The Evolution of EHS and Where We Go Next

Hilary: Hello listeners, you’re back for another podcast episode with me, Hilary Framke from SafetyStratus on the Elevate EHS podcast. I’ve got a new guest with me today, John-Everett Wells. Hi, John-Everett. How are you? 

John: I’m doing well, Hilary How are you doing today? 

Hilary: Oh, I’m doing fantastic. Those who know me well know as long as I’ve got a cup of coffee in my hand, I’m feeling great. And we’re talking EHS. You can’t beat that. 

John: I’m right there with you. Let’s safety dork out with our caffeine.

Hilary: Safety dork out. I love that. So we’ll start with a little bit about, John, from your point of view, how has the field of environmental health and safety evolved over the past let’s say five years? What major trends do you see shaping our future as well?

John: It’s a good question, Hilary, because it seems like we as a profession, a support group are getting more and more advanced and learning how to like track, document, sell our mission. One of the things that I’ve spent a lot of time on in the past, I don’t know, three to four years is leading indicators, which when I started at EHS wasn’t really a thing. It was just reporting out on lagging metrics and then compliance tasks. And we’ve gotten to a good point now that the rising tide has lifted our boat to the point that we understand there are certain things if we do them well, we know we’re gonna perform better.

And certain things that if we don’t do well, are gonna stand in our way. I think our continued challenge is selling that data and making it real. But that’s what I’ve seen that I find exciting is we’re learning more and more about, Hey, these are the pieces of a safety culture that work and we know that you can transfer them across businesses, you can overlay them from agriculture, manufacturing to logistics and they’ll work if you implement them correctly. But the hard part is still the implementation phase. 

Hilary: So true. I’ve seen this change, which I’m very excited about is more creating like a science around EHS and what good looks like. I think it used to be, there was almost this underlying that works for them. It doesn’t work for me.

Either inside a business or even in our whole function. There wasn’t a lot of sharing going on and the thought process was I have to create this unique, individualized solution for this one entity. But I think what I’m seeing more and more is these big picture concepts, that work for everyone that we know leads to success coming out. And that’s exciting. 

John: It is, and I think again, all of our continued struggle is that thing you said about this doesn’t work for us. I would joke with my teams that, we have to be part subject matter expert or safety dorks or, data analysts, but we also have to be part salespeople because we have to get whatever the executive group, the management group, your site level leadership to buy into the, like we understand these things work because we touch them. The challenge for us is that our operators have a huge scope.

They’re responsible for so many things when you talk about product output and quality and taking care of people like paychecks and vacations and calling in sick and hiring and firing and they have a huge scope, whereas we’re these small teams that are laser focused on problems. I think again, we have to be mindful as safety dorks that we get up in the morning and the people that do really well in this field, at least in my experience are like, okay, we fix this.

Let me go look at this over here. And there’s this continuing challenge. We got it to 80%. Can we now get it to 85%? Or we got it down to 1 can we get it down to 0.8? Again, makes sense for us with our scope and the sort of people that kind of get attracted to our field. It’s then how do we sell that to everybody else where they’re looking for some continuity, day to day, week to week relief from the pressure and the stress of their job, when they’re trying to do 100 different things and trying to do them all well. The frustration with us could be, what you change things all the time.

We did this last year. We’re going to do this this year. You want to change it next year. 

Hilary: Yeah, why are you changing the program every year? 

John: Yeah, because that’s inherently I think, who gets drawn into safety or quality or some of the other support functions. It’s like you’re constantly getting a chance to challenge your preconceptions or what you did in 2022. But for our operators, it’s how do you slow pitch that to them so they don’t get safety fatigue? 

Hilary: You bring up such a good point and I want to double click into that. This is unique to the function. If I’ve seen a training two or three times, I’m tuned out, right?

So safety fatigue is real with these trainings, with these engagements. Whereas productivity and finance and maybe some of the other functions are about getting it right and then repeating it, 100,000 times exactly that way. Once you’ve got it, right? That doesn’t work for the safety function, the quality function. You have to keep it interesting and different so that people pay attention and they hear a new nugget and they take themselves to the next level. That’s a very interesting element. I hadn’t considered that, John. Thanks for sharing.

