Reframing EHS: It’s a Game—and Risk Is the Opponent

Hilary: Hello listeners, it’s your host of the Elevate EHS podcast, Hilary Framke, back again with another episode for you, but we’re doing something a little different. We got to keep you guessing here on the podcast. I’d like to welcome Jeffrey Blake. Hi, Jeffrey.

Jeffrey: Good morning, Hilary. Good afternoon, everybody.

Hilary: So great to have you on my podcast. So listeners, what we’re going to be doing today is setting up a metaphor of explaining kind of the sport of EHS. Those who don’t know me well, I’m a huge fan of the NFL. I’m a big football fan.

I’m watching college football as well. I’m watching all the games. My weekends are totally slotted. Monday night, and Thursday night. It just takes over the entire calendar. But, as we were talking in our prep call, Jeffrey and I, about sports and thinking about sport analogies, we found that it was really, had a lot of similarities with how you look at EHS.

Within EHS, you’re playing this never ending game of EHS versus risk. So that’s how we’re going to talk about it and format the podcast today. So let’s start with a quick review of defense and offense. Okay, so in football, the defense’s job is to prevent the other team from scoring. In our metaphor, this would be us preventing risk from resulting in an EHS loss. So what are some primary defensive measures that you use, Jeffrey, to combat risk? 

Jeffrey: Thank you again for allowing me to be here today, Hilary, and good morning, good afternoon, good evening, because this may be global to all those out there. And I’m excited to do something like this, Elevate EHS. I think it’s really innovative and fun that this podcast exists, so I wanted to say that as well.

But speaking about defense to me, it’s really that sort of basic blocking and tackling as we used to call it. It’s the auditing, it’s ensuring regulatory programs are in place and the regulatory training. It’s ensuring standard work is in place across the enterprise. The basic things that you do to play defense and ensure that the company is lowered it’s risk.

That are present that it’s meeting legal compliance and perhaps lowering costs as well. 

Hilary: Yeah. That’s so interesting. I love that you brought up, let’s dig into it a little bit, the auditing side of things because I see a lot of organizations really haunching kind of all their hopes and dreams on the audit program.

Hey, I’m doing auditing. We have great audit results. So our program must be great, but this is a defensive strategy, right? 

Jeffrey: It’s a defensive strategy because whatever risks are there, whatever legal exposures are there, are present. They weren’t caught upstream during the offensive scheme, right? When the offensive team was on the field.

And so you’re inherently spending time and money playing defense, which means we’re not really winning. We’re just trying to avoid losing by as many points as possible. 

Hilary: Oh my gosh, I love that. I think that is such a cool metaphor for EHS versus sports. And I totally agree. And I think when organizations really put all of their, strategy into audit results, and they set it as a KPI and they’re using this, they’re always going to be behind the ball.

They’re always going to be learning from things that have already occurred and dealing with so many transformative losses in the organization that are impacting their employees. 

Jeffrey: Exactly. It’s the ultimate mitigation versus prevention.

Hilary: Yes, exactly. So let’s flip the script. It’s time to play offense. What offensive EHS tactics do you use to get ahead of risk? 

Jeffrey: Things that aren’t required by the laws or maybe even in an industry. So things like putting in place management systems, which make us more efficient. And ensure that we identify risk and prevent risk up front new product and process launch programs so that stream as we call it, we’re getting, we’re putting the right plays and strategy in place so that the risk never materialize.

Predictive models, where might we see a risk if we run a particular player strategy? Perhaps you want to call an audible. 

Hilary: Yes.

Jeffrey: And then initiatives like zero to waste landfill, carbon reduction. You could say carbon reduction is a little reactive, but at least we’re getting to future programs which help us to be better. And as we move along and then working with industry groups to shape laws, shape risk programs inform what our environment, so that when we get there, 2027, 2030, we’re in a much better place strategically that we can, the business or enterprise can operate within. 

