Welcome, I'm Brad Williams with architectural precast concrete committee and we're excited to present to you our next series of production workshops. This is production workshop number four, how to build a safety focused culture. We welcome with us Mr. Brian Duggan, who is a safety senior safety professional from Optiman safety management and he'll be discussing key cultural drivers in safety and so welcome. We appreciate you being here. Just a reminder for you that we will be meeting at 1pm central time on Tuesday, May 18th as part of the convention. I'll be in person and also by webinar so hopefully you'll join us then for our next architectural precast concrete committee meeting. So with that I'll turn the time over and appreciate Steve and Randy and Nicole who are ever here and keeping everything going for our workshops and I'll turn the time over to Randy now. Thanks Brad. Yeah, Nicole, you can go ahead and go another slide and one more. So we'll start off with the PCI antitrust compliance guidelines and the PCI code of conduct policy. The PCI antitrust compliance guideline, it is in the interest of PCI and its members to comply with all antitrust guidelines. They are general in nature, following them does not guarantee compliance with the law and deviating from them does not mean that the law was necessarily violated but today we will not be discussing any type of pricing issues, pricing topics or any kind of competitor pricing or any allocation of markets at all. This is not something that we do at PCI and we'll also follow the code of conduct policy. Code of conduct policy is pretty simple. Basically it just states that we'll treat each other with a lot of love and respect and when you come to the architectural committee there's always a lot of love and respect in a good way. Go ahead, Nicole. So that takes care of our opening remarks, some introductions and our antitrust policy. The process here today is like the last ones for those that didn't join us is that you can direct all your questions to me in the questions box or the chat box, either one, and we will look at these questions at the end of Brian's talk. The goal of these presentations is to build some camaraderie among plant managers. What we found is the production management workshop over many years has been a once a year program to where it would be a three day event where we'd have a couple of good networking opportunities plus plant tours. Obviously with COVID that's not possible, so we still want to get the information out to plant managers that helps you advance your career and help you advance your companies forward, so that's why we put these series together. The topics that we have here for these workshops, the first three was a series centered around culture and quality and now we're going to do two. This is the beginning of the next series, we'll do two on a safety culture. These topics were created through the Architectural Precast Concrete Committee and they were the topics that plant managers asked us to cover, so we will, after the next two, after May, we will take a break over the summer, we'll resume these topics or these talks in September, so if you have any topics that you would like for us to do some research, get some speakers to the table and please come to the Architectural Precast Committee meeting, voice those concerns or voice those topics and we'll try to make sure that those get incorporated in our next series starting in the fall. With that, the process today is going to be about 30 minutes, Steve and Brian are going to have a really good discussion about safety culture and then at the end of that 30 minutes we'll start taking questions from the floor, but as you get questions, go ahead and put them in the question box and I'll write them down and I'll make sure those get answered for you. So with that, I'll turn it over to Steve. Thank you, Randy. Our speaker today brings 29 years of experience in various environmental, health, safety and security roles. Brian is the Account Executive and Senior Safety Professional with Optimum Safety Management. He is a graduate of University of North Dakota with a BS in Industrial Technology. Though new to the precast world, he has quickly noticed the similarities of the challenges to other types of low-rate heavy manufacturing. His vision is to bring full employee engagement into precast plants. When all employees are valued and engaged, the workplace achieves a work-class safety performance. When Brian is not doing that, he also enjoys hunting, fishing and family vacations. Welcome, Brian. How are you today? Good. Thank you, Steve. Thanks for the introduction. Yeah, no problem. Nicole, next slide, please. First of all, let's talk about safety culture. What does that actually mean and give us some definition on that? Absolutely. So what you're seeing on the screen is the definition of culture right out of the dictionary. And I'll just read it. A set of shared attitudes, values, goals and practice that characterize an institution or organization. So just simply put, it's how we do things around here. The culture is what dictates how things get done in any organization, in any employer situation. And when you have a strategy, you may have financial goals, you may have any types of business plans, and when they collide with culture, every time culture wins. So you may have a vision for your company to be 10% reduction in injuries for the coming year. But when that gets up against your culture, if you don't have a culture that supports that safety progress, the culture is what wins. Conversely, you might not have much of a strategy around safety. But if you have a good safety culture, you're going to continue to reap the rewards of that strong safety culture. People will do the right thing at the right times, not because you have policies and procedures that are driving them, but because the culture is already there and people are going to act in accordance with it. So it sounds like the culture is almost more important than the policies. Absolutely. I mean, we all have to have written policies. If OSHA comes and knocks on your door, they want to see your written hazard communication plan, they want to see your lockout tagout plan. You've got to have those written documents for OSHA compliance. And it's proper to have a reference so everybody can go back to it and understand what it means. But culture is completely independent of that. I mean, has anybody ever seen a leader state that safety is the number one important thing to them, and yet they may go out in a production environment and not wear the PPE that's required of everybody in that production environment? Right. It sends the wrong message of the culture, doesn't it? It sends the wrong message. So the strategy is