “She pointed me in the direction of industrial hygiene.”After working as an industrial hygienist for six years, Jeremy became a health and safety supervisor at a chemical company, which led him down a more safety-oriented path. Now, he’s Deputy Director of Environment, Safety and Health at California-based SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory.Regardless of whether a workplace is more science-driven than profit-driven — like a lab — Jeremy said it’s still crucial to maintain a successful safety program. His approach to avoiding incidents is to first gain buy-in from the C-suite, which he does without focusing on the cost of injuries. “When you're talking with leaders, you want to ensure that they understand that our most important resource and the reason that we are able to be successful is our folks in the field,” he says. “We need to make sure that they have the tools … because if sites get shut down for whatever reason, then they're not making money.”On this episode of No Accident, Jeremy also discusses the importance of not policing employees and showing that you genuinely care about their well-being. “I think failure in our line of work can be absolutely catastrophic. Not in a financial sense, but in a people sense. We want to make sure that failures don't result in people getting hurt.” Featured Guest

Matt Hare originally studied to become a firefighter before taking a job at Hit Promotional Products — a training he believes has greatly aided him in his role as Vice President of Environmental Health and Safety.On this episode of the No Accident podcast presented by TRUCE, Matt breaks down the value and necessity of safety in the workplace for both employees and the company’s profitability. “People honestly want to see a vendor that is protecting their workforce, providing a clean and safe environment for their people and so on and so forth,” May says. “It is a true sales advantage for us because we dedicate a lot of time and resources to making sure our employees are happy at work and that they go home to their families the same way they come in.”  According to Matt, safety is an invaluable asset, proving a company’s competency and ability to push out a good product while protecting its own employees. Instilling top-notch safety programs can also yield long-term gains for the company in paying lower premiums and workers’ compensation.“If you can institute programs that are beneficial to your organization,” Matt says, “you have to let those programs really develop into something and work out the kinks before you get a long run of success.”In addition to ensuring the safety of Hit’s employees, Matt also discusses the importance of seeing the total business of Hit - not just the safety aspect. “I was actually sitting with my dad one night and he was like, ‘It's great to have all these safety degrees, but if you don't know and understand how the business is going to operate, you really don't know how you're going to impact it,’” Matt says.So, he got a business degree to better understand how certain components of the business, like returns and investments, can impact the company overall. With Hit ranked among the top 5 commercial printing suppliers in the nation and creating items for so many Fortune 500 companies, it is clear that safety and sustainability are keys to success. Featured Guest

When Lauren Mayfield graduated college with an urban planning degree, she had the intention of helping people through science, technology and ingenuity. A few decades later and Lauren is doing just that as Senior Vice President of Safety & Health and Loss Prevention for State Compensation Insurance Fund. “I love the job,” Lauren says. “It married my love of science and technology with the ability to work with people and help impact and make a difference.”On this episode of the No Accident podcast presented by TRUCE, Lauren Mayfield talks about her work at the State Compensation Insurance Fund and the value of proper safety protocols. The company’s mission is to help make workplaces safer, not only for the sake of employees but for its clients’ optimum profitability as well. “We sit down with employers and talk about ways in which we can help to make not only their place safer but more profitable and more attractive from a standpoint of employment,” Lauren says about the company’s work.At the end of the day, Lauren and the rest of the company want to see businesses and the state of California do well. Many of the State Compensation Insurance Fund’s resources are available online to anyone, not just policyholders. The company wants to see small businesses thrive in the state of California. To them, an investment in safety is an investment in good business. Throughout the episode, Lauren also discusses why communication - simple, straight forward, and clear communication - is key, because if her teams don’t fully understand what is important to business owners, then behavior can’t change.“One of the habits I've been trying to break - and I think my staff has been doing a great job - is we're not talking to ourselves, we're talking to business owners,” Lauren says. “We've got to be understood. Communication is key. If we're not understood, then the behaviors can't change.”Featured Guest