Hilary: Oh, I really like that. I think it’s the things that we’re doing to get ahead by seeing things before they occur. Like you said, predictive models, collecting data, extrapolating that data to see not enough organizations do a value stream map and analysis of their business and really understand what risk profiles exist and to what severity what probability based on the type of work that we’re doing. And I always see those gaps at the top level. It’s like we have really strong EHS analysis at the physical locations at the plants, the distribution centers, etc.

Our field has been mostly ignored. I have no idea of the risk at the sales team level, commercially, service reps, that whole part of the business tends to be a mess. And then there’s this big gap at the top with R&D not understanding how they feed into the sustainability strategy, sourcing not understanding.

All these top levels cross functional partners. And I think it’s because we’ve been playing defense for so long. We haven’t been able to shift into an offensive play. 

Jeffrey: That is 100 percent correct. And I saw in another podcast where you talked about how the commercial team should be really integrated and how that should happen.

Then really, the process starts there. We should have batteries without mercury and products without lead and so forth. So that when it comes downstream, we don’t have to deal with those within the manufacturing site for example. 

Hilary: Let’s not make it with methyl ethyl ketone. Can we pick a replacement? So I don’t have to deal with any MEK and then dispose of any MEK, right? But that’s not enough of EHS sitting at that strategic level. Again, that kind of value stream mapping to understand where EHS should be integrated, where that makes sense and market analysis and even, with merger and acquisitions.

Where do we want to sell to, where do we want to produce EHS should have a say in some of those things and talk about, we have the infrastructure to support that or don’t. Even having that information is so valuable. I’ll tell a story from my past to illustrate this. I was working for a business that got acquired, and it was med device to med device, right?

And it was a really good fit product life cycle wise, like we finished the product life cycle with putting the two companies together for a lot like pediatric care or respiratory care or something like that. So it was a great merger or acquisition from that perspective. But what they hadn’t really considered was their business was all manufactured really in the US and Mexico at that time. They had four major plants in those two countries. 

My business was 30 manufacturing sites with global footprint, right? And so we’re in APAC, we’re in EMEA, and we’re bolstered right with that regulatory support and backbone. And when we came to them and we showed them our org structure, they said, We don’t need regional EHS people.

We don’t need global EHS people. We don’t need all these people at the top. You’re so heavy on the top. I’m like, There’s something you don’t understand here about how difficult it is to go from two countries to thirty. And how much you have to pull together at those upper strategic structures to cover the compliance assurance. 

That exposure, the risk management side of things, the engagement, collaboration, etc. But there was just a real misunderstanding of the burden of that because they didn’t have that built into their business, but they sure did find out.

What are the key plays in your EHS playbook?

Jeffrey: So I’d look at things strategically as we’ve been talking. I define a mission with the team. What do we want to be in five years? What are our opportunities? We need to be more commercial. We’d have more input in with technology. Loss prevention, engineering, where do we need to play more? How do we change the game? Because if we’re having the same discussions in 2030 that we’re having at 2025, we’ve not done our jobs. That’s how I look at it, right? We missed a lot of opportunities.

So our plays, which are really our multiple year, we should have a multi year roadmap to get us there. But our plays really come down to the annual goals, the annual strategic initiatives, which all tie back into that 2030 vision or mission. And so when I have meetings, when we have get togethers, one on ones, what have you, it’s all around that mission and ultimately those plays that we’re running to get us to the 2035 sort of reshaping strategy or reshaping mission.

Hilary: And, you discussing this got me thinking, if I had a playbook and I was running a football team and I had a playbook and it only had defensive plays. 

Jeffrey: That’s right. 

Hilary: This would be a problem. I’d say. What are we calling for the office? And so it’s an interesting analogy because really going through this metaphorical analysis of a sport versus EHS, I think this is almost something that every EHS leader should subject themselves to. If I were to build out my playbook, what are my offensive plays? What are my defensive plays?

What are the, like you said, the audibles that come in right later that kind of take us to that next level? And we should see a maturation. We should see some type of maturation of these plays over the years. Because if we’re doing the same play over and over again, the other team is going to figure it out, right? And figure out how to combat us. 