John: It’s a challenge for sure, because as you outsource. You’re training, you get video content from a third party provider and, like just transparently, I’m sure you’ve seen some of the videos, the same videos that I have they were copyrighted in 1998 and they’re like we’re going to get to that by 2032 and have a new one like that could be tough.

But again, if you’re that 30 year employee yeah. Frank has seen that video 25 times it might have been impactful to Frank the first two, but at this point, it’s not doing much. 

Hilary: Yeah, it’s not getting us where we need to go. Definitely. John, what EHS programs are still keeping you up at night?

John: The things that are farther away from our touch. And I think you asked in the beginning about where we are versus where we’ve been or where we’re headed. One of the battles I think we still have to fight is that safety is everybody’s responsibility and that it’s our job to get everybody on board with a certain culture, certain set of programs, a certain set of rules, but it doesn’t just belong to John-Everett or Hilary or Frank.

Like it has to be done by everybody. It has to be executed by everybody. And then as we get farther away from the core of who we are at whatever business we are. That’s what worries me. And specifically, we talk about maintenance functions or vendor functions or logistics functions where these teams are.

They’re probably away from your main production line. They’re away from your main facility. They’re away from the heart of your operation. You talk about truck drivers, they’re very rarely in your facilities, but they have a huge impact on your performance, both from a like just a general operation standpoint, but also from safety have huge impacts on insurance costs, both auto and work comp and you get minimal touches with them. And then anybody, just anecdotally, anybody who’s ever managed truck drivers will tell you what a fun group it is to be involved with.

Hilary: Yes, absolutely. So fleet management, what else? 

John: I think maintenance because maintenance again, they’re critical to your operation, but they’re going to be separated from the core of what you’re doing. I’ve seen it both ways, a solid relationship or a core understanding of safety as a priority by your maintenance leadership or a disregard for it can make or break your culture in your organization and they’re their own separate little group. And then the vendor pieces usually they’re the ones working with your contractors. And so again, if you have maintenance leadership, plant leadership, company executive leadership, that’s bought in on, Hey, we’ve got to follow these safety steps before we bring a vendor into our plant.

You’re probably going to have much better results. You’re probably going to get, better compliance. You’re going to know that when you bring in somebody to do your electrical work that they’re actually certified to do it, that they’re insured, that they’re rated and, the opposite is also true, which is if maintenance has a problem and they have to outsource and they’re not bought in on the safety mission, and this is happening on a Saturday evening while everybody is away from the building, they might bring in their cousin to look at something and, 

Hilary: have a terrible result.

John: Yeah, so those are the ones because they’re away from what we look at as the core piece of our business as operations. They’re separated from that. And so I think that those are the ones that can be more challenging. 

Hilary: I think, too, the struggle with maintenance is they tend to be the ones assigned to resolve the corrective actions. They’re that kind of core group on that feedback cycle, when we work so hard with all the employees to get them to report and input data, and then when things don’t get done on the back end, and they don’t get feedback about why things are incomplete, because we, didn’t get a capital project approved, or we couldn’t get investment or no one’s made a decision yet, that sort of thing. That can fall through this hole, oftentimes related to maintenance had too much on their plate, they’re doing too many other things, they don’t have a good tracking mechanism, they’re not putting the safety, actions at the top level because they’re not locked into the culture, whatever it may be that can be a huge killer of culture. 

John: Yeah. And again the part of our jobs that is sales pitch is if you’ve ever worked with a maintenance leader that has had someone on their team get electrocuted or violate like a lockout tagout procedure and get significantly injured because of it, you’re going to get buy in from them.

