Learnings and Missteps

Empathy Over Compliance: Redefining Workplace Safety Culture

• Jesus Hernandez • Season 3

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As a safety professional, I found myself standing at a crossroads, faced with two divergent paths: one leading towards genuine care for workers, and the other veering into the rigid territory of compliance and regulation. Our latest episode unpacks this contrast, inviting you to journey with us through my personal experiences at a pivotal training session. There, amidst a sea of compliance-driven peers, I uncovered the empowering essence of people-centered safety practices. Join us as we unravel how servant leadership and human-centered approaches can transform workplace culture, challenging the status quo of box-ticking and rule enforcement.

In high-risk environments, the difference between proactive safety advocates and those entrenched in compliance can be monumental. We explore how the rare 20% of people-focused professionals make a significant yet often uncelebrated impact on worker safety, while understanding the pressures that push many towards a compliance-centric mindset. This episode is a call to appreciate the unsung heroes of workplace safety, those who put people before paperwork. We gently remind listeners of the importance of empathy—for ourselves, for colleagues who might feel trapped in their roles, and for the workers who rely on these safety champions.

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Speaker 1:

What is going on my people? I think I'm about to ruffle some feathers because I want to talk a little bit about safety and, more specifically, I want to talk about safety professionals and Almost a very clear distinction I've been able to observe in terms of how they operate, and it's two buckets. One bucket is they come from a place of service. They come with the best intentions of making things better for the people that are doing the work. The other bucket is they are 100, strictly solely concerned with compliance, making sure boxes are checked, and really don't have, or rather don't demonstrate, any interest at all for the human beings that they're reportedly supporting and keeping safe. So this went back to just that little blip on the screen of time where I spent as a safety professional. So I had to take some training right, because I got this new fancy position, had a lot of responsibility. Here's a key point. I was recruited for that position to help transform the culture, and the person who recruited me knew that I have an immense focus on human beings. And how do we make things better for the people that have to deal with the stuff or the people that are doing the stuff? And so his concept, or his idea. His focus was perfectly aligned with the way I prefer to operate. Now we both knew, because I'm a wacko and I don't have, or didn't at that time have, any formal safety training. Sure, I had my OSHA 30 and those kinds of things, but, like everybody has those right, I was granted national responsibility. So I obviously I needed some additional training for that. So I go to this training and I can't remember it was three, four, maybe five days worth of training and what stood out to me. This is the first time I saw the difference and maybe one of the largest contributors to the problem. The problem I'm talking about is the way some safety professionals, eh&s professionals do their job, and I just want to be ultra clear I do not support it. I believe 100% that people in those positions are perfectly staged like, put in an ideal spot, to be an advocate for the people doing the work and make indeed make the work better for the people doing it.

Speaker 1:

Anyhow, I'm in this class. It's me, a friend of mine and I made a connection there with some other gentlemen. There was about 20 of us in there. It was really interesting as we were going through all the material me, my buddy and and my new buddy, the one I met there. We were asking questions and presenting ideas that made us look like the odd ducks. We were like everybody else in the room was like what the hell are y'all talking about? Almost like would y'all shut up and let us get to the meat and potatoes of the whole thing, except for the three of us. We were like, yeah, yeah, like I agree. What do you think about this? Have you tried this? And now again, most of what the three of us were talking about maybe falls into the realm of leadership, or even servant leadership, and how do we approach a situation that's not clearly defined in a policy, and we also maybe know that the policy or the rules are not necessarily applicable in the particular situation. And so we were having this type of conversation of how do we utilize the, we'll say, the standards, the OSHA standards, to better serve the people, which the instructor was phenomenal because he could. He helped us kind of navigate through that. Of course, there was no direct answer, but he gave us a framework to use in terms of thinking of how to overcome that thing.

Speaker 1:

Anyways, back to the rest of the team. So we didn't get invited to sit at the cool kids table right, because we were the odd ducks, we were the weirdos. And so I'm really observing, like why is there such a distinct difference between the three odd ducks, me being one of them, and the rest of the crew that was there? And they were all from different companies from different cities in that part of the country, and like they weren't all from one company. It's like, okay, so they're not all from the same employer, but they share a lot of the same characteristics. And so I decided to like talk to them and understand, like why were they? They were like the safety person for the construction companies that they were working for, and I must've asked six or seven of them like why they were in the safety role. Like was it something that they went to university for? Was it something that they were always interested in? And of the seven that I asked, all of them said that their boss assigned them to the role, and I think that's a key thing. They were assigned to the role. I'm like, oh so it wasn't something necessarily that you were interested in. No, they said that I was a good candidate for it and it was kind of a. I thought it was going to be a really great promotion. So I took it.

Speaker 1:

One guy had had a significant incident on site and the the idea, like it was a mutual agreement, in that the company said, hey, like you have a pretty interesting story and now your attitude about safety has dramatically changed, we would like you to take this position. He said yes, I want to, right, anyways. But the rest were like no, they kind of made me do it. They didn't say it that way, but it's kind of how I interpreted it. Now, the consistency I saw in that group like the rest of the people, not the odd ducks, the regular normies was they were super, super compliant, focused. They just wanted to know what's the rule, what's the consequence? Where do I find the answer? What do I do to make sure? Like to punish people appropriately and make sure people comply? They didn't use those words, but that was my interpretation of like the gist of their questions. They were just like black and white. What is it? Yes or no? Go, go, do not go. And then, of course, I kept thinking I'm like huh.

