Core Capacities that Lead to EHS Excellence

Hilary: Hello listeners, I’m Hilary Framke, host of the Elevate EHS podcast. I’m back for another episode today. I’ve got a new guest, Shawn Galloway, welcome. 

Shawn: Thanks Hilary, happy to be here and work with you virtually today. 

Hilary: So excited to have you on, Shawn. You’ve been very busy. You published seven bestselling books, 400+ articles, a 100+ videos and we could just go on and on. Actually found out in our prep call, you launched the very first safety podcast, over 800 episodes. That just blows my mind. I’ve only been doing this since about, March, April. I can’t imagine having done it for that long. So, obviously your contribution to the EHS field, nothing short of extraordinary.

I’m super thrilled to have you on here today and to chat with you a little bit about some thought leadership things. So to start off tell our listeners what initially inspired you to dive so deeply into our field and how has that EHS conversation changed over the years?

Shawn: Oh, interesting. So, I had a military career and my first corporate career started in England with an engineering firm called Offset Services.

I was back on holiday for Christmas time and Fluor Daniel, now Fluor, recruited me because they wanted to get into this particular engineering space and worked in the Sugar Land, Texas outside of Houston office. I was in my 20s still at the time. They wanted to move our department to Irvine, California, moving from Houston to Irvine without a significant bump in pay.

That was the end of my career with Fluor Daniel. I wasn’t about to make that move at the time. But I was working within a lot of petrochem chemical plants. OSHA’s process safety management had come out at that time. So that’s where my safety career began, and I was primarily on the compliance side of things.

Clients didn’t really want me there. They had to make some changes, whether it’s an audit or internal protocols, they need to go in this direction and when I was recruited in 2005 to come to work for ProAct Safety, and I became the president in ’09, and the CEO three years ago now. I had my first approach where organizations wanted to be better, and the very first project that I went on was a company that was headquartered also in California, in Burbank, and they had about 40,000 employees, the COO’s name was Henry, and he wanted to change the culture and that’s an area that we’ve been focusing on since 1993 as a company.

So he brought our firm in, my first project and I met an individual that absolutely bought into was leading safety. He knew that safety was never going to be a core value if it was delegated to the safety professionals. So he, the head of all operations, owned safety. So here’s the right person for the job.

My thinking back in 2005 was pretty naive when you’re looking at culture and leadership and all the things I believe we’re going to talk about today. I thought naively if you just get people to care, the rest takes care of itself, very naive. I had a very valuable lesson that got me really hooked into why I do what I do in safety and it started with this company in Burbank. We found two weeks after starting to work with Henry that he got up in the middle of the night and had to use the restroom. His wife shared this story with the executive team, of course, in turn, share it with us. When he got up in the middle of the night, he must not have seen his magazine on his carpeted bedroom floor, and when he slipped on that magazine, he hit his head on the nightstand but he went to the restroom, back to sleep, not realizing he was internally hemorrhaging and he passed away that night. We think the same thing happened during Covid with Bob Saget, the gentleman that played father in Full House.

Very similar thing, we all think so, I learned a lesson then that it’s not enough to care. You have to know what to do to be safe, and then we need to make sure we’re putting the right systems and things in place that enable the safe decision to be the easy decision. But my thinking really evolved back then and it got me really passionate about what I do and we spent a lot of time making off the job safety and on the job topic as well because you’re much more likely to get injured outside of work. So that thinking has evolved. But the other part I heard in your question was how the evolution and things have changed in safety. I will sometimes tell this as a story when I’m doing keynotes or workshops that if you go back to the 1880s, at least in America, when we were building the first high rises, they actually used to plan for how many fatalities would occur, based on how many floors were being constructed. So that was acceptable practices. That was the cost of doing business. You’re building a twelve story building, you’ll kill twelve people. So obviously our thinking evolved. And in America, when Nixon signed the OSH Act towards the end of 1970, that first decade of regulated safety in America, primarily general duty clause, provide a safe work environment, the environment, the conditions were of primary focus as where we should always begin.

But in the late 70s, the thinking evolved, the conversation evolved and matured, and we started looking at also the behavioral side of safety. Now, some organizations have taken that the wrong way and forget that behaviors can never be the root cause of an injury, but we started realizing it’s not just where people are at or the conditions they’re in.