Shawn Mandel’s passion for safety began as a hospital corpsman — aka an enlisted medical specialist — in the U.S. Navy, when the health and safety of the Marines he worked alongside was his responsibility.“It parlayed well into the environmental health and safety field,” he said on this episode of the No Accident podcast, presented by TRUCE. “I started out as a district environmental health and safety manager for BFI [Browning Ferris Industries] and progressively worked my way through that organization.”For the past nine years, Shawn has served as the Vice President of Safety and Risk at The Woodlands, Texas-based Waste Connections Inc. The company approaches safety based on the philosophy of servant leadership, in which leaders ensure their employees’ highest priority needs are being served. Shawn explains how this drives the business’s success, as well as how that success is supplemented by empowering workers, maintaining a value-based work culture, and using modern technology like the company’s event recording system.“It is our self-directed, empowered team members that have enabled us to see the success that we have from a risk and safety standpoint,” he says. “Obviously we're a for-profit company publicly traded, but at the same time, those values drive our business. And it's those values that drive our business that have enabled us to see the success that we have for the past 25 years.” Those values are so ingrained in the company culture, he added, that he doesn’t even have to use the word “safety” that often — his entire team knows that’s what he’s referring to when he says “first value.”“We've got this internal language that only we understand,” Shawn says. “When you ask anyone in the Waste Connections organization about the first value, they know that you're talking about safety. And you're talking about their safety. You're talking about their coworkers’ safety.”Featured Guest

Damian Alvarez got into construction as a 14-year-old who just needed to make some cash. He took an under-the-table job to pay for summer school, but after several months of putting new shingles on roofs, he’d found a lifelong love for working with his hands. Fast forward several years into his time at the University of Texas at El Paso: Damian and his longtime girlfriend got married and decided to leave El Paso and move to Atlanta. He got a labor job with MA&O Construction, where he climbed the ranks after the owner noticed he was bilingual. “We were a subcontractor, so we had contracts with very big companies and they started to ramp up their safety and what they were expecting of their subcontractors,” Damian says on this episode of the No Accident podcast, presented by TRUCE. “He said ‘Hey, you went to school — would you like to go back and learn about safety?’ And I said sure.”He became the company’s safety director and never looked back. Currently, Damian is Environmental Health & Safety Director at Jordan Foster Construction LLC, and on this episode, he discusses how his position requires him to work closely with everyone from the executive team to the employees in the field to facilitate an engaging safety program with buy-in on all fronts. By focusing less on compliance and policing his employees and more on mentoring them on why it’s important to be safe, Damian is able to get everyone on board. This in turn helps business because if a construction group doesn’t have a good safety record, it won’t get more work.“We're changing more into a coach. Like we’re talking about …  ‘OK, why did you do this? Let's see how we can do it better,’” Damian says. “A great safety leader is that they’re a leader. That person is building other leaders. … I tell my team, ‘I want you guys to be better than I am.’”Featured Guest

Keith Robinson’s 30-year career in safety started with a direct command from his captain in the Navy.“When I was a young officer in the Navy, the captain I served under came to me and said, ‘We need you to be the assistant safety officer on this nuclear-powered aircraft carrier,’” Keith says. “The Navy puts you where they need you versus where you want to be. I had no experience with it, but I spent my final two years in the Navy and on my ship as the assistant safety officer, got a lot of experience, and discovered a passion for the job.”Once he was done serving, that passion didn’t go away. Keith took safety job after safety job, starting at Four Seasons Environmental Services. He bounced around for the next couple of decades until six years ago, when he left Stantec for his current job as Vice President of Safety at Civil & Environmental Consultants, Inc.On this episode of the No Accident podcast, presented by TRUCE, Keith discusses how making a personal connection with the employee, providing the personal touch, is ultimately what helps to motivate safe behavior, because ultimately it’s up to the individual to make the right decisions.. He also shares how to speak the C-suite’s language — that is, talk in terms of metrics that they care about, such as productivity and profitability.Keith also discusses how and why an injury negatively affects business, noting that it “impacts the company's ability to produce whatever product it is or whatever service it is in the long run.”He points out that when somebody gets injured, it’s important to remember that “they didn't do it on purpose. They may have been careless about it, but they did not intend to get hurt. That's not the result that they wanted. So we need to really make sure that as leaders, we are approaching people with that same perspective.”Featured Guest