safety is important, but the person is not living that. Some people will say they're not walking their talk, but it's really just an example of that culture not being ingrained in them. I mean, I'll be the first to admit. I found myself walking out in a production environment before where I forgot my piece of PPE, and the moment it hits me, I cringe because I know everybody that's seen me up to that point is thinking I don't care and that I'm above it, or they're somehow ascribing thoughts to me that aren't present. So I usually see whoever I see, I apologize to them and tell them I'm going back to get my PPE because I don't want to set the wrong example, and that's not who I am. Right. Okay. So we've talked about the importance and have an understanding of the safety culture. What's the best way to build that in a manufacturing facility like a precast plant? What we find working with clients, Optimum has worked with, I don't know, hundreds of clients on assisting them with building culture, some of which are precasters as well. And what we find is really the first step is to make sure that you have leadership buy-in. There might be a leader in an organization that wants to drive a safer safety culture, but if the whole team isn't on board, you really can't make progress. You can improve compliance, you can reduce risk, but you can't drive a safety culture because everybody has to be in harmony around that goal. So the first step is really to get the leadership team engaged and make sure everybody's bought in and they understand how their role impacts everybody in the organization, the financial group, the engineering group, obviously production owns the lion's share of it, but everybody's got to be on the same sheet of music. So we say, you really got to pull your leadership team together and make sure that they're focused on it. And I should say, building culture is not easy. It costs money. It's time consuming. It consumes resources in the sense that you're going to dedicate your leaders to a purpose and you're going to take time out of their days when they would normally be doing their ordinary job. You're going to take time away from that to work on culture. Now the rewards are tremendous. It pays for itself, but you can't go into it thinking you're going to do it on the cheap. Speaking of that, when you're speaking about building a culture, how do incentives versus discipline tie into that building of a culture? There's a role for incentives and there's a role for discipline and safety. Absolutely. If you have employees that do not, will not comply with the rules, there's always a role for discipline. You try not to use it. We all do. I mean, if we have kids, we all know what it's like. I mean, our first attempt to correct behavior is not immediately discipline. We ask our kids to clean their room. We don't take their car away from them for a week at the first time we see a dirty room. We attempt to convince them that it's in their own best interest to keep a clean room to do what we've asked them to do and only escalate when we need to. Same thing with safety. You do have to escalate because the thing you have to remember is if you don't do what's required to get everybody on board, you're setting an example for all the other coworkers. Everybody's watching what's going on. Somebody knows. Others know that this person is cutting corners, maybe not wearing their PPE, maybe not following protocol, maybe not following lockout tag out, and they're aware of it. And if you fail to deal with it, you're sending the message that you don't care enough to deal with it. So discipline fits into it. Incentives can certainly fit in there. You have to be really careful with using incentives for any kind of a trailing indicator like number of injuries, recordable rates, anything like that. OSHA takes a very dim view of that. But you can use incentives for leading indicators. The number of job safety briefings you've done, the amount of training, toolbox talks that have been presented, things like that. Okay, so incentives are tied more to the action that promotes the safety versus actually the results of the safety. Absolutely. You reap the rewards by incentivizing good behaviors. Okay, that's a good point. You and I had talked earlier, and you talked about how you can build into the culture. You use the term of the Swiss cheese. I don't know if you want to speak to that a little bit about building culture and how you can layer things in. Sure. So if people are familiar with the Swiss cheese model of safety, it's just this cool visual. I think somebody in UK and England came up with it in about the, I want to say it was 1890s. I forget. I don't want to not give attribution to the correct person, but my memory eludes me. But the Swiss cheese model is nothing more than a block of Swiss cheese that's been sliced into a bunch of slices and reorganized and piled up slice upon slice upon slice. Well, each slice represents one protective measure in your safety management system. One thing that controls risks for you. So it might be engineering controls. You might be controlling the amount of silica in your workplace by working everything wet, not allowing there to be dry, covered concrete around. But that has some holes in it because there's times that you will have dry material around. So then there's some holes in that. Well, then the next layer of defense is, all right, well, we have PPE on. So the PPE, even if we were in an environment that was always laden with silica, the PPE will protect us from that. But we all know that sometimes the PPE isn't a perfect fit on somebody or somebody takes shortcuts and maybe flips the mask off for a while, their glasses are fogging up, they're getting frustrated. So they pop the mask off for a little while. Well, there's a hole there as well. And so on and so on. You can stack up all the layers of Swiss cheese. And when you look at systems that fail, especially complex systems like bridge collapses or something like that, why on one given day would a bridge collapse? I'm from Minnesota, and there was a bridge that dropped into the Mississippi River. It's a big bridge, 835 crosses the Mississippi River. And one day on a hot summer day, it collapsed. I think 12 people lost their lives. Well, that bridge had stood there for decades. Why does it fall on that day? Well, they were doing construction work on it. Yeah, but construction work had been done other days. If you start to look at all the failure of that bridge, you start to see that there was this really good protective measure, but it had some holes in it. And when all the holes line up, something can pass through all the holes. And that's when you get failure. And when you really go back and look at incidents, you start to