Revolutionizing EHS: Ideas to Boost Training, Engagement, and Culture

Hilary Framke: Hello to our listeners. I’m Hilary Framke. I’m back as your host of the Elevate EHS podcast. I’m here with Tom Mellinger today. Hi, Tom. 

 

Tom Mellinger: How are you today? I’m doing fantastic. Thank you for being a guest on my podcast. I’m excited to be here. Thanks for having me.

 

Hilary Framke: I’m excited too. We love to get into the EHS topics.

So tell our listeners about your EHS journey so far. What’s inspired you to pursue this career path? 

 

Tom Mellinger: Yeah, absolutely. I would say there’s probably a lot of EHS professionals who have a similar path that didn’t necessarily start in an EHS role, didn’t have a formal education in EHS.

I’m a chemical engineer by background. That’s my degree and I started my career as a process engineer in chemical manufacturing. In the mid nineties, my boss came to me one day and said, Hey we have this new OSHA standard called dealing with process safety, and we need somebody to create a program for us.

So congratulations, this is one of your new job responsibilities. And I wasn’t, oh, you’re our process safety engineer. You were in our safety department. [00:01:00] No, you’re a process engineer and this is one of your jobs now. In the mid nineties, there were not the prevalent resources on process safety management like there are today. There weren’t consulting companies dedicated to that. So i literally read the OSHA standard and tried to interpret each element as best I could to implement those at our site where we used a hexane to extract the soybean oil from the crushed soybeans and hexane met the flammability requirements. So I built a program from there. That ended up transitioning into other jobs in process safety. So most of my career has been different levels of responsibility related to process safety. Thankfully in my more recent roles, they’ve been much more mature programs, not one that I created from scratch, where I was actually creating P and IDs and process flow diagrams, now we’ve got a lot more mature programs. It opened a lot of doors for me, I will say, first of all but it also came like a vocational, it was like a calling to me. I really gained a passion for it because very early in my process safety career I started a [00:02:00] new role with a new company, and one month into that role, we had a catastrophic explosion that ended up killing an individual and another 15 people to the hospital.

Very significant. So I didn’t even know the processes. I didn’t know the people. I was the process safety manager for the facility and I was actually in Boston at a PHA training class. My boss called me and told me what happened and I said, All right I’m going to get on the next flight home.

And he said, nope, that we can’t do anything with the facility. It’s under control of the state police right now as they investigate and you’re going to need those skills from that PHA training course. So stay there, finish the course, and then get ahold of me when you get back. When I say it’s vocational and it’s very impactful for me is, I don’t want to live through that ever again.

I never wanted to have that type of incident at any of the facilities, any of the companies I worked at. I wasn’t the one that had to meet with this individual’s family and explain to him what happened and why their husband and their father wasn’t coming home. And I never wanted to have that that conversation again.

When you go through that, it really makes an impact and it’s something that you want to make sure that the people you’re working with feel like they’re in a safe working environment. And that their families can expect them to come home at the end of the day.

 

Hilary Framke: That’s so impactful. Thank you for sharing that. What an experience to live through. I think it’s something as EHS leaders you dread. Every day that you work for a company, you dread that something like that occurring and having to work through that for your business, but it’s such a near reality right? And I think far too many organizations think it’s unlikely, but really, we’re only one mistake or one piece of chance away from that occurring in most of the businesses I’ve been in with the risk that’s present and in the work environment. But having to live through that and feel that, what an experience. I’m sure it really changed you.

 

Tom Mellinger: Oh, 100%. If I ever had designs on going into a different aspect, going back to process engineering, it really changed that day  because I was part of the investigation. I was in large part leading the investigation, had a very critical role in that.

And dealing with OSHA regulators, with lawyers, more time with lawyers than I cared to spend at any point in my life, nor do I care to spend again. But it really hits home, how real this is, how serious this is. For the rest of my career, whenever you have an incident, there’s many times that you look at it and say, boy, we were lucky.

The reason that this wasn’t more serious, a lot of times was luck. Let’s really minimize the level of luck. 

 

Hilary Framke: Yes. One of my favorite new phrases from a client of ours actually is, are we lucky or are we good? And the investigation should help us determine that.