Cole Wadsworth is a cowboy and rodeo competitor who never thought he’d work outside the agriculture field. With degrees in agricultural science and animal science, his plan was always to teach agriculture — until his wife applied for a compliance job at Ben E. Keith, a food and beverage distributor, on his behalf. “I had no idea. She just used my consultant references and some friends of ours that let them know what I did,” Cole says in this episode of the No Accident podcast, presented by TRUCE. “ I thought Ben E. Keith was somebody who wanted me to ride a horse for him. I'm not even kidding. So I went up there and interviewed … and it paid a heck of a lot more than the ag teaching job I was about to take.”While he was working his way through school at Texas A&M University, Cole’s friend taught him auditing as a side hustle. Civilian auditing is much different than shoeing horses — what Cole was doing before he got into compliance — but it helped prepare him for his work at Ben E. Keith, where he was responsible for over 180 drivers and 190 trucks.Because his dad was a commercial vehicle enforcement officer, Cole also knew the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration regulations like the back of his hand. But he still had plenty to learn before he got to his current position as Vice President of Health Safety Environment at Smart Chemical Solutions.In this episode, Cole discusses the importance of testing new safety technology, how a good safety program helps retain employees and why his approach to safety is to work alongside those in the field to gain their input rather than utilizing a “gotcha” mentality.“If there are too many flaws at a field level, then who cares about what I think?” Cole says of the safety procedures he implements. “Remember, I just sit behind a desk and I drive around and teach classes. So if it doesn't work at a field level, what's the point?”Featured Guest

The first thing John Goodpaster does every morning is make his bed (sometimes even when his wife is still in it). As a former commander in the U.S. Navy, he thrives off of routine and structure, and those character traits have served him well in his post-military career. John got into safety while he was running a parts distribution center in Michigan. He’d just finished his work supporting a SEAL team in Hawaii and, after a tough winter transition, was settling in when the company received an OSHA citation. He was then asked to transition into a safety position. According to John, if it weren’t for that citation, he’d likely still be on the logistics/operations side.“The hardest thing was, when you're an officer in the Navy, you expect certain things to go a certain way,” John says on this episode of the No Accident podcast, presented by TRUCE. “In the service, they do things without having to be repeatedly told stuff. Whereas in the corporate world, sometimes you’ve got to spend more time to educate because they don't react the same way.”Lucky for John, he has a master’s degree in adult and higher education from the University of Oklahoma, which helped him find a way to engage his employees in safety trainings and other educational settings. The trick, he said, is focusing on explanations rather than commands. You have to explain the importance behind safety precautions, he said, because that’s the only way to get buy-in. Currently, John is the Director of Environmental Health and Safety at the Abilene, Texas-based company Briggs Equipment, where he’s drastically improved safety conditions.“That was really when the ‘Safety First’ program came in, about when I came in in 2017,” he says. “At that point, we were spending multiple million dollars in workers' comp injury costs. We had a lot of cases. Implementing what we have, we are right now looking at being less than a $100,000 this year. … We've [also] gone from having 50-60 accidents a year to now we're on track to be under 20.”In this episode, John discusses the importance of getting out in the field and listening to the employees doing the dangerous work to gain a new perspective on safety, and how it’s possible to make safety-first a way of life rather than just a slogan.   Featured Guest

John Horne’s four-year-old daughter doesn’t understand his job, but his seven-year-old son has a better grasp on it.“He knows that his [dad’s] responsible for safety and health,” John says in this episode of the No Accident podcast, presented by TRUCE. “And what's really cool is he tells me all the time that when he grows up, he wants to be a chemical engineer and work for Nutrien.”John serves as the Vice President of Safety and Health at Nutrien, the world’s largest provider of crop inputs and services. He originally planned to become an environmental engineer, but during his second semester at East Tennessee State University, he took a human ecology course that was part of the environmental health and safety program — and got pulled in. After graduating in 2002, he worked as a Site Leader for Hexion Specialty Chemicals and then as a Manager of Safety and eventually Director of Safety and Health at PotashCorp before it merged with Agrium to form Nutrien.After more than 14 years in the industry, John has learned how to effectively spearhead safety efforts at a major company. At Nutrien, he works hard to enforce the importance of safety, maintain a culture of care where everyone’s concerns are listened to and find a balance between quality, efficiency and safety.“Our purpose is to make sure that, in everything we do, we do it safely,” John says. “We do it with integrity, but we also do it from the lens that we want to make sure that we're doing our part to make the world a better place.”One example he discusses is Nutrien’s safety leadership coaching program in which coaches teach a course to frontline leaders focused on why it's integral to have a personal commitment to safety. “They [the coaches] go out and they spend four or five hours with those leaders, providing direct one-on-one feedback,” he says of the program. “Additionally, we also make sure that we get our senior leaders in the field visibly engaged in safety.”Featured Guest