see that many times some of the holes lined up, but maybe there was one slice that was slightly off and that last hole didn't. So you were close a bunch of times, but you never quite got there. Yeah. So I guess with a good safety culture, you've got a lot of different layers of cheese that kind of eliminates the holes. Absolutely. And you're always trying to shrink the size of the holes. You're always trying to get more cheese in the slice and less holes in the slice by working on your systems to tighten them up. Just change the pepper jackets, the much better cheese. There you go. That's the easy solution. Yep. Okay. Nicole, you want to go to the next slide? So let's talk about the leadership group and implementing a safety culture and improving their safety culture. Who do you feel? How does that driven into the culture of the workforce, bottom up, top down go? You got to come at it from every level, but that first step, as we talked about earlier, is you've got to make sure your senior leadership team is organized around it and everybody's on board. And that takes as long as it takes to get that. You know, if the senior leader at your company says, this is something we're going to do, and there are holdouts, there's some people that aren't on board yet. You got to work at that level until you get people on board because you need everybody to buy in. Once you got everybody bought in and they're all accepting that this is A, necessary, B, possible, then you can start to make progress. And then the next step is to get the rest of the leadership team engaged. And we recommend that you end up doing some education with those other leaders. The most important person in your safety program is that first level leader. But before you go and try to educate that first level leader and give them the skills necessary to be good safety minded supervisors, you've got to have an overall strategy and that starts with that senior team. And then you start working on your middle and first level leaders to get them all on board. When everybody's on board, you can start to take actions to drive culture. And there's, you can take numerous different actions to drive culture. You can start off with, you know, a focus on PPE compliance or a focus on housekeeping, a focus on fall protection. It doesn't necessarily matter so much where you start. You address your weakest areas first, you know, try the big, take out your biggest risks. But what you're really doing is you're showing consistency on whatever issue you choose to work on or multiple issues at the same time. It's not that you can't work on multiple things, but you have to have consistency around what you're doing. So if you say that, you know, we're going to focus on PPE for the next month or two and we're really going to get good at it, well, part of doing that is not just making sure people are wearing the PPE that you've given them, that you've specified for that. Part of that initiative, part of that focus has to be what are the reasons you don't want to wear the PPE? Do we have the best PPE for you for that environment? If I've given you gloves that are crappy and crummy and they fall apart really quickly, how can I really expect you to wear those gloves dutifully if they're not the right gloves for what you're doing? So take that holistic look at whatever and go spend some time and understand the issue and figure out what do we need to do? Is the PPE readily available or is it locked up in off hours and people can't get to it during their shift? The guy who's got the key is never around, they can't get to it. So you tell them it's really important that they have gloves in good condition, but then you make it hard to get gloves. Well, again, that's an inconsistency. So you've got to really go and remove the barriers and make meaningful progress and employees are seeing that. They're seeing your commitment to it. They're seeing that you're trying and you're doing everything you can, and then they start to trust you more and more, and that's how you build culture. You get employees to trust you, and then they want to engage. And as far as, you know, if a leadership group is trying to change or improve, I guess maybe improve would be the best one we talked about. You're going to have a culture one way or the other, where it's bad or good. So it's not introducing a culture, you're just trying to improve the culture that you already have. Yes. From your experience in other manufacturing facilities, similar to pre-casters, and even what you've dealt with here recently with pre-casters, you know, is that a month and it changes? Is that a year and it changes? Is that you hit everything at once? Kind of, how do you attack this elephant? The experts on cultural change will tell you it's a three to five year transformation. And that's why I say it's not for the faint of heart. It's not something you're going to do, you know, in January and February when things are quiet or maybe around your facility, maybe it's not as busy as the summertime. You're not going to do this in two months and reap all the benefits. Building trust takes time and getting employees to engage. You know, I think when you get a new employee and a lot of them maybe are, you know, they're bright eyed and they're fresh and they want to change the world, they want to work and, you know, be part of something, but maybe they come in and work for a while and they offer suggestion for improvement, maybe a better way to have gloves available. And for whatever reason, they got an unsatisfactory response from the leadership team. Maybe they felt like their suggestion was never heard. Maybe somebody was dismissive of their suggestion. And that teaches that employee just to pull back and just, you know what, they don't want to hear from me. They just want me to do my job and that's it. So when you try to build that trust back in, they've got to have enough positive experiences. They start to believe and they really start to believe. They've all heard the flavor of the month. There's been other efforts to make improvements around some issue, whether it's productivity, time card compliance, it doesn't matter what it is. They've all seen it before. So people are naturally a little bit jaded when you announce that you're going to work on something. So they need to see that consistent behavior time after time after time. They start to believe, they start to engage. And when you get them all engaged, their eyes are everywhere. You'll find your hazards before you would ever spot them, before your safety professional would ever spot them, before your supervisors would. The employees know what's going on in your workplace and you just need to get them engaged and working with you to find the hazards and more importantly, find