I may be a newcomer here, but I'm not new to Safety.  I've been in this field close to 10 years and by accident at that.  When i graduated from college with my Bachelor's in Biological Sciences, I never gave even the slightest thought of what I'd be doing with that degree.  Fast forward after a year of unemployment, and I got my foot in the door with an alternative energy company in charge of their environmental health and safety compliance.

While my first position was mostly clerical and administrative, I learned bits and pieces of the EHS program, and received 4 years of on-the-job experience before moving on to manufacturing; where i spent the next 6 years.

In ten years, there's been many highs and lows; and while I can't say for certain where my career will take me, I wanted to take a second to highlight one of the biggest frustrations I have with the field.

The job of ensuring the safety of employees in the workforce has become one of the most delicate dances out of any career I've held a position in.  Especially when you're an army of one.  On one hand, you're tasked with holding employees accountable to safety rules - which they often don't want to do.  On the other hand, you're also tasked with holding fellow management peers/superiors accountable for decisions which impact the safety of employees.  The latter is easily the harder of the two responsibilities.  Even with companies who preach "Safety First" profitability is the number one concern - after all, businesses have to make money in order to exist. While I could drag this point out, I'll leave it open ended with the intention of providing some individual case studies later on in the platform.

For those looking to enter the field, be mindful that despite your best calculated safety decisions - safety initiatives will often get crushed by higher authorities within the company due to: Cost, difficulty of implementation, or some other business concern.  Don't let it get you down, it's the profession - not you.  Some days will be harder than others, but at the end of the day it's worth it, because your efforts will make a lasting impact on the lives of those you interact with.

The Burden of EHS Management

What is a safety culture? How is this safety culture achieved? How do you handle adversity while trying to obtain this culture? What do you mean by building a safety culture from the ground up?

These are the some of the questions that I have received recently when talking with people that have reached out to me through different facilities of the hiring process or just casual conversations that strike up between myself and other safety individuals. 

You may be wondering why they are asking me these types of questions. Well, see I decided to place on my description section for my current role that I was tasked with building a safety culture from the ground up. Was this a bad thing? Had I really been prepared to answer what a safety culture meant to me? I can tell you the first time I was asked this question, I was not prepared! Boy did I look like the fool....

However, it got me thinking. I had listed something on my description section that I felt passionate about but hadn't put much stock in how to describe this to others. This caused me to take a deep dive into myself and what other safety professionals I knew felt about what a safety culture was to them. I received many answers from an organized written program to employees doing what is expected of them even to having a great program to where employees share their near misses and injuries with ease.

Employee's share their experiences on the floor with ease? That’s it I thought! We need the employees to be the culture. I had been doing something and felt passionate about this and never thought of it in this way. We need employees to be the culture through expectations, reporting, and training others. Well how do we do that!

How do we as safety professionals build that culture!!!! 

I believe we do this through our everyday interactions on the floor. We must take the time to build relationships with the people we work with. As that relationship is nurtured and grows, the culture then grows. As one individual buys in and begins to nurture the same relationship with others you will then see a domino effect within the work force. As this occurs you will see everyone's kayaks begin to turn around and flow with the current instead of against the current. This is how we achieve a positive safety culture that will lead to compliance!!


Safety Culture??

Alright, now let’s duplicate that for you in about 45 seconds. Ready?

Step 1: Copy the text in this google doc:

Step 2: Type in “notepad” in your program search, open the app up and paste the text.

Step 3: Save to your desktop as “safety.html”

Step 4: Double click the file called "Safety" now on your desktop (should open in your default web browser).

Awwwww yea (hopefully)! It should look something like this:

You made an html page. It’s not a “live” website since there’s no server, meaning you can only access this page if you have access to the specific file you just saved. BUT, if your company has a shared drive you could put this file in a location accessible to your employees. Once accessible to everyone, people can actually bookmark it in their browser and treat it like a real website. This means that when you want to update certain aspects of the page (update a training, inspection, etc), all you have to do is edit the html page you just made, and those changes will immediately be seen by everyone.

You also probably noticed that the orange links in each container don’t do anything. Right now those are just for show, but you can easily link those to actual documents also saved on your network.

Think of all the applications something like this could be used for. Training updates, OSHA regulation updates, employee recognition, the list goes on.

You can create amazing interfaces and workflows for virtually no money. HTML and css provide far more flexibility than traditional workflow documents such as word, excel, and outlook. There are tons of resources available which facilitate the creation of truly beautiful workflows.

You have to learn HTML and css. Lucky for you it’s not rocket science. HTML and css are what we in the web-dev world call “markup languages” meaning there’s no complex interfacing with servers and databases required. If you’re looking to learn more I would recommend starting with these two tutorials.

The digital landscape is changing! Make sure you’re on the front end of that cutting edge. Executing on some of these small projects can have a positive impact on your workforce and not cost your company any money. Give it a try!

Abby Heiler

The Burden of EHS Management

Safety Culture??

Imagine if your workflow looked like this 👇