Working in the oil and gas industry runs in the family for Justin Overstreet. About 20 years ago, he started working for his dad’s company, where he was in charge of documentation and other rudimentary tasks like testing employees after they watched safety videos. From there, he moved on to take both operations and sales leadership positions before later returning to the safety field. Although it was an atypical path for a safety professional, Justin believes his diverse background made him even more prepared for his current role as Vice President of Safety at Wildcat Oil Tools. “I've never been worried or concerned about taking on additional roles. And I've never looked at my role in a company as ‘I'm a safety guy,’” Justin says on this episode of the No Accident podcast, presented by TRUCE. “I've looked at it as: My job here is to enable operations or some other team to do the best that they can do. ... Whether you call me a safety professional, an account manager, an operations support manager or whatever — those things all go together.”On top of focusing on the safety of Wildcat’s employees and customers, Justin’s current role has expanded to concern quality control, which means he’s working to ensure the integrity of what Wildcat does. On this episode, he explains how these responsibilities have changed the way he looks at safety culture — and why he’s so annoyed by the term “safety-first culture.”“If your company is not a safety company like you're not going out and providing safety services or training services or whatever, safety should not be first in your company — making a profit should be first,” he says. “By [instead] saying, ‘safety always,’ what you're saying is ‘We also understand that in order for us to continue being in business, we've got to make sure that our employees and those people that we affect and touch are protected.’”Justin also discusses why it’s OK to occasionally break the rules if it means using a practical solution, why sending local safety reps into the field can be counterintuitive (when you have managers who are already supposed to oversee that), and the importance of staying out of the way and letting employees do their jobs. Featured Guest

Nearly the entirety of Mike Letters’ career in safety has centered around vehicle safety. One of the biggest differences he’s made is also the simplest: slapping a sticker on company cars.“We have a decal on the side of our vehicles as well as on the rear of every vehicle that’s our no-phone decal,” Mike says on this episode of No Accident. “That is a trigger for both the driver and for the general public — we want our driver to see that sticker as the last thing they see before they get in the vehicle. We want that to be that constant reminder every single day, every time they get back in their vehicle, to put their phone away and not be distracted.”Those stickers, Mike adds, are also strategically placed on the rear of the vehicle near the company’s phone number (1-800-TERMINIX) so that anybody who observes an employee not following proper driving practices can call and report noncompliant activity. When Terminix first adopted the stickers in 2017, it received an average of 120 calls per month about aggressive driving; over time, however, its safety measures have decreased this number by roughly 50%.Mike argues that simple tools of this nature and technology like TRUCE’s mobile app are a highly effective way of preventing distractions and thus avoiding accidents. However, Mike recognizes that these tools won’t work if the employee doesn’t buy in. In fact, he “doesn’t have time” for employees who refuse to participate in safety programs and/or let go of old behaviors and habits, and he advises letting such individuals go.Mike also discusses the importance of companies creating a culture that not only values safety, but encourages employees to think of it as something they should do for the benefit of themselves and their loved ones. “What are you going to do to ensure that you sit at the dinner table that night? It's not about the safety manager, it's not about the safety team. … It's a personal responsibility,” Mike says. “If safety is all about the safety department or all about the driving, the bulletin board or a training program, then you haven't solved for safety at all. … It's about creating a passion within the culture of your company.”Featured Guest

Kay Yoder didn’t know what field she’d end up in when she started college, but she knew she wanted to help people. At first, that led her to study pharmacy at Butler University, but she soon switched majors to nuclear medicine. After receiving her associate’s degree, she went to Tulane University to study something new — in large part because of her dad. “I thought the healthcare industry was a good fit for me, but once I changed my major, my father expressed concern over my choice of profession,” Kay says in this episode of the No Accident podcast, presented by TRUCE. “His concerns stemmed from the fact that not much was known about the nuclear industry and about radiation exposure, and he knew of my passion for health and safety — so it was him that suggested I consider biomedical engineering.”Kay currently serves as the Vice President of Environmental Health and Safety at Miami-based alcohol distributor Southern Glazer’s Wine & Spirits, where she’s been for the past four years. There, Kay oversees a safety program that uses a simple but effective strategy to communicate safety procedures: emphasizing the “why” behind them. When leaders explain the reasoning behind protocols, she argues, employees are more motivated to follow them and feel like their employer cares for them. Another source of motivation is the stories of employees who have been through accidents. Kay has given these individuals a platform to share their experiences by launching a “Safety Matters at Work and at Home” poster campaign. Every six weeks, her team shares a new story of an employee who was hurt on the job; they explain how their injury occurred and what led to the situation.“In many cases, when you have a serious injury, it significantly impacts your family,” she says. “Sometimes they're going to have to care for you. Sometimes it's seeing your children having to give you a bath because you've been covered head to toe in burns. So it’s a very impactful story written by the employee themselves.”Kay looks at safety as much more than being compliant. To her, safety is protecting assets, being inclusive, sharing a common goal, and speaking in relatable terms — and maybe even creating a new industry standard in the process.Featured Guest