the solutions to managing those hazards. Okay. I know here at my plant, you know, the basic message on safety and trying to build the culture is we want you to leave here in the same condition that you came. You know, no injuries. We want you to go home. Is that the right message to build a culture or, you know, we're not saying, oh, we'll save our insurance because we don't have injuries. We'll have a, you know, a lower, better OSHA rating. What is the driving or from your experience, kind of what is the message, best message to start with as far as why we're even doing this? It's exactly what you were saying, Steve. We care about you as an individual and we want you to be able to have a, you know, a productive relationship with us as an employer and not be hurt. You deserve it. We have a moral ethical duty to offer you a workplace that is as safe as we possibly can make it. And when you start with that position, yes, of course the business is going to reap the rewards. I mean, they should. I mean, that's what happens. If productivity increases, you're going to reap the rewards. You're not going to say no to the better productivity. So you start with your heart in the right place. We want to do the right thing by our employees and stay genuine to that. And as you work to make the workplace safer, they'll see that. They'll see that your heart's in the right place, but they're going to be watching too. Every time you need to make a decision, every time you get in a production crunch where the right piece of equipment isn't available and there's an alternate way to do things, it's not as safe, it's maybe the way you used to do stuff until you made some improvements. But when you get up against that situation, they're going to watch to see what decisions the leaders make. And that's a telling moment. If you fall back to the old less safe ways to do things, when push comes to shove, they see that. Now, it's not to say that you can't have a productive workplace. You absolutely can. Maybe you go back to the old way, but you also change some other things about it. Maybe you change your staffing level. Maybe when you're using the other piece of equipment, you clear everybody away so that if something goes wrong, the panel doesn't fall. You find additional protective measures to ensure that nobody gets hurt. And then you're very clear with the employees. You know, we normally wouldn't do it this way, but because that piece of equipment is down, we're finding ourselves having to do it this way. But just to make sure nobody gets hurt, these are the other things we're going to do as well. Yeah. With any culture, you know, safety cultures, from what you're saying, what I'm hearing is, you know, you got to show that you care. And I guess that goes across all the cultures, you know, that you can't act like you care about the employee for safety, but then not care about other things like quality. You know, how is safety and quality tied together? And, you know, we just came off of our quality workshops. How do they kind of tie together in just as an overall culture for the company? Yep. I think if you look at the Paul O'Neill example, that's probably one of the best examples out there. Paul O'Neill took over as CEO of Alcoa in 1987. And he went into the first press conference with all of the investment group, and he was laying out his plans, his vision for Alcoa. And he said for the next year, all he was going to focus on was safety. And, you know, one of the attendees asked a question, well, aren't you concerned about this financial metric or that, you know, earnings per share, or all the things that investors are interested in when they look at big companies? And he said, I don't think he understood me. I said, we're going to focus on safety. That's all we're going to focus on for next year. And some of the people in the investment community were rattled by that. They thought he's a fool. And some of them, in fact, afterwards have said, you know, they went and actively told their clients to dump Alcoa stock. And they're the people that missed out because in the time that he was the chairman, their market capitalization went from 3 billion to 27 billion. Their earnings per share skyrocketed. They outperformed all their competitors. Their safety rates got world-class safety rates. Their quality improved, their productivity improved. Everything improves when you have engaged employees. When employees are engaged, they feel safe, as in physically safe. They know they're not being put at undue risk, but they also feel safe to contribute their best to the work environment. They spot quality issues long before you do. They can start to fix things before you even know they're there. But that takes employees that know that you care about them and you want to work with them. It all makes the, all boats get lifted at the same time. And that's really where it pays off. And you can start. He said, I wasn't necessarily so interested in improving safety. I wanted to improve the performance of the company as a whole. But he said, safety was something that everybody could rally around. It had a little meat on the bone. I knew employees would engage on something like safety. And in order to get better at safety, we really had to understand our processes and how we did things and get better at them. And that was the secret sauce. Put you on the spot a little bit on that particular case. Do you know what they actually did as far as improvements for safety? No, I wouldn't want to go into the details. There's lots of articles written on it. I would just go out and do a little Google search on Alcoa. Gotcha, okay. Little sideline there for us. Speaking of, again, from your experience and all, what are some of the low-hanging fruit that pre-casters can go safety-wise? You mentioned PPE. Are there other things that we should be looking at in particular if we wanted to start out to kind of change the culture and kind of focus on? We may be focusing on them already, but maybe a little more focused. Yeah, it's hard to say across the board the things. There's things that affect everybody. Housekeeping, tripping hazards affect everybody. But the best way to do it is to look at your own incident rates and see where it's coming from. See what kind of events you're getting reported in. If I look at your OSHA data, and I see that of your recordable cases, almost all of them are lost time or restricted time cases, I can tell you that you have a record-keeping, a reporting problem. People with lesser injuries aren't coming forward. You should be seeing the more severe incidents should be about half of your total. And if I see them at 90% of your total, right away, I wonder. Now, that could be random chance in any given year, but if there's a consistency