Jeffrey: That’s right. And just like an NFL team should start seeing wins, should start seeing bigger crowds, could be more profitable, TV contracts, that kind of thing. I think good EHS should lead to, better customer contracts, maybe it’s because of ISO lowered cost, efficiency in the operations if we’re strategic and good. That mission should include opportunities that we pick up on along the way, which are inherently offensive and help the enterprise. 

Hilary: Yes. And of course an improvement in that cultural landscape of the employees feel that they have a voice and that they’re connected to us. They’re participating in certain initiatives. The fans love to participate. 

Jeffrey: That’s right. And these are things you can see, taste, and feel as well. 

Hilary: Yeah. 

Jeffrey: You can go to a game, it’s electric, right? The Lions right now. And you can see a change in culture. They’re down. We were talking earlier. They’re up 15 with two minutes left.

Some three years ago, they probably would have lost that game. But today, people are thinking, no, they’ll pull it out. They’ll find a way of winning, and they did. I see it just the same way when the culture changes. We expect to find a way to win even when we have issues that come along. You see that in culture. 

Hilary: Absolutely. And the employees are the fans, aren’t they? I hadn’t put that together yet, but that is in this metaphor where they are. And I think when an employee is a true fan, they’re going to put their hands up. They’re going to support you, when you’re losing the game. They’re going to participate, they’re going to put the team’s jerseys on, they’re going to wave their flag. They’re going to be loud when your team’s on defense to add that extra element and employees are the same way really in the EHS program. They can feel if they’re engaged and if they have a place in that culture as they should.

They’re going to know way before you do, and they’re going to come tell you this is really off track. We’ve increased, this line speed and it’s hurting all the employees’ wrists. And, we need you to come advocate for us. We need your help.

Have you seen this? It’s not something you’ll have to find out about for ergonomic injuries. You’ll tackle proactively. 

Jeffrey: A hundred percent true. They will come to you. And so we’ll have members of the management team salespeople as well. It gets back to ownership and having a strong culture of inclusiveness and people thinking I got this right.

We got this. We’re winning. We’re doing well here. We don’t want union issues. You hear that in the language. And the place is clean. And line leaders will come to you and say, “Hey, I’m concerned. I’m worried. I don’t want to go back. It’s that kind of language.” 100%. 

Hilary: That’s when you have a winning culture in your organization. 

Jeffrey: When you have a winning culture. To me it starts with the board of directors. Board of directors, the CEO, the operational executives. And we’ve talked about other functional leaders as well. Those are the four sort of main groups to me that they all form a front office. And EHS unfortunately is the back office, but we work with the front office to make things happen.

Board of directors. And I’ve seen this can do things like, Hey, you’re focused on ESG and EHS. They can be one of the same. We need more focus on both. So I’m splitting you up. And so there’s a greater focus on the things that matter the most, like we were just talking about. CEO can say, Hey, this role should be senior vice president, or vice president level. We need more than one in the business as well to show its importance. But also to better partner with senior leaders, someone of that caliber or someone of that level, to get to the risk reduction and risk prevention. The operational executives, of course, help every day with partnering and delivering strategy, but also during things like awarding employees, great job my region let’s keep it moving. It’s going up a thousand days, things like that. Then of course, the functional leader, things like budgets, ensuring EHS leaders are in place.

And so I see them all as sort of partners or front office folks, like a GM, like a team owner, a coach that ensures the success of the enterprise or the team. 

Hilary: Fantastic. And I would say, I agree with you. That’s what I was thinking too, as I was planning for the episode. Who is the front office? And it’s the board, right? It’s the CEO. It’s the C Suite if you don’t have, a board of directors, right? It’s that executive team. And I want to go further with this, Jeffrey, and say, It’s very important to assess your front office and to meet and greet each of them and to find out who really is aligned with EHS.

Find out who that champion in the front office can be for you. Because this can be a conduit of getting on a scorecard. Getting a few minutes on meetings, getting more visibility, a conversation going and this is something I never did enough in my career was doing an analysis of them and finding out meeting them and finding out who that person could be for me, I was always just like, why don’t you put me on the C Suite?