Regina McMichael didn’t enter the safety world for fun. The force that brought her into the industry was a tragedy. “I started in the safety industry at exactly 1:20 in the afternoon on Feb. 6, 1986. That was when my first husband fell from a roof and died. And that was the moment I was thrust into the safety world — as much as it existed in 1986 — and the roofing industry and started my journey,” Regina says in this episode of No Accident.Instead of letting grief or anger consume her, Regina thought logically. Fueled by a new passion to help prevent future loved ones from experiencing the same tragedy, she used the worker's comp settlement to pay for a college degree in safety and started working in the industry as a safety engineer. She climbed the ranks of several organizations such as the Associated General Contractors of America and the National Association of Home Builders until she decided to form her own organization, The Learning Factory, in 2011. Now, Regina is a successful safety speaker, consultant and author (of the book “The Safety Training Ninja”) whose approach to safety is unique for one reason: she recognizes everyone is human. Regina knows there will be days when employees won’t follow the rules. But if you take the time to understand why they’re breaking protocol (e.g., they’re behind schedule, they’re picking up the slack for someone homesick) and what might motivate them to follow it (e.g. explaining all the potential hazards of using shortcuts), she believes you can help employees find their own motivation to remain compliant. In this episode, Regina discusses how safety isn’t just a black and white concept and why it’s important for safety professionals to work with the C-suite. She also gives helpful tips on how to get employees more engaged and willing to follow a safety program. Regina likens the challenges of enforcing safety protocols to driving over the speed limit: everyone does it, and it’s unrealistic to expect everyone to always follow the limit. However, to reduce the likelihood of accidents, you can teach and encourage people to make better risk assessments and choices.“I could teach you the information about what could happen in a car accident. I could talk to you about the impact it would have on your family and your friends on your ability to do your job … I would try to hit all of the different ways I could potentially connect with you.”  Featured Guest

For Joseph Kopalek, it was natural to follow in his father’s footsteps and pursue a career in the energy industry. What might appear less natural is the path he took to get there. “He worked his way up from a laborer into management,” Joseph says of his father in this episode of the No Accident podcast, presented by TRUCE. “I took the long route and went to college, played around in environmental consulting for about eight years, and then got into the natural gas industry.”After his consulting work, Joseph spent a large portion of his career in operations management for various energy companies — primarily Columbia Gas Transmission — before realizing that safety was his true passion. So when he was offered his current position of Vice President Environmental, Health and Safety at UGI Utilities, Inc. a little over a year ago, he took it without hesitation. The COO of the Denver, Pennsylvania-based natural gas and electric utility company told him he was perfect for the job because of his operational credibility.“They won't question how you’re perceived or how you set up something from a safety standpoint because they know you know how to get the work done,” he recalls his boss telling him upon promoting him. “You've been there all the way from field supervisor up through director ranks.”Since then, he’s proven his boss right by consistently valuing employee feedback/input and focusing on problem-solving rather than pointing fingers when safety issues arise. Some of his biggest lessons have come from working with Dupont Sustainable Solutions on an improved safety strategy following a fatality that happened within UGI in 2017. “We realized that there were some improvements that needed to be made on how we respond to emergencies — the kind of equipment we use, and we need to preserve life as our first priority,” he said. “One of the things we changed is one of the metrics that we use … that is a make safe time, that's the time it takes to call an employee out .. into the field and making whatever situation they find safe.”And it must be working because UGI has since been recognized by the American Gas Association for having some of the best emergency response times in the industry.Featured Guest

