Full Transcript

• Can you share an experience where you took ownership of a safety concern in your workplace?
• As a field staff and local health and safety coordinator, I'm in a unique position where I can sympathize with the inconveniences of health and safety-related tasks but can also understand the intention and regulation behind them. Let's be real. A lot of people in the field, and I'm guilty of this myself at times, view health and safety as a box to check, a HASP to create, a tailgate to conduct. It can be viewed as a step standing between us and the real work. This is a linear way of thinking when health and safety is cyclical. It demands reevaluation during every second of every work day. I try to take ownership of this cycle in my own work. I was on a project site that had simultaneous operations. There was a demolition crew and an environmental investigation crew. I was completing well installations with the environmental drilling crew around the building while it was under active demolition. The demolition work crew met every morning for a health and safety meeting and outlined the active work areas and preferred routes of travel around the site for the day. The expectation was that the environmental drillers would also attend the tailgate meeting. I attended the meetings every morning, but the drill crew coming from further away did not want to get to the site every day in time for the meeting. I didn't push the issue thinking that I could simply conduct my own meeting with the drillers when they arrived on site and that's what we did. But on this one particular day, despite having conducted our own tailgate meeting, the drillers drove around on a route where active demolition was occurring. While no incident occurred, the risk for an accident was very high. The incident represented a breakdown of communication and engineering controls, health and safety was being seen as a linear path. A box to check at the start of the day, instead of not being revisited. Travel routes should have been recommunicated prior to the drillers mobilizing to the next hole. I take ownership for assuming that discussing travel routes once was enough. This is a great example of how continuous health and safety communication needs to occur throughout the day and that we should never make assumptions about what others understand. We will always make the time and no one will ever see health and safety as an inconvenience if we understand that it could be the difference between getting home and not getting home at the end of the day. From that day forward, the drill team was on site bright and early for tailgates, we conducted our own tailgates after lunch, and each time we mobilized the drill rig, we discussed travel routes and confirmed that everyone understood.
• How do you prioritize safety in your daily tasks and decision-making processes?
• Everyone always says that safety is a mindset. And for the most part, I agree, but a mindset often implies something inherent, something passive. You either have it or you don't. And that's certainly not the case for safety. Safety is a mindset, but it is neither inherent nor passive. You must practice being in the safety mindset every day. For me, that's not always come easy. I have to plan health and safety thinking into my day. It's kind of like training for any sporting event or doing a dress rehearsal. If you don't practice under non stressful situations, you can't expect your brain or your body to respond appropriately in the heat of the moment. This type of thought training started for me at a young age. I remember learning to drive and my dad told me to pull over. We got out of the car and he told me, "You just got a flat tire. There's a zombie horde coming your way. If you don't change the tire within 10 minutes, the zombies will get you." As you can tell I was very into Walking Dead at the time. And while this scenario is ridiculous, the important lesson here is that I learned quickly to think on my feet and be prepared for the unexpected. So I think that's how I prioritize safety in my daily tasks. I make safety fun by allowing my creative brain to play with the what ifs of the job site. For example, while on a site that was located next to a county jail, I allowed my brain to wander and imagined a sci-fi scenario where an inmate escapes from prison attempts to hide on our subject property gets infected with some sort of chemical contaminant becomes some sort of killer lizard. And us consultants have to solve the mystery, get to safety, and save the day. Is this situation extremely unrealistic? Absolutely. But that being said, the thought process did make me think about what our emergency procedures were. Who would I call for help? What is the nearest evacuation route? What security measures are already present? This creative thinking allowed me to engage with things that are outlined in the HASP and JHA in a super fun way. At least for me. Health and safety doesn't have to be a boring box to check. We can engage with HASPS and JHAs and other health and safety topics in a way that is both fun and helpful. I think the most important part of the safety mindset is learning to view health and safety as a topic worth being creative with instead of viewing it as just another document. Yes, health and safety is serious. But that doesn't mean we can't have fun while engaging with it and learning to enter into the health and safety mindset. So long story short, I prioritize health and safety and integrate it into my daily routine by making it fun for myself. For me. That means just doing a little daydreaming.
• Describe a situation where you observed a safety hazard but chose not to address it immediately. Looking back, how would you handle the situation differently?
• The first example that comes to mind is the frequently observed problem of a subcontractor not wearing the appropriate PPE time after time, I've seen many subcontractor not wearing the appropriate PPE next to a drill rig or cutting something without gloves or safety glasses. It's not easy for me to interrupt the work they're doing and tell them they need to be wearing different PPE, especially if it's a contractor that we didn't directly hire. When I first started working, I would put off saying something for as long as possible to avoid the self imposed embarrassment of interrupting their work. But the entire time that I was not addressing the issue, I was constantly stressing about it. What if something happens and that PPE could have saved them? I quickly realized that the anxiety of not saying anything was far more painful than just confronting it right off the bat. As my mom always says, the anticipation is far worse than the participation. And that's something I live by now. When it comes to health and safety, it is always always better to address the unsafe behavior right away rather than stress about the what ifs associated with the unsafe behavior.