The hard part for us is getting those leaders that have never experienced that firsthand to understand, like everything we’re doing is in support of you never having to go through that because if you’ve ever had to go through that, you would never wish it on anybody. And it casts our support in a different light, but it’s how do you break through that bubble because, we are uniquely tied to the maintenance team and in all the ways that you just laid out. They’re more focused on, we don’t have the budget to put that safeguard in place, or approve that over time to fix this piece of machinery. If those are concerns that are coming before what our priorities would be for them, it’s going to be a problem.

Hilary: Absolutely. So what steps do you believe EHS practitioners need to take to effectively tackle some of these, either the groups that are separated off on their own field groups, fleet management groups, et cetera, or those who are dealing with really high risk areas and, they’re not directly inside operations. What can EHS practitioners do to tackle that? 

John: It’s that relationship building piece, which is generic dorky advice, depending on whether you’re dealing with somebody that you could have a beer with on Friday night or somebody you want to fist fight in the Monday morning huddle. 

I don’t know that it’s any more generic or specific than that. It’s just the slow building of relationships, which to your point, if we’re cycling through talent on either side, every 2 to 3 years, relationships come and relationships go.

I think on the transportation side, you pull those leaders into auto insurance renewal discussions. So they can see these are the things your insurance carrier is looking for as far as fleet protection, management, speed governors, cameras, AI, safety scores, all of that stuff. That is pretty eye opening.

I’ve heard across industries with transportation groups is drivers are at a premium right now, and nobody wants to lose their driver. Everybody wants to hold on to their drivers. And so it’s how do you manage that message of, Hey, we’re adding cameras forward and backward facing into your truck.

And this is to protect you. Nobody’s going to buy into that if they’ve never had to deal with that before. Suddenly they’re being videotaped while they drive for eight hours at a stretch. When we can show them and their manager evidence that we had this accident in this state with this camera footage where this person cut us off and slammed on their brakes and our guy rear ended them and we were able to exonerate the driver and prevent any sort of hit to our insurance. I think that goes a long way when they see, oh, okay, you’re not just out to get me. It’s making those employees feel comfortable with the things we’re doing. A lot of that, again, it’s relationship management. I think it’s a little bit different with maintenance though. I think that’s a different ball.

Hilary: No, it absolutely is. And I would add on to that relationships with data visibility. I saw this in my career like this isn’t just because I moved over to technology in my career as an EHS practitioner. Not being able to make sense of the data and not being able to make a connection with these different groups and drop, for instance, let’s talk about the maintenance example for us to have corrective action tracking and escalation and severity assessment and all those things using technology and then to be able to drop that to the work order system with them so that was integrated automatically and they were picking those work orders up and seeing the safety corrective actions like without systems based technology, I just don’t know how you get these field groups and fleet management groups and maintenance on board.

John: No, it’s a good point. And that’s back to your original question, where we’ve made strides is tying all these pieces together because I know when I started, it was like, I had all this raw workers comp data and all this accident severity data and all this work order data.

And it’s like, how do you make sense of all this, then pair it down into something you could sell to somebody else as, “Hey, here’s three bullet points in an action. Please go do this for these reasons.” But I think you’re right as the technology gets better and we collectively refine our learnings and point it in the right direction, it makes it a little bit easier. But again, we’ve got some groups are very good with technology and some groups are very adverse. So it goes back to that relationship building and getting that maintenance manager on board and making sure they understand you don’t ever want to have to go through this situation and we’re going to do these things to make sure you don’t.

Hilary: Yeah, it just continually shocks me too, how many. I’ll go to conferences, I’ll go to all these things and hear from EHS practitioners and, we want to go to AI and we want to do all these really fancy technical things, but then we’re still not doing basic corrective action tracking well. 

Our compliance calendars are on Excel spreadsheets for all the sites and we haven’t validated them as correct or incorrect. We don’t know what permits we have. These are basic elements of an EHS program that aren’t being done at a good level today, yet we want to run a marathon and go introduce AI to our system.

I have a hard time marrying that and I always had to go back to my businesses and say, we are not there yet. Let’s talk about the current state of our business and how we’re not even utilizing the solutions we are paying for. 