Dr. Timothy Ludwig started studying motivation and safety because of a psychological question that always plagued him: Why do we get out of bed in the morning?“There's a moment in which you're suddenly up. Right. You just get up. And that moment has always fascinated me. And frankly, that's taken me down a lot of research paths in addition to intrinsic motivation,” Dr. Ludwig says in this episode of the No Accident podcast, presented by TRUCE.This curiosity led him to become a postdoc at Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University, where he worked with industrial engineers via a federal grant studying management practices related to the development of the next tritium bomb. When the Iron Curtain fell, it was great for the safety of the world, but not so great for his job. He was out of work until he took a position as a performance improvement consultant for about six years, and during that period he also got a job as a professor at Appalachian State University (but continued to consult on the side). Dr. Ludwig is a behavioral psychologist, and most of his research has been on the psychology behind safety practices, so he now serves on the Board of the Cambridge Center for Behavioral Studies, presents keynote speeches at safety conferences and continues his consulting work. When evaluating a company’s practices, Dr. Ludwig says safety culture is defined by how often employees are talking about safety and what they’re saying. “Once you get them talking, they know the right answers,” he says. “The smartest people in the room are the employees. They're on the front line doing the work. They can tell you what the risks are.”In this episode he also addresses the problematic nature of focusing on zero injuries, and how important it is for leaders to observe their workers to gain a better understanding of what potential risks the work entails.“The energy you get out of leaders when they get away from email land and they get to see the frontline where all the wisdom is and where all the value is created, that energy is quite infectious,” Dr. Ludwig says. “And the learning there is unique.”Featured Guest

Brent Sanger originally dreamed of a career as an electronics engineer, so when he joined the military at age 18, he took a job fixing radios. But the work wasn’t as meaningful as he’d hoped, and when he got back from Operation Desert Shield/Operation Desert Storm, he became an Army medic.That job felt right, and it led him to then join the fire service when he got out of the Army.“It felt that it's where I needed to be,” Sanger says in this episode of the No Accident podcast, presented by TRUCE. “I wanted to help people. I was still young enough to kind of crave that adrenaline rush ... I wanted to make a difference. And I did, I made a difference in a lot of people's lives.”He pivoted his career yet again after 11 years as a firefighter paramedic. Brent was moving from Georgia to California, and the latter only accepts fire certifications from those who attended a fire academy in the state. He didn’t want to go through that training all over again at age 40, so he got his commercial driver's license and went back to doing something he did often in the military: transporting materials.After four and a half years, Brent’s next move was to leverage his experience in high-pressure environments where people were relying on him for survival to transition into the trucking safety sector. He took a job as an accident prevention specialist — his past experience helped a lot when speaking with drivers.“When they know that they're talking to somebody that's been out there, that understands what life is like on the road, it really makes things click a whole lot easier,” Brent says.It also helps him communicate the importance of drivers to executive leadership, which Brent says is crucial for getting a company onboard with the same safety procedures. He believes safety goals and vision starts at the top with management, but accomplishing those goals can only be done from the employees on up.One key lesson he often teaches drivers is to learn from the mistakes of others, especially mistakes they see clearly displayed on social media.“We can be safe by avoiding failure, but that takes a very long time,” Brent says. “The best way to do it is to learn from failure, and not just our own.”Featured Guest

David Galloway has never held an “official” safety leadership role, yet he maintains a keen understanding of how a company can decrease risk-taking and bring greater hazard awareness to its employees. After 35 years of manufacturing and business leadership experience, he’s worked with several safety professionals to develop a safety strategy centered on leadership. “That passion is driven by a couple of very painful and personal stories in my life that I experienced while I was working,” David says in this episode of the No Accident podcast, presented by TRUCE. “I always felt like there was a huge component of leadership that determined whether or not people could work safely or not.”As the author of “Safety WALK Safety TALK,” and as the Founder and President of Springboro, Ohio-based Continuous MILE Consulting, LLC, David offers companies strategic leadership advice geared toward improving safety performance — an area of business development that he says few senior executives take the time to plan for. David argues that if business leaders don’t take the time to learn how their employees think and what drives their actions, they won’t be able to improve safety performance because employees won’t feel cared for. “It doesn't matter how proficient I am at creating a safety rule,” he says. “It doesn't matter how much technology I deploy. It does not matter how much structure I follow. If it doesn't start with … ‘I'm doing this because I care about others and I do not want to see them get hurt,’ then we will often fall short of the mark.”In addition, David says leaders need to look beyond compliance — simply following the rules isn’t enough to ensure a safe work environment. Employees are humans, therefore they will make mistakes, but understanding why people take risks that lead to mistakes is one way to get to the root of the problem.He also touches on confirmation bias as a blind spot for leaders, the endowment effect, and other factors that prevent companies from reaching their full safety potential. Featured Guest