It’s also what they do that can help prevent injuries, but then there’s a lot of influence around that. And then in 1986, the conversation matured, the thinking matured with two tragic events, one in January, one in April. Challenger in Chernobyl and with those two events, the term safety culture was coined.

Now people overuse that. It’s become, I like the term semantic satiation. It’s when something loses its meaning. Think of the Charlie Brown wah, wah, wah, wah. So safety culture’s lost a lot of meaning from what its initial intention in safety culture is just a part of the occupational culture. Sometimes people forget about that. But how we talk about safety and the evolution and thinking is always going to occur because progress begins by thinking differently. And in 2021, I was working with some organizations in Australia and I learned that they were the first country that has now issued mandates around psychological safety.

And here in America, that’s only about a four or five year common part of the conversation. The term originated in the 1950s, Amy Edmondson out of Harvard really popularized it but now you’ve got a country as influential as Australia that has thou shalt statements within the mandates from regulatory bodies and England has a standard, Canada has a standard.

There’s now an ISO 45003 standard. 

Hilary: Mexico actually has one as well. Psychosocial factors is what they call it. Yeah. 

Shawn: See, and that’s what I think we should continue to do is look for better ways and not adopt a practice and say, there’s no more better practices. We got to keep looking for better ways.

And I think just those things and influence and the ability to do what we’re doing here, you’re sitting in your location, I’m in mine and we can have this conversation and think differently and mature our own thinking. So, it’s been interesting to see even over the last five years, how things have evolved. 

Hilary: Oh, I love that.

And I think you expound on this pretty significantly in your most recent book, you talk a lot about the five core competencies for EHS excellence. So I would love for us to dive into this a little bit because I think it’ll just organically take us in a direction of thought leadership.

That’s what your book is all about. So let’s start out with EHS systems. Tell me a little bit about that competency.

Shawn: So the Department of Energy in 2009 created a guidance, volume one, volume two guidance document around human performance. Now the common term is human organizational performance. So that started to realize, it really changed the conversation for DOE covered facilities, but others as well, leveraging that the number one principle is that mistakes are normal in a complex environment, and also that it’s not all about prevention.

And a lot of companies still have their zero incident goals and targets zero, goals zero. They all have good intent, but we have to realize the limitations around preventing every possible deviation. And that’s the part that only really mature organizational leaders really understand is that deviations are normal. They’re not desirable, but they’re normal. Every day, you and I will have some deviations in this conversation today. Things don’t go as planned. It happens all the time. So from a systems standpoint, I refer to the term, and I don’t know who originated it but system capacity, you have to have the capacity and that’s what we’re talking about.

The five kind of core capacities. You have to have the capacity for prevention, but you have to have the capacity for recovery because work is decided at the top of the organization, carried out through the frontline supervisor, and we hope work is going to go as planned, it doesn’t. You have deviations and often we don’t really hone in on those deviations or work to understand them until something bad has happened.

And then we realize, okay, an event happened, contact made, illness, whatever it might be, now, how do we bring the individual back to the pre incident state or minimize the severity or the operating environment back to the pre incident state. So system capacity means are we confident in our preventative efforts?

So leveraging hierarchy of controls, if you use the five common one, eliminate, substitute, engineering, administrative controls and PPE. So what’s our confidence there, and then on the other side, what are our redundancy, our what if scenario, contingency thinking, that if things don’t go as planned because even like eyewash stations, fall protection, the event happened. How do we minimize the severity? So that’s more on the recovery side than it really is on the prevention side, if you think about it. The last ten years, the conversation has really evolved it’s back to the hierarchy of controls, but it’s popularized by serious injury fatality prevention, SIF and I don’t have the exact numbers, but it’s around 280, 270 more fatalities occurred in, I believe it was the 2022. So despite this, our fatalities are still going up a little bit. Despite all the energy and effort around this. So, we think we’re doing all of these things. There’s SIF, PSIF, all of this, but it’s not really getting the traction. So how good are we if we’re not really making a dent in that? 

Hilary: The funny thing is we could so go down a rabbit hole about this, right. Because what the SIFs tend to be are the low probability, high severity. And speaking of data, if you look at like inspection questions, they tend to look for the high probability, low severity findings, like not wearing your safety glasses, fire extinguishers not being inspected. We tend to see them a lot but they’re very low severity, something bad happening. It’s not going to be a fatality, it’s not going to be an amputation or something like that. So we’re spending all this time, all of our activities, inspecting for low severity, high probability, but it’s the opposite that actually leads to the fatalities, so we’re not going out and looking for the things that actually result in the worst outcomes.