John: You and I discussed this a little bit previously, but the under resourcing of our groups, that’s where you see it. Which is everybody is spread thin. I don’t want to throw the baby out with bathwater. This has gotten better in my career in this field, my tenure in this field. But I think a lot of us feel like we’re pitching this is what we can do for you, like that sales pitch part.

And we’re moving in the right direction. I don’t always think we’re moving fast enough, but that’s where having a small team of three or four people, maybe you need six. But it’s how do you show positive return on investment? And so now we’re tying in, hey, if we’re able to get our arms around this, then we can produce the data that shows you the justification, the cost reduction, the prevented expenditures, that gets us there.

Hilary: And I have to make a plea to all executives listening in on this podcast. If you have a quality system and you don’t have an EHS system, you need to be asking yourself how that makes sense. There is so much data with EHS. It’s, again, I’m continually surprised by how many businesses have to go back and sell bringing technology on board.

I’ve got to make a business case for this. I don’t have a budget for this. And the fact that’s got to be convinced on an executive team. It’s mind blowing to me that they don’t understand how much data is coming in from the EHS input just like the quality input and that could never be handled by as small of a team as EHS usually is.

John: And we’ve talked about this too, where quality ties to the product and talking to quality leaders in the past two weeks that have frustrations because they don’t trust data coming from sites. They think it’s being skewed either by inattention or somebody putting their thumb on the scale.

And even within that group, that is farther along than we are, and it’s going to get more resources inherently, because they tie to a financial goals in a more obvious way. They have the same frustrations we do. So, it’s not like they’ve figured out, they’ve squared the circle either.

I Think for all of us, the refrain you would hear from an HR professional is, they usually go home at the end of the week exhausted because they have everybody putting everything on them related to personnel, which, that sounds exhausting. 

Hilary: There are specific skills and knowledge areas that will help EHS leaders to stay ahead. What do you think those are? And then I’ll come back with my thoughts. 

John: What I’m describing there is the Pareto effect, which is understanding how do you mentioned it, you’re ranking maintenance work orders by severity.

How do we do that internally and make sure that we are hitting the most impactful pieces, like just, without getting into a lot of specifics, the meeting before I got on this call was a meeting with my team about updated job hazard analysis, and we’re getting good buy in from some groups. With some disciplines. And then we’re getting a little bit of resistance in some other places and they with boots on the ground have frustrations that are like we’re just not getting penetration with these groups. We’re not getting buy in. We’re not getting the support we need to get these done.

And I was like, okay, so how many are we talking about? And that’s saying it’s maybe, 25 or 30%. So we’re getting buy in. Broad buy-in was 70%. We’re talking about 49, 51. You all hit 70%. So let’s focus on that. Yeah. And put our energy into the 70% and move them along.

Yes. We can come back. And then again it’s a phrase I find myself using a lot. It’s the rising tide. So we’re gonna lift this 70% of boats and this other 30% is gonna see it and say, wait a minute. We didn’t get new boots. We didn’t get new. 

Hilary: Why didn’t I get that? 

John: Yeah. And so you’ll pick up another 15% just out of, 

Hilary: sheer competition. Yeah. Yeah. No, it’s true. No. And I love what you brought up. It’s resiliency. And it’s don’t keep beating your head against the same brick wall, find your window. So like you said, there’s always going to be this bell chart. There’s a certain amount of people who will just be on board,

who will do the things that they’re asked to do. There’s always going to be outliers on either side. Ones who are super champion, do so much, far exceed expectations. And then the ones who won’t do anything for you. And if you hold a program based on that lowest outlier, that will impede your development.

So you try it first shot, like you’re saying, try it first shot, that 70%, then move forward, and try and get at those lower outliers in a different way, through competition, or through showing them what they’re missing, or having a conversation with them in a separate meeting. There’s lots of ways to get around it, but I think it’s changing your approach as you see the results.