Travis Post never intended to go into the safety field. But after a Skilsaw injury at one of his first construction jobs left him a partial-leg amputee, his career trajectory completely changed.“In the early eighties, I received my safety baptism, as we call it,” Travis says in this episode of the No Accident podcast, presented by TRUCE. “It took about two years of physical therapy to learn how to walk again.”He took a new job in respiratory therapy, then was working in the cardiac unit of a major hospital when he got a call from his old employer — the company he was working for during his injury wanted to know if he had any interest in construction safety. Travis thought it sounded interesting, and went back to work for them in a completely new capacity.As a former construction worker who considers his injury the result of “horseplay” on the job, Travis was able to go into that position with a valuable point of view. He saw an opportunity for people who had experienced workplace injuries to educate employees who hadn’t, which made such trainings a more meaningful experience.“I started hiring employees that had previously shot their foot or their hand to the plywood to actually do training classes,” Travis said in one example of a response to several nail gun injuries. “The guys actually listened to them because they're active employees in the trade.”His team then took this approach one step further and started having individuals who had injured themselves severely enough to receive modified duty worker's comp payments speak to other workers about that experience to show that “you don't get rich off of it. It's basically there to let you survive.”These employee-led trainings are a result of Travis’ belief in employee-based safety, which he refers to as a hybrid of behavior-based safety and education that help protect a company’s profit.“You take an individual and have that individual completely buy into the system through education and clear direction,” he said. “If they have input in the whole process, then we get 100% buy-in.”Featured Guest

Can a company be safe and profitable at the same time? “Absolutely,” says Denise Estepp, Fleet Manager at American Safety Services, a family-owned business providing safety products and services for the oil and gas industry. In fact, Denise knows that safety improvements are good for the bottom line. She joined American Safety Services after working with Walmart’s corporate vehicle program — drawn in by the company’s efforts to create a “cultural shift” modernizing their approach to fleet safety.  To do that, Denise says the company has taken a page out of the oil and gas industry’s stringent safety playbook — and adopted the ethos company-wide — “their mechanics, their drivers, the warehouse people, they really wanted to drive that whole culture of … everybody's doing their job safely.” Safety is truly baked into every part of the company. Denise points out that even her email signature includes the phrase “drive safe.” The episode also covers how the introduction of autonomous vehicles will affect safety, as well as the professional support and development necessary to advance as a safety professional. Featured Guest

What does teaching Marines how to escape an upside-down helicopter sinking in water, have to do with corporate safety? Quite a lot in the case of Chris Moulden. In this episode of No Accident, host Kathleen Finato speaks with Chris who is Corporate Safety Director at ARB, a subsidiary of Primoris. On any given day, Chris — who is a two-time winner of the safety director of the year award — oversees between 35 to 45 safety professionals in the field.Earlier in his career, Chris worked as an advanced dive medic for the Marines, teaching troops how to survive when their helicopter hits the water. Seeing the Marines return from war — sometimes injured — made a big impression on Chris. It has informed his approach to safety ever since.   “We all come to work every day to make a couple of bucks. But that couple bucks is all it is unless you utilize it towards something that's really valuable to you, and for the most part that's usually our family and our friends,” Chris says reflecting on what has stuck with him. “If we don't cross the T's and dot the I's and use a checklist or do the things we know how to do ‘em … it's our family and our friends who are going to be affected the most.”While Chris likes to point out that safety comes back to the heart, he’s an expert when it comes to translating the value of safety for others — sometimes that means bringing it back to the bottom line. For executives, he likes to show the worth safety can bring. “When you're safe, you're more methodical, which leads to more quality which may lead to more production,” he explains. While safety absolutely needs to be “bolstered by an extreme commitment from leadership," Chris acknowledges that ultimately safety is an individual's responsibility. “Truly safety is about … your individual conscious decision making.”Featured Guest