Why can’t I come and present? Of course you’re not going to sit there, but someone is sitting there who might speak for you. So go find them. 

Jeffrey: That’s right. It’s a hundred percent. I’ve even done stakeholder analysis to say, Hey, who’s our early adapters? Who do we need to influence? And what’s the strategy to get them there? And so you build the team of champions that way. 

Hilary: Yes. Because you never, honestly, you never know where they are. And I think so many champions get overlooked because of the function they sit in.

What would the finance head isn’t gonna be interested, or the IT head isn’t gonna be interested, whatever. But within the game of EHS and the losses, this could be a personal loss for that functional leader. Their dad could have had a serious work related injury that negatively impacted their upbringing, their marriage, and that could be very impactful and drive them to be a huge EHS champion, right? Because of that personal component. You don’t know that unless you sit down and have those one to one conversations. And find out, if they have a strong kind of moral drive for a EHS support.

Jeffrey: I’ve seen that. 

Hilary: I have too. 

Jeffrey: Even prior operating leaders, which I thought weren’t champions, and then they actually became the boss, so to speak, and they’re like now I see your point. And two, two years ago, I’ve told you to go and pound sand, today it’s I see your point now, I’ll help you, that kind of thing as well.

Hilary: It is. They all live in sometimes strange places, but as many on board people in the front offices is we can have the better it is. So good to know the landscape. And find out who those people are, if you have one and try and utilize them as much as possible. So as we’re preparing for a game, EHS against risks, a lot of times teams will review game footage to prepare for upcoming games.

So in our metaphor, this would be data. So what data from an EHS perspective do you suggest reviewing to prepare and constantly refine your strategy? 

Jeffrey: And I’ve done this different ways, but one organization, and this can seem onerous, but I see where it works as well. Every week, we’re having basically meetings, and they’re global meetings with regional leaders SMEs, subject matter experts.

We’re getting together and we’re saying, okay, this week we’re looking at sustainability. Where are we against our goals for the year? What do we need to do? What kind of training needs to happen? And what are the next steps? The next week is going to be lagging indicators. And maybe I’m presenting, okay, here’s our results. Here are the sites we’re off. Here’s where we’re doing well. We’re going to do awards. And here’s the region where we’re going to visit next because they’ve got a plant that is brand new and needs training. Following the week is leading indicators. And so it’s a very systematic approach again to reviewing metrics as a team might in their video reviews to see where we are, what we need to do next to win the next game.

Hilary: So how do you know if you have the right metrics? 

Jeffrey: Ultimately, and I think you discussed this on a prior podcast, the lagging indicators should change, ultimately. If they aren’t changing, you need to look upstream at the leading indicators, the atmosphere, the culture, perhaps the team, the back office, the front office.

Hilary: Yeah. 

Jeffrey: And to ask questions and to make changes. 

Hilary: I love this. So this is a point, as I’ve joined technology in the last year, I’ve had a lot of time to sit and think about these sorts of things as I’m looking at EHS from a different point of view. And even just doing the analysis of how many data points do we have?

I had never thought of until I came to tech, but so things like how many risk assessments do we have done? How many investigation reports have been done? How many investigation reports? How many hazard observations? And just in total number, and then analyzing the risk categories against each one.

Something I never thought of that tech can do for us is to make these connections, these integrations between the loss data, the lagging indicators and the leading indicators. So for instance we are seeing a trend in losses around slip, trip, fall, let’s say 30% of our total risk profile.

Where are we assessing slip, trip, fall in risk assessment? Where are we assessing slip, trip, fall in our inspection activity? How many hazard observations in slip, trip, fall last year? Like collating the leading indicator data in a risk topic against our lagging loss. And analyzing that and saying, If we’re having this as 30 percent of our loss profile, this isn’t good enough over here somewhere.

So either we’re pencil whipping the inspections where there are questions and we need to ask those questions differently or retrain those employees to do better. To actually find those slip, trip, fall hazards. We need to make more investment in maybe it’s a surface issue, right?