John: Yeah, and you bring up an interesting point, which is the opposite end of the bell curve. We’ve focused a lot on the zero side. You have to be really careful with the 95 to 100 side, because if that’s all you ever sell your leadership, like if you’re only ever reporting good things, or you’re only ever highlighting the positives from a safety aspect, I think first of all, it undercuts our mission and our value.

And I said, that EHS team is really getting it done. So we’re good. And you and I know there are a ton of things that we need to make improvements on. Again, we’ve seen the back of the closet. We know about all the skeletons. And so again, specifically for young EHS leaders, don’t just hit on that really positive message. Like we want to sell that too. But it needs to be in context of the greater focus.

Hilary: No, it’s so true. But in showing that more of a holistic view, one, I think of what I’ve had trouble with, and here’s what I wanted to contribute.

This elevator speech of here’s the problem statement, here’s the roadmap steps I want to take, and here’s the anticipated solution a very basic elevator speech. We as EHS practitioners do not do well. I know because I didn’t do it well and I didn’t see any of my team doing it well. That’s just been my experience.

I can only speak from my point of view, but I’m seeing that. And if I could make one suggestion to EHS practitioners listening on, work on your elevator speech, work on making a very clear, short message when you get time with executives, a very quick, three to five minutes of skeleton, actions and anticipated solution, and show that clear connection, don’t get so caught up in the emotions of an EHS culture and who we’re trying to be and being ethical and all those things like it doesn’t sell and that’s not the way that the other functions are selling and gaining investment. They’re not selling on a heart message. They’re selling on a head data driven message. 

John: Yeah, and that brings up another interesting point. Like again with us still feeling relatively new and us and our leaders figuring out, what do we do with this group? How do we best utilize them? A lot of our EHS professionals don’t get exposure to some of the highest level conversation. And so it takes a lot longer to learn this because you may be a Senior EHS Manager, you may be the senior EHS person for your company.

You may only have a manager or an engineer title, and you may report into Plant Manager or an Assistant Director of Operations. And so you’re not at that higher level table where you even get a chance to get exposure to those other elevator pitches or how the conversation is even being had, where it’s almost you’re not going to learn Spanish if you’re not involved and interacting with some people who speak Spanish on a regular basis. 

Hilary: If I’m in the minor leagues, I’m never going to see 110 mile an hour pitch. I’m such a good batter in the minor leagues and then I attempt to go bat with the majors and I’m struck out every time. You can only work with what you’ve been exposed to.

And I think that’s a really good point, so look for those opportunities to learn from those people, when you make a pitch and it doesn’t land, don’t get dejected and give up. Go and gain feedback. Go ask them. I’m really disappointed. I thought this was a really good project.

I thought I had a clear business case here. I’m really disappointed. We didn’t get awarded funding. Tell me what I have to do differently to win funding next cycle. Tell me what I have to go get to be successful next time because I will be coming back. I really believe in this. I’m never going to give up. So tell me how to win. 

John: That’s the same resiliency, which is, it doesn’t mean it’s not important. It means we have to go back to the drawing board. To use your baseball metaphor, you strike out the first two times at bat in a game and three times, and then you go up and get a hit the next time.

That’s probably batting average wise, pretty successful game. But our people, especially lower down younger in their careers are not going to get these opportunities. And so I think we, as the more tenured leaders for them have to find opportunities to interject them or even just bring them into spaces where they like sit in the corner. Don’t say anything. Don’t let anybody notice you. Don’t draw attention. Just listen. Just listen to all these people speaking Spanish. And try to digest this, try to absorb it. That’s huge. It’s been huge in my development individually where I’ve gotten to actually sit down in rooms that maybe I shouldn’t have been in at that point in my career, but I got opportunities.

And I think it’s our responsibility to make sure we’re paying that forward because otherwise we won’t advance as a group, as a discipline. 

Hilary: I agree. And I think if I could add to that, you have to be self aware about how you’re coming off and when you’re not, this was a mistake I made, early in my career, and I would say even up until recently. It’s easy to get connected to this is my personality, this is my brand, this is who I’m gonna be, no one’s gonna change that about me. If certain people like it, certain people don’t. You get caught in that you want to be authentic to yourself.