Episode Description How do you make safety fun and interesting? Can it be done? Jerry Roach, Director of Safety, Environmental and Facilities at Kimball Electronics, has some ideas. In part two of this No Accident interview, host Kathleen Finato continues her conversation with Jerry, a 22-year veteran of the occupational safety field. Jerry describes how he turns safety slogans into meme-style imagery. He also explains why he believes in collaborating with competitors.  Episode Summary Jerry Roach, Director of Safety, Environmental and Facilities at Kimball Electronics, is a 22-year veteran of the occupational safety field who says it’s important to make safety interesting and fun. He even turns safety slogans into meme-style imagery and posts them inside restroom stalls. That’s just one of the unique ways he takes his program beyond training videos and other approaches that don’t “stick” with everyone.Jerry pushes back against the idea that safety concerns only affect employees who work in overtly hazardous situations. But those workers are often much safer than their co-workers in comparatively less risky environments. “Complacency sets in quickly, and they might be overconfident,” he says. “Whereas if you're doing a dangerous job, you don't have the opportunity to become confident. Many times it is in the mundane jobs where we see more people injured.”That’s why safety should be part of employees’ routines, but it should never seem trivial or dull. There’s never any place for shortcuts –– and everyone should be held to the same high standard. Jerry shares a story about forgetting to switch between his regular prescription glasses and his safety glasses after a meeting. Only one colleague noticed, but Jerry insisted on marching himself to Human Resources and insisting they write him up for the violation.“All leadership has to lead by example,” he explains.That extends to the larger safety community, as well. He believes firmly in sharing case studies and training procedures with others in the industry.“We have to be willing to help each other, even competitors. Collaborating can be really beneficial.”He talks about the OSHA Voluntary Protection Program (VPP), a distinction granted to companies that undergo a rigorous evaluation to ensure their safety systems maintain injury and illness rates below Bureau of Labor Statistics averages. He’s proud that Kimball Electronics is a participant and says it’s only possible through the joint efforts of everyone –– from hourly workers to the C-suite.Buy-in from leadership is essential. He advises connecting safety initiatives to company KPIs and emphasizing that safety means everything to the bottom line –– including everything from worker’s compensation claims to efficiency and morale.In fact, he says that a safety program should really be called a safety system. It should permeate every part of the business.“It has to be a system that takes over your culture and your company, and it runs the process itself.”Featured Guest

On the premiere episode of No Accident, host Kathleen Finato talks to Jerry Roach, a 22-year veteran of the occupational safety field and the Director of Safety, Environmental and Facilities at Kimball Electronics.Jerry tells us how his family taught him to put people first, why safety programs should be foundational to an organization’s culture and why safety isn’t just about compliance. It makes good business sense. But how can a business turn “safety first” from a catchphrase into a credo? It starts with leadership and never stops evolving.“Safety is everyone's job,” he adds. “It doesn't matter what it says on your job description or whether you work on the shop floor or in the executive offices. Safety should be the foundation for everything you do, every decision you make. It's the hallmark of a successful company. Episode Summary Growing up on a farm in southern Indiana, industrial safety expert Jerry Roach learned firsthand how to put the “C” in “TCB.” (As in, Taking Care of Business.)Hard work was part of daily life for Jerry and his family. “Whether working with the cattle, putting up hay, whatever it might be –– you take care of business,” he says on the premiere episode of the No Accident podcast, presented by TRUCE.Watching his parents care for their community “really set a tone for me,” says Jerry. They taught him simple, but enduring lessons: work hard, do what's right, and don’t take shortcuts. “Shortcuts lead to injuries,” he adds.Today, Jerry is Director of Safety, Environmental and Facilities at Kimball Electronics, a manufacturer of electronic equipment for the automotive, industrial, medical and public safety sectors. At Kimball’s Jasper, Indiana headquarters, “every single person who works here is my customer,” he says. The 22-year occupational safety veteran says he was attracted to the field because he wanted the opportunity to make a difference every day.“I'm the type of person who gets up every morning and can't wait to get to work.”He knows it might seem odd, but he “absolutely loves safety” –– and believes deeply in making it a foundation of company culture. It begins with leadership, and should be modeled by leaders, too.  A commitment to safety demonstrates to employees how much they’re valued. It’s an essential part of building and maintaining a good public reputation, as well as a sense of pride among workers. When morale improves, so does quality. Employees who are safe and well at work are more productive and efficient.  Plus, Jerry adds, safety makes good business sense. It should never be an afterthought –– or focus on compliance alone. It shouldn’t be a scrambled reaction to an accident or other emergency. And to be blunt, insufficient safety measures cost cold hard cash. A $20,000 overhead lift is a smart investment if it prevents an employee from injuring their back. Besides their pain and suffering, that employee’s surgery would likely cost much more than 20K. In the world of safety, “proactiveness is absolutely vital,” he says.Featured Guest