If during the investigative findings, we find out we were lucky. We better be doing something about that and quick because your luck runs out very quickly. We have quick turnaround. I once had two recordables within an hour of each other by the exact same mechanism of injury. They got cut and then they went to recreate how they got cut and got cut on the other hand.

Same employee, two cuts, both reportable within an hour of each other, right? So stranger things have happened and will happen in the realm of business and EHS and risk, and we’d all do well to take that very seriously. Isn’t it unfortunate so many times that it does take a loss of that level to make that real? 

 

Tom Mellinger: Yeah. And to get the attention of upper management of who maybe aren’t investing what they should in safety, process safety and occupational hygiene and all these other programs. Unfortunately, sometimes it is an incident like that before it gets attention of, okay maybe we need to put some focus here and do some investment here. 

 

Hilary Framke: So true. 

Let’s shift gears a little bit. Tell me about what strategies you found to be most effective in connecting every layer of the organization to the EHS program, because as we know, such a huge part of being successful and leading a truly excellent EHS function.

 

Tom Mellinger: It’s a great question because, with most places, the EHS team and a safety team in particular is a handful of individuals, right?

And you might be at a large manufacturing facility, a research facility, whatever it might be. You can’t canvas the whole facility and you can’t manage a program as being the safety police where you’re out there looking over everyone’s shoulder at all times. So you really have to build that mindset and that culture that everyone owns safety and it’s embedded throughout the organization.

Where I’ve seen that kind of be at the most successful is where you recruit roles embedded within the departments themselves. These safety champions, if you will, where you train individuals on things like risk assessments, on incident investigations. They’re doing inspections, right?

They’re doing training within the unit. So they’re an extension of the EHS team, but these are people who are operators or mechanics or lab technicians. So they’re doing the job. They understand the job better than we do as EHS professionals. They connect their peers with the folks in their department.

They already have the respect of their department and they’re seen as leaders. They’re trained, we give them these tools. They typically have kind of a higher pay grade within the department because they’re seen as,  if they’re an operator before, maybe they’re a senior operator with taking on these additional responsibilities.

It’s certainly reflected when you look at performance reviews because they have these additional responsibilities. So there is an incentive for people to want to do these roles, but you also have to have the right people doing it. You have people that want to have that drive and you see them being involved and very visible as leaders and safety leaders within their organization.

But it’s been a very effective way of getting that partnership and really expanding the tentacles of safety and EHS into the entire organization in a reach that a smaller EHS department just can’t do. 

 

Hilary Framke: So EHS teams, let’s talk about this. I’ve had the benefit of lots of exposure to this concept over the course of my career.

Have you ever heard of Milliken? 

 

Tom Mellinger: Oh, sure. 

 

Hilary Framke: So Milliken is a textile company right that actually built out a Performance Solutions arm, so Millikan Performance Solutions that does this very concept. So they built out [00:08:00] this entire program which I think there’s varying levels now, but back at the beginning of my career, when I was just first starting out, I worked for an organization that purchased this Millikan performance solutions, the whole package and it was a year implementation, right? And they came on, they picked this safety committee, they put them through two weeks worth of training to kick off and the build and tons of education, all these things that you said, risk assessments, inspections, FMEA’s, JSA’s, investigative tools, repause analyses, Kaizen events, et cetera, right?

They had all these tools, built out formal agendas, processes, risk profiles that they were going to go chase, targets that they had set for this team. I got to be the team sponsor because I was just an EHS technician on the night shift at the time. So I got to support the team and we would meet every month and then meet back with these Milliken practitioners.

I think it was once a month for two days. And that was my first exposure to this concept of a [00:09:00] safety champion that was a non EHS employee that would gain a little bit of more EHS training and like you said spread those tentacles out into the organization. This is something I think it completely transformative when done well, because more eyes looking for hazards, more people understanding what EHS is trying to accomplish and how to participate and how to engage more people who know how to do things like hazard reporting, corrective action closure, they understand the hierarchy of controls, they understand basic risk assessment and control effectiveness, how to analyze that and become more successful continuous improvement techniques.

