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

When it comes to user interface there’s no comparison. Google Sheets takes a far more minimalistic approach when it comes to their interface. And for me, it works. No, you don’t get access to the computational firepower that excel offers, but in the health and safety field it’s rare that you’ll need it. Still not sold?

What say we take a small sample of BLS injury data and put together some charts. Check out their repository for Injury, illness and fatality data.

Let’s take the non-fatal recordable injuries and fatalities over the past 10 years and plot them up. Data entry is pretty much the same as excel. Enter your headers and your data points...

To create a chart, highlight your data, then just hit the little chart button in the toolbar. Google will automatically pick the chart it thinks is most appropriate, then auto-format the labels. Check it out...

Close, but it needs some work. Let’s add a secondary axis and change the scaling on both axes…

That’s more like it. Looking at the chart we clearly see over the past 10 years fatalities have gone up, and non-fatal injuries have gone down. Mission accomplished, which took all of 45 seconds. I’ll go ahead and share this with the world:

While this was just a simple example, it highlights that the overall functionality of Google Sheets is nearly identical to excel. If you’re into writing macros Google Sheets uses JavaScript, whereas Excel uses visual basic. I can’t hate too hard on visual basic because it is OG in the coding world, but javascript is much easier to use. Google sheets also offers a pivot table feature.

I know the corporate world is still using excel and probably won't be switching anytime soon, but anyone looking to start up a side project in the health and safety field should look to include this in the technology tool chest. You also can’t really beat the price ;)

Google Sheets > Excel. Safety edition.

Colors. Not generally something safety professionals give much thought to in the field. However we as humans make constant subconscious associations with specific colors, especially in the workplace. Think about basic signage in your facility: red means danger, yellow and orange mean warning, and green means good. Now take a second to think about that. We are able to convey powerful messages simply by exploiting different colors. These colors are ubiquitous in the workplace: signs, labels, emails, floor markings, drawings, the list goes on. Even though we may not actively think about colors, our brains are certainly responding to them.

Here are some general associations with each color:

Beyond these general associations with different colors you can abstract out even further and combine them to convey even more messaging. This concept is used constantly by artists, web designers, marketing gurus - so why not safety professionals?

Think about everything you do at work that uses color. Putting together a training for example. Typically when we put together a training we will choose from one of the default PowerPoint templates provided by Microsoft, and from there our creative energy is focused on content. But if you really want to get crazy and elevate your training slides try selecting a color theme based on the content of the training. RCRA training? Try green, blue and a little orange - sustainability/environment themed, with some orange to liven it up. Think of what messages your training is trying to convey, and select your colors accordingly.

No they do not, but some do. My advice, use the internet:

This platform can help guide you to choose the right colors based on what message you’re trying to convey. In your next company email, select a color scheme based on the tone of your email. Don’t get too crazy - keep it dark font/white background, but try selecting pictures (if the email includes them) that match the color theme.

If you’re looking to learn more about color theory here are a few sites to get you pointed in the right direction:

Color matters in the workplace.

When we look around the Safety Industry, we are awed by the large diverse segments. Many of those practicing the craft fell into the industry serendipitously. It’s great to see how so many people want to protect others and work towards building successes. 

With that said, I believe it is up to each and everyone of us to contribute to the body of knowledge. We must identify our strengths and help each other up the mountain of success. Everyone in this field has a specialty and the industry needs for is to share. Find ways to contribute by helping entry level employees or Safety Hopefuls (people not in the industry yet, but want to get their foot in the door. 

Development of the Safety Industry

For those interested in creating new tech within the EHS field, the purpose of this article is to show that it’s easier than you may think to execute on your ideas. My name is David Jaenike and I built Neon Jacket, the blogging platform for safety professionals. This is my journey, and the story of how Neon Jacket was launched.

I want to preface this by saying that I do not consider myself a tech savvy person. I still have to google how to format word and excel documents, I have no clue what the hardware specs on my computer mean, and I consider getting my printer hooked up to our home WiFi an accomplishment. Despite all this, I’ve been able to create two media platforms within the EHS realm. How? Time and patience.

I studied Environmental Science in college and graduated in 2013 from the University of Rochester. In addition to loving the EHS field I saw a lot of opportunity to create new things in the space. I found that my life at home was so much more automated than my life at work, meaning the EHS field had (and still has) some catching up to do with respect to mainstream tech trends. Two years ago I made the decision to buckle down and work towards my goal of becoming a creator and builder in the space. At that point I had no idea how to code. 

Lucky for tech creators web development is not rocket science, but like anything in life it takes practice. The beauty of this particular craft is that it’s CHEAP to learn. The only things you need to pay for are a computer and an internet connection, both of which most people already have. 

There are several ways you can make a website. You have no-code options, website builders, or you can hard code it. I chose the hard coding route. I spent about 6 months learning html, css, javascript, then React (javascript framework for web platforms) IN THAT ORDER. I accomplished this simply by watching youtube videos - links below 👇

The key to learning to code (or learning any new skill) is just giving yourself the time and not giving up. You will get confused, you will get frustrated, and you will feel stupid. Do not give up! Everyone encounters these feelings.

Once I learned these fundamentals, creating a platform became the easy part. I learned the true challenge is executing on your idea, and getting people to actually use your platform. I found this out first hand when I launched Safety Knights (safetyknights.com), the online community I made for health and safety professionals. Safety Knights was launched in March of 2020, and it took about 6 months before I saw consistent engagement from the user base. I grew Safety Knights primarily through direct messaging people on LinkedIn, which was extremely time consuming but effective.

With Neon Jacket I tried something else, a relatively new concept called building in public. The idea is to source community feedback while the platform is being built.  I did through a series of social media posts/polls categorizing each post with the hashtag #justbuildit. Of course, this article is being written on launch day, so whether or not this strategy worked is presently unknown. Regardless of its success level, the platform is functional, and was built with relative ease.

Coming up with the idea:
I decided two months ago that the health and safety world needed a repository for bloggers. Although platforms like Medium, LinkedIn, and a handful of other platforms exist as blog repositories, none were specific to safety professionals. I wanted a single place I could go to see what other bloggers in the space were up to.

Tech stack:
A chose Next.js as the javascript framework and mongodb as the database. I knew that Next.js was very SEO friendly and super lightweight. Seeing how blogging platforms are generally pretty simple I figured Next.js was the perfect fit.

Learning the tech stack:
It took about two months of night and weekend practice to get to the point where I could make something functional. I followed the documentation on the next.js tutorial series, along with some youtube videos. I also had a good amount of practice with javascript at this point so a lot of it came naturally. 

Promoting the platform:
After I felt comfortable with the technology, and confident that I could make something functional I went ahead and built out the platform. I posted by progress daily on social media, and occasionally sourced community feedback on certain features of the platform (how authors could get paid, max number of images each blog could have, etc.). It took 9 days total to go from nothing to launch.

There are tons of ways to build and launch tech platforms, and I am far from an expert. The purpose of this article is to share my experiences and journey so far with the hopes that it may inspire others to do the same.

SafetyNotForgone

The Burden of EHS Management

Google Sheets > Excel. Safety edition.

Color matters in the workplace.

Development of the Safety Industry

Making a tech product in the EHS niche #justbuildit