around that, then I know you have a record-keeping problem. Not everything is being reported. You have to have everything reported because when you find everything reported and you have good first aid reporting, good near-miss reporting, then you're finding hazards, and that tells you what you should go work on first. Yeah, and you mentioned the near-misses. I mean, if you have no near-misses recorded, then that shows you people aren't keeping an eye out and they're just not telling anyone. The near-misses are occurring. What's the best way to promote that? How's the best way to get your employees engaged in just giving that information? Yeah, I mean, make it easy. If you have the ability to do something to make it really easy for people to report. I've worked in Fortune 500 companies and we promoted the heck out of near-miss reporting, and yet there was a tendency for some people, we really wanted to investigate each near-miss and dig in and find out what caused it, what the contributing causes were, but I found some employees were put off by that. They said, I don't wanna raise my hand and talk about a near-miss because the next thing I know, there's gonna be a team of people are gonna descend on my workstation and ask 100 questions about what and who, when, why, and when, and where, and people don't want the attention. So you gotta be a little careful. It comes with time as you promote near-misses. And honestly, if you celebrate the near-misses, when somebody reports one, or if you implement a stop work authority where everybody's got the right to stop work, you've gotta make them feel safe about doing it. And the way you do that is by celebrating every time work gets stopped. And that's counterintuitive because people are thinking, well, why would I celebrate it? Well, what you're doing is you're telling all the coworkers of Mr. Smith who stopped work, it took guts for that person to say, I don't think this is right, I don't think we can proceed. It takes guts to do that. And you've gotta tell everybody, it's okay that Mr. Smith did that. This is a good thing that he did it. So they see that and it makes it a little bit easier for them, you want them to be aware he did it. They might work in a different part of the plant, they may not be aware of it. You wanna publicize that so everybody's aware of it. So it makes it a little bit easier for them to raise their hand and stop it the next time. Yeah, I know sometimes I halfway get the feeling, especially with more established plants that have workers that have been there, everything starts turning into wallpaper and they don't even notice some of the safety hazards. I don't know if there's any tricks of the trade that you can give on that to kind of make people more aware of what's out there. Get some fresh eyes in, work with a partner to bring in some fresh eyes and help learn how to spot those hazards. That's one of the education courses we offer to supervisory and management personnel is to help you spot hazards. And there are techniques for getting you to start seeing things differently. I'll guarantee it, Steve, if you and I went walking in your facility and we came back, back to the room, we didn't talk while we walked for a half hour and we came back and I wrote down everything I saw and you wrote down everything you saw and we compared our lists, they wouldn't be the same. My eyes are trained to look at safety things and your eyes are trained to see what's going on in your facility. You know where your pain points are, things that you've been trying to improve, whether it be quality or productivity or whatever the issues are. And you'll probably see some safety things too, especially if you're walking next to me, you're gonna be trying to spot some safety stuff. But my eyes are more focused and we can teach people to gain that ability to focus on safety. And you don't have to do it all day, every day. You just get everybody engaged a little bit. You know, not every employee of yours has to become a safety professional, but they're there all day. And if you can get them to see it differently and then bring it up to somebody's attention, somebody who's empowered to make a change, that's the winning strategy. Yeah. You mentioned earlier about new employees and their orientation in that kind of onboarding. What percentage would you say, or how much should be talked safety at that point when they really don't even know what environment they're kind of going into? How is that handled as far as new employees? My preference is, you know, I know what it's like to be a new employee the first day. I mean, I've started with different companies and I go home and my wife asks me about, you know, well, what's their 401k like, or what's the health insurance like? And I know that information was presented to me and it's probably somewhere in the packet, but I don't remember the details. Not that health insurance and 401k aren't important. They obviously are important, but taken in as a whole, you can only absorb so much in that first day. So what I like to see with an orientation is you get them an orientation. It's an overview of your whole safety program. You at least dip their toe in the water and then you just make sure they know the things that they have to do to stay safe for the next day or two. And then you bring them in and you start integrating them into your regular safety training rhythm where they start to learn more about all those topics. But you can't sit them down for the first two days and pour safety into them because it's just, they can't absorb it all. Yeah, okay. Well, let me flip this back over to Randy to see if we've got any questions from our audience. Randy, what you got there? Well, I got a couple of questions, not too many today. Hopefully we'll get a few more, but a couple of questions. One is, you know, I thought it was a pretty decent question is what's the optimum, pardon the pun, optimum number of tasks that you kind of mentioned it, but this was a question from earlier. How many optimum number of tasks can your plant as a whole absorb in the first phase, second phase, third phase? How do you roll that out? The way we like to do it is we like to help our clients with an assessment. So we do something we call our P3 assessment. We come in and look at 30 KPIs, indicators of safety, management system, and then we like to lay out a path forward for what we think you can meaningfully work on. There's no way a plant can work on 30 KPIs at a time. It's just not possible. But you choose a few big ones, you know, things that are going to take some more effort, and then you choose some lighter ones that help fill in. But you also look at who do you have on your staff? Are you a 80 person plant or are you a 250 person plant? Well, the 