Speaker 1:

So these people are, these group, this group of people, awesome people are hyper, hyper, compliant, focused. Their only concern is to have the ability to discern whether somebody is doing it right or wrong and what to do when they're not doing it right, which that's important. Right, like that is a skill or maybe a core element in managing people. But in terms of leading the safety culture for an organization, I don't think it's enough. But that's not their fault, right, like that's their mindset. That's the way they think, that's the way they operate. Not their fault, right, like that's their mindset. That's the way they think, that's the way they operate, which to me was maybe a little disappointing. But shine the light on why we have such a big divide between the trade installers out there and the safety or compliance officers out there. And it's through no fault necessarily of the individuals.

Speaker 1:

It comes back to the leader of the organization that selected the safety leader. Like I, didn't do any study on this, so I'd love to get your thoughts in the comments or shoot me a DM or tell me I'm full of it what I interpreted that as is the leaders of those organizations that selected those guys that were in that class with me. They did not see safety as a core element of their culture. They did not appreciate safety to be a core element of their business or the success of their business. They saw it more as a matter of compliance, more as a necessary evil, like they had to do it so they could comply with federal guidelines, so that they wouldn't get in trouble. And so if that's the value or the level of appreciation they have for safety or the potential in a safety department or safety program, of course they're going to find somebody that is naturally compliant, that follows the rules, crosses the T's and dots the I's, and then that creates a lot of the situation that a lot of us out there have been dealing with, where I know for a very long time, like the safety person was the least cool person on the job site. Right, they were the tattletale, they were the narc. They would come and tell me what I was doing wrong but could never help me figure out how to do it right. They always came after the fact. They were never involved on the front end of things, and the closest they got to being involved in the front end was giving me some damn checklist to fill out and a bunch of other damn paperwork. That didn't help me make the job safer. All it did was help them cover their butt in case something happened.

Speaker 1:

Going back to my boss, the one who picked me in picked those other two guys. Their bosses picked them for particular reasons. I think that I know for sure the guy who picked me for the role understood safety from a different perspective. He saw that a good, sound safety program that served their people, produced business results and met the national or federal requirements and insurance liability issues and all of that it wasn't. It was a yes and situation in terms of we want to provide a different experience for our people and for all the people that come to our project. By different we mean how does the program serve the human beings? What that was going to require is some radical maybe yeah, we'll say radical some radical thinking in terms of doing it differently.

Speaker 1:

And so maybe, on one hand, what I'm saying is those hyper-compliant, focused, dictator-type safety professionals out there. It's not entirely their fault that they're that way, because I've also been involved in some incident investigations which are not fun, like they're. Probably one of the worst experiences I've had in my career in construction is doing an incident investigation and all the bureaucracy, all the technicalities, all the liability stuff that you got to get into and check and make sure that you're covered and you're not saying the wrong thing and people are okay. And did somebody die? Did somebody get hurt? But I also have these corporate things I need to do, like there's a lot of conflicting things that happen during an incident investigation and safety professionals. They always get pulled into those things and they're just the worst, they're just bad. There's no fun at all. Maybe there's some learning, but it's very stressful, intense learning, so that'll sour anybody's mood.

Speaker 1:

Back to the point. If you're in a situation on a job side or with a company that is hyper, hyper focused on compliance and only compliance, you're going to see that firsthand by the safety professional that you're dealing with. You're going to see that firsthand by the safety professional that you're dealing with. And maybe the challenge is this to like keep an open mind, because not all safety professionals function that way and that's usually a result of their leader and what their leader values or understands a good safety program to be. And that leader can go all the way to the CEO. Right, in my little wishy-washy analysis it was it all absolutely went back to the CEO.

Speaker 1:

Ceo decided to put these people in these roles because the only value they saw in it was compliance. And so when you have those safety professionals, those EH&S pros, that do listen and do try like, invest time and effort into making the work better or understanding the situation and help design this, mitigate all the as much risk as possible and design the safest ways to execute the work, show them some appreciation. And I also have an ask I know this was a little convoluted but I don't know if what I'm saying like it was just a little sliver. Of maybe 18 different people, three were the odd ducks, right, they were real, people-focused, service-oriented. How do we make this program serve our people and meet the expectations or the federal requirements? And then the rest of them were very compliant, compliant, compliant. Thou shall not, thou shall not.

Speaker 1:

So maybe you can help me, like, let me know how many of the safety professionals that you have worked with are people focused, how many of them are proactive in terms of being involved in evaluating the way high risk work is going to be executed and contributes to making it less risky, versus the number of safety professionals that come and just tell you what you're doing wrong and offer no solutions or countermeasures to approach that work differently.

Speaker 1:

I'm going to say we're still looking at a maybe 80-20, 80 on the compliance, 20 on the people focus. But maybe you can help me figure that out Again. When you find one out there that is people-centered and takes action and steps to serve the people that are doing the work, give them a fist bump, tell them thank you. And when you come into the ones that are ultra, ultra compliance, fill out your paperwork, check the boxes, give them some grace because they're not doing it to be ugly. There's the conditions that are in are just make setting them up to really not have a lot of friends. Be kind to yourself, be cool and we'll talk at you next time. Peace.