Look at those root causes and say, We’ve got to resurface this area. We have too many slip, trip, falls here. We need to make the investment to cut the loss. But if you don’t have enough data points even. Let’s say 30 percent loss and then I’m only seeing maybe 20 slip trip fall analysis data points over here.

That’s not enough to be able to change your program, transform your program, right? Which should push you as an EHS leader to say, We have to focus in on getting data around slip trip fall. We’ve got to do some focused slip trip fall inspections. We’re going to, hit this hard, right? And we’re going to do that for a whole month.

We’re going to do risk assessments on all slip trip fall hazards for a month, right? We’re just going to totally get after this and then see what things are leading to the losses on the back. 

Jeffrey: I work with an organization that created a metric called a defect rate and it combined. It was looking at environmental. We would look at audits loss prevention. Of course, all the safety leading and lagging indicators, and you’d come up with what was called a defect rate and was a point system. And so it would direct you towards a certain plant or maybe an operation that said, it was over the past one and 12 months, this site has a defect rate of 150 or whatever. Go there, look, and it was that kind of thing to where it helped you to be a lot more predictive in your work and active. 

Hilary: Interesting, but that, was that defect rate like a general, these are all the things that are happening or was it like risk specific? 

Jeffrey: It was more based on things that had happened. I would say it’s included risk as well because it included loss prevention risk scores.

Hilary: Very interesting. I think this is where EHS needs to go. We need to get outside of these traditional metrics of TRIR and all the ones that they just have way too much opportunity for miss and they’re not telling the true story of performance of engagement, of culture, of risk management of this potential that I find so often existing in organizations. So we’re going to have to get creative. 

Jeffrey: I agree but going up that ladder and playing more offense helps us to increase our value within an organization as well. Helps us to increase our impact. And so in terms of the enterprise and what it gets out from us, we’re just more valuable entities and the organization should be more valuable as well because of that. 

Hilary: Couldn’t agree more. It’d be wrong of me not to ask this as my last question, so I would go for it. Who is the MVP? Who’s the most valuable player in the game of EHS? 

Jeffrey: And I’ve thought about that. When I was at the plant, I thought the plant manager this site is always good because the plant manager is so steady. But really what’s left behind is the culture. I’m going to say the employees are a fast follow because they execute the strategy.

If the culture is there, as long as it’s nurtured, the culture is what is carried is what’s understood which can be taken to other sites, locations, businesses, and so I think the MVP of a place is the culture that’s built, and it’s just sustained. You can pull the players in and out, remove the front office, back office players, the coach, but if the culture is still there, it’s the culture of winning, then I think you’ve got something that can sustain. 

Hilary: I love this answer. You really surprised me. This was not even on the list of things I would have suggested. And yeah you convinced me, Jeffrey. So I agree with you. I think that definitely could be up for MVP. I would love to ask our listeners, who do you think the MVP is? Throw it in the comments, tell us your thoughts, make your case. We’ll give you our feedback, but game of EHS according to Jeffrey Blake. We’re going with culture. I love it. Jeffrey, this has been so much fun.

Thank you for going on this journey with me, for doing a little metaphorical analysis of the game of EHS. This is such a good thing to do. Especially when you’re deep in the weeds and you’ve been in EHS for a long time. You can get stagnant and stuck in the way of doing things and in a certain recipe.

So I really like this activity of stepping out and seeing it as a metaphor and analyzing it as a function with this point of view. Because it can show you things and give you insights that maybe you wouldn’t have had otherwise. 

Jeffrey: I agree. And this is awesome and a fun way of discussing where we need to go next within EHS. And I really love this Elevate EHS podcast and what it’s doing to help us to get there. I just want to congratulate you and others on coming up with this. 

Hilary: Oh, thank you so much. That warms my heart. It’s a huge passion project as I’m sure you can tell. Couldn’t do it without great guests like you and the listeners. So thanks everybody for supporting this initiative and Jeffrey thanks for being a guest on the podcast sharing your point of view with us loved it. It was really enjoyable. Can’t wait to get this episode out to all the listeners so that they can listen in. 

Jeffrey: Thank you, Hilary. 

Hilary: Bye.