250 person plant has more capacity to take issues on and work on it. So that's a question that's best answered when you're familiar with the facility that you're talking about, or the size of the crew, the size of the company, the level of resources available. You know, you can't inundate them. I used to be part of a corporate audit team that would go out when I was with a Fortune 500 company, and I would roll into a big facility, you know, a facility that employs 3000 people. And my rule of thumb was I never left them with more than 20 findings. And that was, they would have a year before we'd come back in another audit. These are typically pretty heavy findings, things that required a fair amount of work. But you might've seen 60 things that are issues, but you got to boil it down because if you give them a list of 60, it just paralyzes them and they can't make headway. So I don't know if that answers the question. No, I think it kind of does. I mean, it's like most questions, you have to know a little bit more of the background. But I think this next question is kind of a follow-up, kind of ties together in my mind is, what have you seen as the biggest and best effect on a company's performance? Again, I'm assuming that's going to be something, you know, what are those few activities that the rest of the plant can see to say, yeah, that's the tipping point to get everybody to start looking towards more of a safety culture? Again, you like to see what's going on at that facility. You know, what are their issues? I mean, what do the employees perceive are the big safety issues? If they're telling you the quality of the PPE sucks and you don't do anything about it, you just tell them to keep putting it on and keep doing their work because safety is number one for us. If you don't talk about it, why you're not making the change, then you're just shooting yourself in the foot. You need to know what the issues are for the employees. So run a survey on them. Let's see what they think the issues are. And with that information, when you're informed, then that helps feed into your plan to formulate where are we going to go work first? I mean, your first line leaders know where most of the issues are. If you work with that group, they'll tell you what the biggest issues are. Maybe it's a worn out piece of equipment for a given facility that's constantly breaking. And as a result, you have to do a process more manually that's more work and more risky than the way you'd like to do it. It'll vary facility by facility, but it doesn't take that long when you dig into it to figure out what the big, the hot button issues are. Gotcha. Yeah, one of the things that I always question, and this is just me, is when you see somebody who, and they might do really dirty work, but they always got that yellow vest on that's filthy. And to me, maybe it's the old perfect pair of blue jeans for that individual. It's just that the one he's had for so many years, it just feels right and he didn't want the new one. But when you walk into a plant and everybody's got new gear and have gear available to them anytime they need it, I think that sets not only a cultural path, but as a visitor, it kind of sets the tone of that this employer cares. So that's just my own personal non-safety guy comment. That feeds into housekeeping as well. I mean, you walk into an environment that stuff is laying around, not only does it present a trip hazard, but it's hard to feel great about your workplace when, you know, things are half broke. You got duct tape holding things in place. Maybe somebody bent a coat hanger to hook on something and hold things. Do you feel good about that workplace? Do you feel like, you know, as the employer, if you can't provide just some basic comfort things and have a clean workplace and take some time off of production to put somebody on doing that. I mean, to clean and keep things neat and tidy, it's got to be part of somebody's job. And if you're not willing to dedicate some effort to it, to maintain that, then that shows too. Yeah, I guess it kind of goes back to that overall leadership showing they care for the employees by doing all the things across the board, like investing the money in tools and house cleaning. I mean, that ties to safety, but that goes even further than that. Absolutely having the right tools, you know, are you missing the right tools? You don't really have the right stuff. So people are beating on things, you know, with wrenches instead of hammers. I mean, it's, it all, it all plays together. I've got a quick one here, Randy, if I can jump in. Yeah, go ahead. I know you've got a lot of experience in other manufacturing, environmental, automotive and that type of thing. What do you see from precasters versus other manufacturing? Is there anything that stands out as a safety hazard that you don't see in other manufacturing facilities just by the nature of what we do? The big challenge, obviously, a wrecking crew is on a construction site. There's a lot of hazards there that you'll see, but those hazards exist in other construction environments. So that isn't so dissimilar, but in the production facilities, the thing that jumps out right away is just the very manual nature of the work. I mean, it doesn't lend itself to automation. It doesn't lend itself to presenting the work at a reasonable height. You will be stooped over. You will be working in that environment. There's going to be trip hazards working on the beds. That's just the way it's going to be. You will be exposed to fall protection or fall hazards when you're working on the stacks. There are some distinct challenges there that, you know, I'm not seeing a precast facility that's got all that figured out and makes the work easy. You know, that's the nature of the product, that it's got to be built the way it's got to be built. And that is going to always present the challenge. And you know, in normal manufacturing, if you want to improve productivity, improve safety, you know, you improve the working condition. You present the work closer to the human being where they can get at it easier. You may be air conditioned in the environment. So it's, but you got huge buildings, how are you going to air condition a big building? It doesn't work that way. So those are the things that jump out at me right away. Okay. All right. I got a question here. Is there a certain number of safety professionals per headcount of employee to help with the cultural change are you're talking about? He's looking for like a certain number of safety professionals per headcount in a plant. No, it's not so much that. It's who you have as your safety professionals. Are your safety professionals transactional or are they transformational? And I've worked with a lot of