But what you find and what I found and I’m learning more and more, the more tenure I have is you have to see how you come off and there’s nothing wrong with making adjustments to your presentation style to be more successful. Wouldn’t you rather hit 90 than hit 60? And just, I’m not asking you to change your personality, just change your delivery.

You don’t have to deliver in this way to be authentic to yourself. So be mindful of that, be mindful of how that comes off, of how you’re delivering, and make adjustments to your approach so that you can get the result that you’re looking for. 

John: I don’t think that’s unique to us because one of the things that I’ve learned that I do message within any organization within any discipline is like we’re based on our output.

If you’re not that hourly employee standing in a station, making widgets on the line, or you’re that maintenance guy who’s responsible for making repairs and ensuring that you’re a cost center or that truck driver who like this product needs to be in this place by 8 am, so we need you to leave at this time to get there.

For the rest of us we’re measured on outputs and for an operations leader with a team of 20, a supervisor that’s never had that responsibility before it can be tough. Where it’s like I told him to follow the rule and he didn’t. Okay how will you get them cause we can’t just have bedlam. We can’t have anarchy. I think specific to EHS if you’re assigned a site and the site is not hitting on their metrics I did the training and I went and visited and I’ve talked to the plant manager and they’re just not doing it like, okay, so then we need to sit down and discuss changing the approach.

Those are inputs. The goal isn’t like to go visit the site and talk to the plant manager and do the training. The goal is the thing that comes out the back end of no injuries and, like everybody the site can own training records and, they’re in compliance with whatever program you just put in place. 

Hilary: That comes back to another piece of knowledge strategy we’re missing. Look, I’m not blaming EHS. I’m an EHS leader myself. I learned strategy because I looked at other functions. It didn’t come from my leaders. It didn’t come from my function. I’m looking across and I’m saying, How come they’re at these executive tables? How come they’re VPs and I’m not? How come they’re getting to be a part of these projects and go off site and meet all days and I’m not being invited? And I found it was gaps in strategy. 

They weren’t taking my function seriously because we were firefighting. We didn’t have three to five year plans. We hadn’t done analyses like PESTLEs, and like looking at big picture, how we fit into the larger function, how we add value, why they should have invited me to those big meetings and what value an EHS function can provide.

So I started to develop that and create that for my business and do value stream analyses and all different things to get them to see me and our function in that way and that moved the needle, but that’s a skill set that many EHS practitioners do not have. 

John: No. And I think to go back to the beginning, this is we were not there five, six, seven, eight years ago and for us right now, like this is our current mountain to climb, which is to get a broad acceptance that this is a worthwhile mission on par with the other support functions who already do sit at that table. And, again they had declined the same amount. You can only have so many personnel issues and wrongful termination lawsuits and, department of labor investigations over missed back pay before you’re like, we’re missing something here from the people standpoint, same thing with shipping bad product, selling bad product, like allowing bad product out of your facility.

And I think our moment is right now to get the understanding that safety needs a seat at that table because of all the reasons that we already know it’s a safe employee is going to trust they’re going to show up to work every day, they’re going to be more willing to learn, more willing to contribute, you’re going to get more out of them, you’re going to be able to develop them, they’re going to take on bigger and bigger roles.

So there’s this whole flywheel effect to just creating a safe workspace for our employees to work in. Knowing that your plant in Minnesota is going to look the same as your plant in Florida. And we already know this. We just have to keep pitching that and get that across the goal line.

Because in five years, we’ll have a different set of frustrations, but I think we will have achieved that seat at the table. 

Hilary: I love that, John. On that note, we’re going to leave it there. Thank you so much for joining me on the podcast today. It was an absolute pleasure. I feel like we got into so many things and you offered up great nuggets for EHS leaders and non EHS leaders to sit and chew on for a bit. So thank you so much for your insights. 

John: No, thanks for having me. It’s been great. 

Hilary: Bye listeners. See you next time.