But even more so is how much it changed the culture. I would say this to my teams, you have to think of EHS like a bank account, and every single time that we have an injury there’s a significant withdrawal and now we’re in the negative. Even if we do an amazing incident investigation and we find all the contributing factors and the repause with the perfect corrective action in place and it’s [00:10:00] a replacement or an elimination, it’s very unlikely to reoccur. We’re still in the negatives. Because people remember, wait, we had an injury.

 

Tom Mellinger: Yeah, it’s great that they did all these things but someone got hurt and you can’t erase that, right? No matter how good you do. 

 

Before you even get to the incident stage we always encourage the near miss reporting and the good catch or good saves to. It’s very easy for most people to see an unsafe condition. There’s a puddle on the floor near some electrical equipment. That’s easy to report and get that corrected. What’s difficult are those unsafe acts, right? When you see your fellow operators, maybe even a leader walking through the area, looking at their phone while they’re walking. It’s difficult to have those conversations and when you embed these safety champions you’re empowering someone as, they’re not the safety cop but they’re the safety leader in that area. They can lead that and they can show people that you can have those conversations that are positive and that encourages others in the department that maybe they feel more comfortable to stop someone that they see them doing something unsafe where before, I don’t want to be a bother, I don’t want to criticize my buddy. But they understand, look it’s not about criticizing. It’s, I don’t want to see him get hurt. I always tell people, if I walk through an area and I see somebody doing something unsafe and I don’t say anything because I don’t want an uncomfortable conversation and then later on I find out that individual got hurt doing that same action, how would I feel knowing that I could have stopped it, I could have stopped that person. 

Hilary Framke: Yes, you become culpable!

 

Tom Mellinger: Exactly. So keeping that in mind and planting that seed and you see people realize that, this is not about criticizing or an uncomfortable conversation. It’s all about looking out for everyone else that’s working in my area.

 

Hilary Framke: That’s exactly what I was getting to, right? This idea again of bank account, deposits and withdrawals. When an EHS person comes out and they do an inspection, they do an investigation, they put in some, hazard identifications or a near miss, and they report that. We don’t gain any culture. That is not a deposit in the bank because it is the expectation of our business that EHS people would do EHS things.

You’re fulfilling your responsibility, but if non EHS people come through and do those activities, like the safety champion concept that you’re talking about, those are absolutely deposits in the bank, because that’s above and beyond their expected job duties. That shows that EHS lives and breathes in the organization.

Because all these people are involved and care and look out for each other and all those things go both ways. 

So I think that this idea of safety champions that you brought up is extremely transformative when done well. Let’s move into another topic here, the training content. We know EHS has some of the not most interesting topics, some would say, maybe even a little boring with the EHS training How to tackle this challenge, especially around these EHS teams, what fresh approaches or strategies, do you suggest for making EHS training programs effective?

 

Tom Mellinger: So I actually had a point in my career where I took an assignment at another site and left my primary location for a year and went to another site to help out and came back. In that time the primary site I was working on had started a new [00:13:00] safety culture program and with the operating units that I was supporting, we’re doing this training. I went out to sit in on the training and it was literally an hour of PowerPoint slide after PowerPoint slide. I’m looking around the room and there’s operators who are sleeping. They’re like, Hey, this is an hour off the floor.

I’m in an air conditioned room. Maybe I get some drinks and snacks. It was a break for them. It wasn’t training. It wasn’t effective. And I went to our manager at the time and I said, look I know that this is necessary, I know there’s a lot of work that’s gone into this, but it’s awful.

This is what I’m seeing. It’s not impactful. All we’re doing is checking the box that we’re doing safety training once in a while but it’s not effective and his response was, congratulations, you’re now in charge of our safety training program. 

 

Hilary Framke: You raised your hand Tom. 

 

Tom Mellinger: Yeah, no good deed goes unpunished.

But I gathered some of my fellow safety professionals and we also pulled in people from the operation that said, look, we want to revamp our safety training. We want it to be impactful, we want it to be effective. And the messages we got were, make it [00:14:00] interesting. How do we do that?

That’s not easy let’s let’s talk about that as a team how we can do that. Also make it succinct. Everybody is very busy and it’s difficult when you’re running a production environment 24×7 to pull people off the floor for an hour. You can’t pull everybody off. You can’t shut things down.