 Let’s go away from systems, you talk in your book about cultural aspects. So what role does culture play in ensuring successful implementation and sustainability of our EHS program? 

Shawn: I just wrote an article, it was in one of my columns, and I talked about the need for when organizations are growing for continuously assessing their, I refer to it as their infrastructure and their tribes, because you can have all the great infrastructure in the world, but especially if that infrastructure is heavy on the administrative controls, and you have a lot of new people within your tribe, where administrative controls sometimes are at the discretion shouldn’t be but at the discretion whether they follow the policies or procedures or not.

So I’ll give you an example to highlight the cultural piece to this. So manufacturing as an industry was had probably the hardest after COVID from an attrition standpoint, and just employee retention in general. And there was a site that I was working with, they’d been improving safety drastically over the past several years.

And then they were overwhelmed by new people and the plant manager pulled me aside on one of my visits. It was April of 2021 and pulled me aside and said, Shawn, I couldn’t believe it, I caught an employee ducking underneath the line. And what that means is the product they make, there’s a lot of batch changes.

You can’t physically guard because they’re constantly moving it around, et cetera. So everyone knows over the years, you never duck underneath the line, even though it’s a low speed, there’s still a chance for entanglement and everything. So you never duck underneath the line. And what we found that new employee, she was trying to show that she’s a hard worker, trying to do things fast and everything, all good intent.

But she ducked underneath the line and we found during the hiring process, onboarding, job shadowing, training, etc., nobody ever talked about that, and I call them risks we never take. No one was passing that on because they took it for granted. It’s cultural. It’s the way we do things and we know never to do that. Yes, it wasn’t being communicated. Another chemical plant that I worked with several years ago, they built another unit, a billion dollar unit. They went from like eighty people to two hundred and something people on this complex now across these two units and the general manager was sharing with me the issues they were facing and his terms were, we outgrew our tribe. So the tribe where we’re watching out for each other and culture also is one of those terms, again, that means so many different things to people besides just safety culture. But the way I communicate it is, it’s what’s common among a group. It’s beliefs that govern behavior, but it’s also the common stories, the common experiences, not just beliefs and behaviors. So everyone has a culture or if you want to go as far as say, everyone has a safety culture, but it may not be the one that you want. So cultural capacity is if we have the right systems in place, what are people doing when the boss isn’t around? What gets reinforced in the absence of the enforcers, if you will and are the newer people being reinforced by the experienced people? No, that’s not the way we do things around here or are they saying things like, “I know that’s how you’re trained, but let me show you a quicker way to do it or faster, whatever it might be.” So having that cultural capacity is just as important as the systems or the infrastructure that you put in place. So some companies have gotten to the point where safety really is a core value. Others are still it’s a situation. Value depends on where we’re at. It’s safety, absolutely. But if we’re not hitting our numbers, that becomes priority one, and that’s unfortunate. So we have to be managing the aspects that create the culture, not just assume we have a great culture. And that’s why we have to look at the systems. We have to look at what’s being reinforced.

Perception surveys are a very limited way to understand culture. You’ve got to get out and observe. You’ve got to interact, but also you have to understand what stories and experiences are creating those beliefs that govern behavior. 

Hilary: Agreed and I think it was interesting to me in my career to find out and to uncover that organizations can have a strong culture and seem like they’re healthy and all is well.

And then you can uncover some really like poor, inadequate, toxic EHS culture. Inside a well and heavily engaged workforce. Unfortunately, that was my experience, so you can’t just say, even though they’re very interrelated, as you mentioned before, and I don’t really believe in a safety culture, more of a business culture, and safety has got to be a component. EHS has to be a component in there but just because the health overall looks good doesn’t mean there aren’t pockets, of inadequacy and I think the only way to find that out is to do those cultural reviews is to get in and to assess, to do the focus groups, to have those conversations one on one.

It’s incredible what you find out by just asking a series of questions to an employee you know, like do you like your work? Do you think your work is hard to do? 