safety professionals. I've led large teams of safety professionals. The majority of the people I know are more transactional. They're great in all the day to day stuff. They're great on an incident investigation. They're good at offering a training course. They're good at keeping your paperwork in order, keeping your programs running. They're great interacting with your employees. But they're not necessarily transformational. Because transformational people tend to get bored. If they stay in one environment long enough, they start to get bored. And then they don't want to stay there. They don't want to stay being your safety professional at your precast plant for 10 years. Because after a year or two, they feel like they've done a lot of the transformational things and now they're getting bored. They want a new challenge. They want to go do something else. So you need a mix of transformational and transactional. You need the transactional people that will be there supporting your team all the way through. You've got to have safety professionals as well. What I would say is, it's unlikely you're going to have a lot of success with your current staffing levels. I participated in a team, I was part of a Fortune 500 company. And the board of directors decided after two fatalities that had followed five other fatalities over a period of years, that it was time to throw out everything and start fresh. And I participated in that team. But we went from a staffing level at a corporate level, EHS, we went from a staffing level of four to 18. Large company, international, based in London. Each one of our plants also had EHS professionals in there. And many of them also increased their staffing levels. I'm not suggesting that you have to go create a bunch of full-time positions. But you do need extra horsepower to get you through starting the cultural and giving you direction and helping you set priorities and where you want to work. Yeah, I like what Steve said earlier about the wallpaper phenomenon. Seeing the forest for the trees, we do it every day, we walk by it every day. No one's ever gotten hurt by it. No one's given a care, no one's mentioned it. And then all of a sudden, somebody walks in and says, you guys always done that? Yeah, but we've done it for 20 years and no one's ever been hurt. How do you make that change to say, look, we've been doing it for 20 years, it's never happened before? How do you convince a plant that that's important, that the wallpaper needs to be changed? I had a vice president that had a great way of referring to that. He said, it's normalizing the abnormal. The first time something happens and you end up doing something differently and nobody gets hurt, it's maybe a little risky, but it worked. And then you don't want to do it again. You always want to do it the right way, but you're forced to use that technique again another time. Well, every time you're forced to use that technique, that approach, that tool in that way, and nobody gets hurt, you're normalizing that abnormal. And you get to the point where it's just a routine matter, of course, that that's how you do things. Because you've got yourself convinced that if you can do it safely once, then it must be safe. Well, if you can do it two, three times without anybody getting hurt, it's safe. Well, the odds could be horrible. I mean, you could be poised to hurt somebody one out of 10 times, you've now done it three times successfully. One in 10 is horrible. And statistically speaking, nobody's going to accept those odds. And that's what you have to look at. If you show me something that's been done millions of times without hurting somebody, then I will agree that it's a pretty safe operation. But if you show me something that's been done dozens of times, so you start looking at frequency and you start saying, well, how often is that exposure really present when you're doing that particular thing? And then you just go through it and look at, you know, what could go wrong? And what are the consequences of that going wrong? If the consequences of something going wrong is somebody gets a bruise or a paper cut, you know, I don't want anybody to get bruised or paper cut, but that's not so bad. If it's an injury and maybe a disfiguring injury, you've got my attention. If it's fatality, we've got to do something different. I mean, are you going to roll the dice with something that might cause a fatality one out of a thousand times? I'm not. Last question we have is, what is the best safety rewards program you have seen? And we talked a little bit about, you know, safety rewards programs and some of the balancing that you have to do with that, but what do you feel like works the best in a manufacturing environment? A mix of leading indicators for that particular entity. You've got to figure out what leading indicators, but it depends how sophisticated the company is. I mean, can they spell OSHA? Do they know what it is? Do they think it's a small town in Wisconsin? Or are they pretty, do you have a great program already and you just want to continue to advance it? So you've got to kind of understand where you're at already on the level of sophistication, but use a mix of leading indicators, weight them, earn the rewards periodically. You can put employees into pools so that they can work in a smaller team. It's hard to feel like you're going to influence something if you're one of 150 people and there's four guys on the other side of the plant screw off and you all lose out. So you want to feel like you're within a team, so you're cohesive. So my group of 20 or 10 or 15, we can work as a team to achieve a result and be able to get some type of a reward. And you know, like I said before, with OSHA, it's got to be leading indicators, you know, the number of JSAs that are performed, did all the training get done on time? You know, if you do things, you can do a trailing indicator like a housekeeping audit or things are being kept clean, but you don't want to trigger it off of anything injury related. Because all you'll do is drive record keeping underground. Yeah, I was gonna say, I guess, I mean, OSHA is pretty clear about giving rewards for being safe. So there is that fine line, I think, where if you can't really speak to this a little bit, you're more knowledgeable, what does OSHA say about giving people rewards for just being safe? Yeah, you can't do it on anything backward looking like the number of injuries. You cannot because their fear is, you know, you're coming up on the end of a reward period, you know, you're two days away from getting everybody's name thrown in the drawing for a big screen, and somebody twists their ankle. Well, you don't want to be the guy that screws it up so that nobody gets the big screen this quarter, or