You got to cover that. Can we get the message across in a shorter amount of time? What we ended up doing is creating a series of videos, video training. It wasn’t PowerPoint. There was a topic every month. It might be slip trips and falls one month. It might be electrical safety, but we basically made skits and it was all done in house, so none of us had any kind of production degrees. Our boss got us some cheap video equipment, microphones and a video camera. We shot everything. We had an Adobe editing software and we edited down to these short 10 minute clips and we did it in a theme of 70s buddy cop shows, these cheesy shows with the cheesy music. We added the music to it.

There was humor to it. After the first couple of months where we rolled this out, [00:15:00] I had people coming up to me when I’d be walking through the plant going, Hey, when’s the next safety training? People were actually excited about safety training because you got the message across, but it was entertaining and you could build a whole campaign around it.

And that continued for years, we would change it up every year or so to make it fresh. So we’d change the characters, we’d change the theme a little bit. But we kept that same principle of technical content. So it’s effective. You’re getting a point across, but keep it short and keep it entertaining so that you keep people’s attention. It was a wildly successful campaign for many years and I came home and we would edit some of the videos. We shot some of it at my house where people would come over at lunch to shoot like a home safety video of my house and my wife would come home and say, what in the world were you guys doing here?

And I would show her the videos. She said, seriously you’re getting paid for this. Because it was fun. It was fun for us to do and it was fun and entertaining for the audience. And so I think if you can combine that, where you get a message in there, but you make it interesting, then people will pay attention and the message hits home.

 

Hilary Framke: This is incredible, Tom. Now, I have so many questions. Did you do this as an add on just to get people engaged or did you actually pick some of those awareness required trainings for all employees and take those topics into the training videos? 

 

Tom Mellinger: We still had some dry stuff that you have to get across some of the OSHA requirements.

That’s maybe a little bit loose as to whether we do this in a video and then check the box that we’ve completed this compliance required training. So we couldn’t do it for everything. But certainly, where we had the key topics, if we saw themes in terms of when we looked at our injury data, if we saw slip, trips and falls is by far our number one type of incident that’s hurting people. Ergonomics number two electrical safety. We’ve had some really serious close calls. Those are the kind of things we looked at. So it was really supplemental to some of the regulatory required or compliance. But it certainly worked hand in hand with those, right? If we have an occupational hazard that we have to do training for, that doesn’t mean that we can’t do a video supporting that. It’s maybe the video isn’t the entire training. 

 

Hilary Framke: Yeah it’s like a little preview.

 

Tom Mellinger: Exactly and it helps hammer home the message. 

 

Hilary Framke: Love that. I think the more that EHS leaders can be creative and innovative like that, the more successful they’re going to be.

I’m all about diversity in thought, and in delivery. We even had some sites that they came up with a safety dance, and did it to music. It had no educational value, didn’t teach anything, but one of the most watched and beloved videos in the business of all time, right?

Because that many of the leaders got up and did it, and it showed that team building and that culture of safety and commitment throughout the video.

 

Tom Mellinger: Talking about and thinking about safety. 

 

Hilary Framke: Yes. Sometimes that’s all it’s about and that’s enough to connect people in their hearts, right?

Not just their minds, but in their hearts to the EHS program. That’s incredible. I bet you have examples too. 

It takes a village as we know with EHS to put all of these responsibilities over the finish line. So I bet you’ve got some great examples of cross functional collaboration that helped to enhance the effectiveness of your programs.

Could you tell me about some successful collabs that led to a better outcome? 

 

Tom Mellinger: Yeah, absolutely. It really starts with having the right level of leadership engagement. And I don’t mean our EHS leaders, all the way up to when you’re at a manufacturing location. If safety is not a value for that individual, it’s not going to be a value for anyone in the organization.

Having the right leader, having that leader engaged and making that a value and a goal for them kind of sets the tone for the whole organization. So when you have then, the leaders in manufacturing, the leaders in engineering even finance and HR, all these different functions, if safety is a value and a goal for them then it is for their teams. One example that I’ve seen, I went to South America where we have two sites in two different countries, but the cultures are very similar.

You go to one facility and it just had that feeling of getting the life sucked out of you. There was no energy. That went all the way up to the senior leader. And it wasn’t just with safety. It was with quality. It was with finance, the messaging was very poor.