Do you feel that your leaders hear you, when you tell them that jobs and tasks are difficult? Have you had an injury here before and then you go down all these series of questions and find out, it’s not really acceptable to report injuries or certain types of injuries. So that’s why I really like this as a core capacity, as you say, in your book, because it is something that needs to be evaluated on its own.

It’s not always going to be linked to something else. So I alway continue to suggest to our EHS practitioners around the world, if you don’t have some type of evaluation of your culture, either culture assessments, focus groups, check ins, listening groups, coffee chats, whatever you want to call it you’re missing the boat on a core piece of evaluation of your overall EHS program.

And you need to pay attention to those things and figure out for your business, what are the factors that tell you things about your culture that might be reporting on time, right? There are lots of different indicators, but set up some metrics that tell you just about that cultural aspect of, like you said, what do you do when the leaders aren’t there?

Let’s go back to engagement. How impactful is engagement in culture? 

Shawn: In the ‘Bridge’ book that was the final piece that I talked about and once that book got published, there’s an old saying that books are never finished, they’re just merely abandoned because you gotta meet the editorial guidelines or deadlines and all that stuff.

So the latest book I finished writing a couple of months ago that we’re targeting maybe towards the end of this year, maybe early in 2025 the primary title and I haven’t worked out the subtitle yet is ‘Shared Ownership’ because I found that’s the final step in true engagement and engagement begins with interest. Now, on the other side of engagement is disengagement. And the far end of that spectrum in the book, the new book I’ve finished is essentially, I want to burn this place down. It’s a terrible position to be in. But, unfortunately, you do have those.

I was on Fox News a couple of months ago about this guy that was building IEDs inside the building that he was working with. And terrible situation that was happening there. But you do have that, unfortunately, and you have to be aware. That’s why security needs to be a part of the EHS conversation, etc.

But you have disengagement. And interestingly, if you look at the interface between engagement and motivation, there are different things, but you have intrinsic motivation and extrinsic motivation, and I want to burn this place down far into the disengagement spectrum. That’s intrinsic motivation.

They’re not doing it because of outside forces. They just despise the organization so much. They feel so strongly. Exactly. And if somebody is primarily externally motivated, that’s at a place where sometimes incentives can be an effective tool. But once you start on the engagement spectrum I’ve referred to in this new book, it starts with interest.

You’re getting people to be interested in something. Be careful about incentives there, because if I’m already saying, I’m interested in what Hilary’s talking about here today, tell me a little bit more. The next step is buy in. And that’s where, okay I like what Hilary’s doing. I’m not willing to participate in it just yet, but she’s got my voiced support on this, at least the next step is willing participation where people are willingly giving their energy to help accomplish something.

After that, you get a sense of self ownership. Dr. W. Edward Stemming, one of his principles is people support what they help to create. So if you want real ownership, they’ve got to have a role in at least giving some perspective in this. And then that final sense is in the army, we called it kind of battle buddies, but no matter what, I’m going to get you to the other side, and I’m going to make sure we all successfully get to this other side of things because I don’t just care about my success. I care about your success, and we’re all in this together. We’re not going to leave any man or woman behind. So we have to understand that, as leaders, it’s our responsibility for creating that motivational and engagement environment, because we can’t just expect somebody to come and give it their all.

We need to, as a cultural perspective, be paying attention to what are we doing unintentionally that might be demotivating the very engagement we want, and what could we change as far as motivators to increase that level of engagement. 

Hilary: Yeah, so many organizations haven’t even done the analysis to know how much of their current company is participating.

That was always one of the first things that I would come in and do when I started with a new organization. I’m like, okay, here is the calculation. Here’s what counts as participation. Like you said, submitting a near miss, doing an inspection, 

you know, 

it all has to be leading things. It can’t be being a part of an incident investigation or something like doing a risk assessment, like things outside of required activities.

And it was so not hilarious, because it’s sad, but to find out that really, usually only 8-10% of the total employee population was actively participating in the EHS program. Because like you said, it’d be one safety committee, that had very little rotation. They’ve given all the duties to that safety committee to execute and become the safety experts and the champions. But how many people is that really? And how does this benefit your overall organization and impact your culture? Where can 8-10% take you? Not far, right? So even that concept of doing the analysis to see how much overall you’re getting in absorption of the ideals that you have and the programs and then totally reassessing, like you said, what’s our expectation?