the cash reward or the Walmart card or whatever it is. So OSHA's viewpoint is when you offer any type of financial incentive, cash or cash like incentive on reporting injuries, that's absolutely taboo. But you can do it on things that should prevent injuries. So again, doing the number of job safety hazards analysis that are done, that's a leading indicator. And if you're doing that, you should reap the rewards of less injuries. So it's okay to give financial incentives on things like that. Got it. All right. Well, Steve, I'll let you wrap it up. Okay. Thank you, Brian, for joining us today and sharing your knowledge. I appreciate all the input you've given us, a lot to think about. My pleasure. Nicole, yeah, there you go. For those listening who want to dive deeper into safety culture, there are two great ways to do that. First, for those that don't know, PCI and Optimum Safety Management formed a partnership to share safety information with PCI members. To go to PCI.org members only section, there is a safety resource bar that you can click on and that'll take you to an area that's got a link for a safety helpline. Also a way to enroll for toolbox talks with a 52-week training schedule. I know there's going to be some safety webinars up there in the future, maybe in November-ish. So keep an eye out for that. Monthly newsletters. So again, to just take advantage, I guess, of what PCI is offering you with Optimum's partnership, definitely check out that on PCI.org. Optimum is also involved in PCI and its members as a safety advisor on multiple committees. I know we got the convention coming up and a lot of committees are meeting, but they are part of the Erector's Committee, the Financial Risk Management, Plant Safety Environmental Committee, Productivity Committee, and they're on the PCI Board of Directors. They also monitor the Federal Register on behalf of the PCI. So again, this is something that you can easily take advantage of at no cost to you and you can kind of see on the slide there some of the things that are offered and some of the things that are coming also at PCI with the help and information from Optimum. Next slide. The second way to develop a great safety culture in your plant is to contract direct with Optimum. They've got this partnership with PCI and part of the partnership is kind of allowing them to come into different plants and kind of help you specifically put a plan together, an action plan, and educational support to ensure improvement in your safety. Some of the revenues from that does get kicked back to PCI. So that's another great way to kind of more maybe focus specifically on your plant against as we talked earlier about how many safety professionals you may have on the short and like Brian was saying, it's more of a transformational person you're looking for that you may not have, maybe they can be that transformational person for you to kind of help you get started on that. So definitely keep an eye on that and if you want to contact them, you can do that through that helpline I'm sure on the PCI.org website. Last one, last slide here, Nicole. The other thing to kind of keep an eye open for is Optimum is going to be offering some safety leadership workshops. So look for that. I think the first one may be coming up in a month or so. Now Brian, you're still on here, is that something that is off site that they go to? Is this online? What is that about? Just to clarify, we're in discussions now. We've had some conversations with PCI staff. I think Bob Risser wants to go to the board and get input from the board, but we look forward to offering this. These are Zoom based classes. So I'm actually sitting in one of our two Zoom studios and assuming everything goes well with the negotiations, there is a revenue share for PCI on something like this as well. So yeah, we would publish a schedule and you could buy individual seats. If a company wanted to put a bunch of people through, we limit the classes to 12 people. So every participant has to have their own tablet, phone or computer so they can be one on one like this. So you can have a conversation. But Zoom is such a- You spoke about doing this in other industries and it was very successful. So we're happy to see that you're coming with the precast industry with the same type of workshop type thing. Absolutely. So again, that's another thing to keep your eye open for on pci.org and maybe tap into that once it's available. Steve, we're hoping that maybe at the precast show, maybe we'll be a little further along. I'll be at the precast show in the PCI booth and I'm hoping to have something to be able to talk about while we're there. Sure. Well, you've already got some great stuff on the PCI website already. And that was a great start for this partnership. And like I say, it's developing as we go. So everyone keep an eye open for that. With that, Randy, I'll kind of pass it over to you to kind of set up our next workshop. Excellent. All right. One more. There we go. First of all, thank Brian for being a speaker today, sharing his insights, not only from safety from a precast plant perspective, but also from a worldly perspective. And Steve, that has done a great job, like always. Appreciate it, Steve, for pulling this together. It's an excellent, excellent job. Now next month, our guest will be Corey Olson from Wells Concrete. He's a plant safety manager for Wells Concrete in Wells, Minnesota. He is hopefully going to be joined by some of Wells' other safety managers from other plants so we can get some different perspectives. As we all know, there's no two precast plants alike. They may have the same name on the outside. It could be precast or ABC, and they might have five locations, but each location was built in a different era with a different timeframe, different forming systems, different culture based on the local region they're from. So hopefully we'll be able to get not only Corey's perspective of how they implement safety at a precast plant level up in Wells, Minnesota, we'll be able to get some other Wells folks also so you get that balance of what can be done at different plants. But the focus will be safety culture as it was today, but it's going to be more at a plant level. What are our precast plants doing to make sure our employees stay safe or our workers stay safe? So with that, I thank everyone for attendance this month. And the next program will be May 27th, which will be the week after convention. So hopefully we'll see as many people as possible at convention. So thanks very much.

Architectural Precast Concrete Committee

production workshops

safety-focused culture

Brian Duggan

leadership buy-in

Swiss cheese model of safety

employee engagement

safety rewards program

safety leadership programs