And you felt that when you walked in the facility. When you go to the other one where the leader is very vibrant and very engaged and safety is a value and he’s preaching it every day, he’s supportive of it and therefore you feel that trickle down effect in the organization.

They had one of the most effective site safety committees, which is a very cross functional team, but it wasn’t led by anybody from EHS. It was led by the senior manufacturing leader. He was the leader of the safety committee. So he’s organizing it, he’s setting the topics.

Certainly EHS has a role in that and in helping develop the content and, sharing data, with the different metrics. But the fact that it’s led by their senior manufacturing leader, the people on the site see that. And so it’s not just saying, we say safety is number one or safety is at least very important.

And one of our values, they see the leadership of the location living up to that because, Hey, they all know that their boss and their boss’s boss, he’s very busy but safety is a priority for him when he has this responsibility and it’s not just something he does, he’s doing it and he’s very engaged in it. He’s following up. He is a visible leader at the site.

 

Hilary Framke: Well they say that employees are only going to care about what their leaders care about. Yeah. So I always would say to leadership, if you could just change one thing for me this week, every time that you go out to the floor and you greet your teams, your first question should be, have you identified any hazards?

Have you had any near misses on the shift? Anything that I should know about that’s dangerous. If you just leave with that, then get to your product questions and productivity and quality questions, right? Just flip that and make safety important just this week. Give me five days of that on the shift.

And see what a difference that makes. People may not say anything on day one or day two, but if you’re consistent and you show you care and you show that it matters to you, you’re going to hear things. Things will come out. 

 

Tom Mellinger: Yeah, if you go out and you’re not just asking about metrics and you’re not talking about targets, right?

You’re out there asking them do you feel like you need anything? Is there part of your job that doesn’t feel safe? You’re showing concern for them as a person. So I think the role of the EHS team too is, we need our leaders to be engaged, but we also have to set them up for success because not all of them are.

So it does take some coaching and giving them the tools of going out there and having those conversations on safety and doing so effectively. 

 

Hilary Framke: So true and I think with this cross functional collaboration, when I go back and I’m in direct EHS leadership again, something that I’m going to be better about is being mindful of the other functions and the skills and the training that they bring to the table.

I feel like when I look back at my EHS career, there’s so many things that I did myself that I should have asked for help. I’m trying to run these big Kaizen events with very little continuous improvement training. Why didn’t I lead on my operations leaders, my OPEX leaders, my continuous improvement leaders to lead that for me with me as a support, why didn’t I lean on marketing to put out the campaign, build out the design and make it more effective. This is what they’re trained. These are where their skills lie, help with my budget, go to finance, get finance to help you understand where your spend is and where you could make improvements.

I didn’t do enough of that. To be honest if I’m being critical of myself and my career and I hope that others listening in on this podcast and hearing some of the thought leadership think about that more. Think about that as you go to build out and do your activities and fulfill your responsibilities. Who can you lean on in your cross functional team, who has skills that you don’t that could lead to a better outcome.

Yeah, absolutely.

So looking ahead Tom, I’m curious what is the biggest challenge and opportunity for the EHS function. 

 

Tom Mellinger: Strictly talking about the EHS professionals and leaders, one of the things that I’ve noticed later in my career is it’s become increasingly more challenging to attract people into that profession.

It’s not sexy if you’re quote unquote it. But it’s not something that I think a lot of people, especially young people look at as a career path. They don’t necessarily think about it. I think that’s a huge challenge. Can we partner with local universities where they maybe have programs like that and start bringing in some of those students for internships or even job shadowing and expose them to the type of roles that we have to offer.

The type of careers that you can build off of that. I’ve gone and I’ve spoken at our local university on process safety and not just talking about process safety as a function, but as a career. To young chemical engineers getting to think about maybe it’s not a career, but it’s also something you got to think about with the jobs that you might be doing that process safety is a very real thing in a chemical industry.

But looking at also being creative of looking outside of maybe we don’t have people in traditional environmental roles that they’ve gone to school for or safety or occupational hygiene roles, but looking at our engineering professions or other operations type roles where people can get some of that experience on the job and maybe they show some promise.