How do we want our employees to be engaged? What are those specific activities? What do we expect out of frontline employees? Then what do we expect out of frontline leaders, then get to middle management, then executives. Here’s exactly how I expect you to participate, and the role that you play.

So often that’s not being done, on the EHS practitioner side. But they want to sit here and say, people aren’t engaged and I don’t have good culture. Maybe start with setting a standard, and analyzing your current performance, setting a standard and making some program changes.

Shawn: Well, this goes back to leadership responsibility as well, and for risk of sounding like chicken little, the sky is falling, also being careful about stereotyping, Gallup data shows that disengagement is just continuing to increase. And in many areas as well, remote workers, their connection to the purpose of the organization is diminishing.

So you’ve got that piece that disengagement is increasing and that’s problematic. That’s the chicken little thing. But then on the other side of being careful, a lot of the people that are coming into the workforce now are perceived as more altruistic than some of the others, they also want a little bit more feedback.

They want to see what the organization’s doing as for the greater good of things. So it goes back to a change in leadership responsibilities. And a lot of times leaders view their responsibility is making sure my people don’t get injured. No, leaders have to have the capacity to not just align people to our standards, but also to be able to get more out of people.

And we all know the super employee becomes a supervisor. And that’s where I find I wrote a book called ‘Coach’. It’s a safety leadership fable that’s published around the same time the ‘Bridge’ book was published because during COVID, I had a little bit extra time on my end. So I wrote those simultaneously.

But in there, I make the argument that the most important people to shape performance and culture are the most under trained, under resourced, and under utilized people. And that’s that frontline supervisor. So if we’re not setting them up for success, and I’m keying in on what you’re saying, the different levels of the organization.

Sometimes, not sometimes, very often, I see a company see that frontline supervisor too, is an opportunity and then they go after them. But the problem is if you increase their skill set about how to be a more effective leader, and if they don’t experience those same things with the people above them, then it’s not going to stick.

It’ll be a wasted effort. So you have to look at all levels of the organization. I love what Steve Jobs said, but I’ll paraphrase slightly because we’re recording this, but what interests my boss fascinates the heck out of me, so people pay attention to what the bosses are paying attention to.

And that’s up and down the organization. So where it manifests the loudest is at that front face of management, that frontline supervisor. But also, interestingly, and I’ll get off my soapbox, is that if you talk to the supervisor, many of them align themselves more with the workforce than they do with an extension of management.

And that’s a problem. It’s got to be fixed too. 

Hilary: What’s an insight that you can provide that leaders could use to inspire and support their teams to pursue EHS excellence? 

Shawn: A lot of it starts with what are we trying to accomplish here?

Just like engagement, excellence is not very well defined in an organization. And I find that excellence, you have to have four things to be excellent. One is the ability to get and repeat great results. So incident rate is still going to be a part of that conversation the next ten, fifteen years, but that’s going away in a lot of companies.

The next piece is knowing precisely why we have the results that we have. If we have great performance, I can’t point to why we need to manage the luck out of the equation. The third piece is the system capacity we already talked about. And then that fourth piece is the cultural mindset that regardless of how well we’re doing, we can always be better.

So we’ve got to get leadership aligned at all levels on what the objective looks like. Alice in Wonderland, Cheshire Cat said, if you don’t know where you’re going, then any path will take you there. So a lot of companies, leaders included, have the best intentions. They’re trying to pursue that gold medal and say, if you just coming out of the Olympics here, but the problem is on what performance yields it or doesn’t yield it isn’t where we’re aligned.

 So to answer your question, Hilary, it may sound trivial, but getting aligned with what that objective looks like in behavioral terms, because the leaders supervisor to wherever you have to coach for the performance you want, you can’t coach for results.

That means we need extreme clarity around what performance is going to yield our result. So leaders have to get a behavioral definition of what is a successful day look like? And what does a safe day look like? So when I’m out there, do I see evidence of what’s going to yield our desired outcome? Or do I see evidence that perhaps we’re starting to go in the wrong direction with this?

Hilary: Thank you, Shawn. And to pull it all together, the last core competency, strategy. Tell us how EHS fits in.

Shawn: Yeah, so you have to have the system capacity, you have to have the cultural capacity, you have to have the capacity to create engagement, and then of course this leadership capacity. Most organizations, if they have a strategy around safety or more broadly EHS or bring in any of the other acronyms to this, it’s what I call the perpetual cycle of avoiding failure.