Maybe they show some interest and looking at things like, can we do a job swap? So one of the facilities that I work with has a really strong safety leader. They have similarly a very strong leader in operations. Partially looking to advance their careers, they agreed to a job swap where the safety leader is going operations leader role and the operations leader is coming into safety.

It’s a win for the organization. Sure we hate to lose a strong safety leader. But she’s still there. She’s still part of the organization. Now you have her embedded in an operations role. So do you think that her team and her department is going to be very focused on safety?

Absolutely. And now there’s an operations leader is coming into safety and he’s bringing an operational mindset of, these are some of the challenges we see every day and so he can bring that aspect to the EHS team. So it really cross pollinates. I think being creative with looking at how we manage roles that way and maybe even incentivizing an EHS role of, Hey, if you want to be a senior leader with the company or with this facility you’re working at it’s not a requirement, but it would look very good on your resume if you had some experience in EHS, so highlighting that as a desirable job experience.

 

Hilary Framke: Agreed. And at the very least, setting some expectations that you will lead an EHS project of some kind, right? Either an improvement that needs to happen, an investigation, there’s so many options. 

 

Tom Mellinger: Leading the safety committee, for example. 

 

Hilary Framke: Exactly, leading an engagement event, you’re going to run safety days this year, right? It’s going to be your responsibility. Make all the content, drive the agenda, do the marketing. And I think, if I could go as far as to say that I think sometimes people want to join EHS, but there’s fear about how difficult it can be, the resource allocation is a real issue, the lack of support, there’s still a far too much blaming of EHS leaders that occurs when programs aren’t [00:26:00] going well, when injury numbers are up or something bad happens. They squarely go to the EHS leader and say you failed in some way for us to have this outcome. I think we’re still far from where we need to be, Tom. On everybody owning EHS holistically as a business and looking to that EHS leader as the technical partner and an expert. But I think we need to realize as businesses, we’re not resourcing them far enough for them to be ultimately successful.

So when losses occur, we need to all own that. We need to ask them what needs to happen, get their guidance about what needs to happen to drive change. Even that in a lot of ways is a guess, right? You don’t always know exactly what we can do to change things, but we sure have ideas about what we can try to drive progress. I think far too often those initiatives are not accepted. They’re not funded. There’s still a lot of that going on and then back on the blame, shame, retrain game, that occurs. So as businesses, if we want to see more bright, young EHS leaders, [00:27:00] speaking of incentives.

We need to create cultures where they can fail and still love their jobs. We can be failing and have incidents and risks and problems, but I can still think I have a great EHS leader because I know that they’re working on it. We’re driving progress. I can see what we’ve done, the step changes that we’ve done, even though the results aren’t perfect.

The step changes are coming to fruition and I can see the culture growing and I can see our program improving. I wish that there was more of that. This concept of, it’s not the absence of incidents, it’s the presence of strong risk control programs. If more executives thought that way, I think we’d see more people in EHS.

Tom Mellinger: And encouraging them to use their voice and to not punish them for speaking up or for being assertive. I’ve seen it where an EHS professional may raise a potential issue and it might involve, Hey, we need to stop an operation. There’s a difficult conversation that needs to happen and they may not be right all the time [00:28:00] that, they could be making a decision based on what they’re seeing, their perception might be wrong. But we also need to encourage that and not punish that. Appreciate you speaking up and raising the issue, glad it wasn’t an issue, and move on, right?

 

Hilary Framke: Yes. There’s nothing wrong. We should all trust that when there’s a pit in our stomach and something doesn’t feel right and we need to be living and role modeling for the frontline workers that it’s okay to trust those instincts and to speak up and to say something. That’s not going to be frowned upon and then discipline, for getting in the way of operations. They say if you spend more time planning your execution phase is far shorter and more optimized anyways. We’re too quick to just jump right in to turn it on and get going.

If we would sit back, take a moment, think, prep and confirm, that we’re ready to operate safely. That usually goes far better. Tom, it has just been an absolute pleasure to have you on the podcast. Thank you so much for your contributions for everything that you’re doing for EHS and your career.

And know that we all wish you very well. 

Thank you very much. It’s always enjoyable to talk about safety. As I said earlier it’s something I’m passionate about. And happy to have the opportunity to talk about it further. 

Thanks. See you again soon listeners.