And there’s four pieces to it. #1, they look at their incident rates. #2, they set a new incident rate goal or objective. #3, they develop a list of things to do. And #4, they do those things. And then they look at their incident rate. How do we do? The problem with that is when we have improved performance, we fall into that previously mentioned correlation causation trap, and that’s not strategy’s value creation.

My definition for strategy is it’s a framework of choices, tradeoffs and small bets an organization makes to determine how to capture and deliver value. So if we’re looking at value creation, then there’s two things we need to be consciously and continuously paying attention to. Are we doing things that are going to create the most value?

And then the harder part, are we doing things that create the perception of value with the things we’re focusing on? I’ll give you two quick examples. A power plant several years ago, I looked at four years worth of injury data prior to showing up to work with them. I knew exactly what the focus should be on, at least to prevent the reoccurrences they’ve had over the years.

One of the very simple questions I asked workforce that I was interviewing, what’s safety focusing on today? Everybody told me the same two things. So initially, wow, they’re really aligned. Steel toes and housekeeping. Now, both of those are very important, but true story had they been perfect at steel toe compliance and pristine housekeeping, it would have had an 8% impact on their incidents over the last four years.

So what they were paying attention to is not the most value driving thing. Now, another good friend of mine is in the financial team of a very large organization. They were doing some reorging a few years ago. They went on a team building exercise, the finance team, and they went bowling. Now this company is one of the best in the world in safety, very mature.

Here in Houston, he wears long pants, long sleeves, full PPE when it’s 105, 99% humidity mowing his lawn. So as he would say, drinks the Kool Aid, bought into their safety. So he gets to this bowling alley and they’re all shaking hands. And the leader says, wait, before you go pick out your bowling ball, we need you to sit down and fill out a job safety analysis form, immediately disengaging somebody that was already wildly bought into it.

So if we’re doing things that disengage, demotivate, as we talked about earlier, or distract people, that’s not winning. And strategy’s about winning. How do we win? So we need to make sure that we have a strategic framework at the corporate, down to the division, all the way down to the local project or building or manufacturing plant, regardless of the industry.

And the framework has to be very clear on where we’re going, where we’re at against that ideal, what are our strategic priorities to address that delta to close that gap, and then two really important measurements to go into our balanced scorecard. Are we measuring progress towards what we want? A lot of companies, Dean Spitzer wrote a book called Transforming Performance Measurement,

it was groundbreaking in 2007 I had the opportunity to pre read it. And in there, he says, the main reason companies don’t get what they want is because they’re not measuring what they want. Apply that in safety. We measure all the things we don’t want. So less bad is more good, terrible grammar. But as opposed to saying, what is it we want?

And are we getting more of that. Are we progressing? And then another thing is, are we measuring the contribution of value? So think about the misinformation list. Are we measuring our corrective actions against the hierarchy of controls? Are we measuring the safety IQ some of my clients do. So they measure what is the retention?

If we’ve trained somebody, do they now know it? Because if you have no injuries, you’re doing all this training, but you assess the knowledge levels or the competencies and it’s not where you’re at, I wouldn’t rely on sustainability of our performance. I would expect some variation at some point. Some companies do have the bandwidth to pursue world class safety excellence. Others really only have the bandwidth for incremental improvement. Both are noble objectives if we’re progressing in some way, but the allocation of resources for world class versus incremental improvement, drastically different.

So the board’s got to be a part of those decisions all the way down to some representation from the front line because we want it to be our strategy, not the safety departments, not the business leaders. It’s got to be owned by people. So have them involved in the strategy. But all of those capacities, they all have to work together.

The previous ones, and then you got to have a strategy for how we’re going to win. 

Hilary: Oh, Shawn. Thank you so much for sharing your insights with us on the podcast today. I just think this is such a EHS can be so difficult and complicated and technical, and especially for those organizations that don’t have the benefit of having enough salary cap to have an EHS leader.

These are five very simple, a great roadmap to build out a stronger EHS program. So thank you so much for taking the time to walk our listeners through it today in this episode and for being a guest on the Elevate EHS podcast. 

Shawn: Thank you, Hilary. It’s been wonderful speaking with you. 

Hilary: You too.

Have a great day, listeners. See you next time.