Human Centered EHS Strategies: Going Beyond Regulations and Rules | Ep 3
Episode Transcript
Hilary Framke:
Hi, everybody. Welcome to the Elevate EHS podcast. I’m your host, Hilary Framke, and I’m here with Claus Rose today. Claus, thank you for being a guest on my podcast.
Claus Rose:
Thanks, Hilary. Looking forward to this. It’s going to be interesting.
Hilary Framke:
It’ll be very. Give me a high level review of your background.
Claus Rose:
Yeah, so right now I am employed by GE Vernova, which is a new company that’s listed on the New York Stock Exchange on April 2nd this year. So I have been working as part of the separation management office.
So this is what I’ve been doing for the last year and a half. And before that, I was part of the OG that doesn’t exist any longer in the renewable space and that’s now part of Vernova. So it’s good to see the new company and it’s an interesting space also to be working in.
Prior to that, I had a long history with one of our competitors, Siemens, where I worked for a little over eleven years and then prior to that, I had my own business. I have over 20 odd years in the Danish Armed Forces as an Army Career Officer. So I have been around also with my military background. I’ve been stationed abroad in all kinds of different locations. So that’s where I am today.
Hilary Framke:
What an illustrious life you’ve lived! I’m sure you’ve seen so much. Thank you for your military service, for everything that you gave to our world. You’ve had an incredible career and our listeners already know. Really multiple transformative initiatives, if you could share one piece of advice on how to be successful on EHS. What would it be?
Claus Rose:
One word, Team. I think in my military career, I learned one very important lesson. If you believe you can be a manager 24/7, you’re in for a very big surprise because you cannot. You’re a human being and if you’re the boss of hundreds of people, you need your own time, you need people to socialize with.
Also another important lesson, you have to make sure that you get surrounded by people that have different attributes, aspects of life, and have different backgrounds. Because if you don’t, you’re not going to create the best of the best I’ve made that a virtue in all of my career and if you look at the team that I have today, it’s a very diverse team. But I always make a pride of getting very young, highly qualifying talent that has no EHS background into the function because EHS isn’t difficult. People make it difficult. So if you just align with them up front and say, Hey, I want you to take a NEBOSH diploma.
I want you to go and take those trainings to not be a burden to the frontline. Are you willing to do that? Absolutely. Okay. Come on in, and then they learn the trade. So people cannot claim that they don’t have the background. They just have acquired the background differently.
So if I look at the team that I have on the separation and management office. There is a sigma lean black belt worked in supply chain. I have a project manager out of the PMO office. So working with high complex projects and engineering background. I have one that has run a very large telecommunication customer support center. I have an individual that has been working for agencies looking at environmental impacts, not an EHS background. and then I have one EHS employee. So really born and bred out of EHS. That creates a massive diversity of thought and that’s why, Team. If you create a very strong diverse team, you also create very magnificent results. I’m not the one creating all of these things. I just come in with the crazy ideas, and then I have people to jump on it and help get us there.
Hilary Framke:
I love that. I find, too that’s been true in my career. One thing that I’ve always said is, I’m less concerned about the technical skills as much as the right soft skills. The right temperament, the right attitude towards EHS. We’re aligned on strategically what excellent EHS programs look like. What elements need to be there. That is so much more difficult to teach, isn’t it? The soft skills versus the hard skills.
Claus Rose:
It is because soft skills are things that people have. So what people don’t often realize is that between the age of 5 to around about 11-12, you create your personal, I would say soft skills layout.
Hilary Framke:
Yeah. Like your persona almost.
Claus Rose:
Correct.
Hilary Framke:
Yeah
Claus Rose:
And that doesn’t change. So you can shift based on, I would say mainly traumatic events, you can shift to another way of communicating, another way of engaging with people, and that’s okay. But if you get cornered, you always step back into your true self from when you were in that age.
So you cannot pretend and that’s why, if you get people to a school of thought, then I wouldn’t say get directed to have one thought process, but that’s not what you need. You need people that have a diverse background that can bring up topics that you haven’t considered. That’s how you make a team strong.
Hilary Framke:
So true. I love that answer, Claus. Thank you. What achievement in your EHS career has made the biggest impact on safeguarding employees, contractors, and customers?
Claus Rose:
I think there’s been many, but the one that very reason that I’m probably most proud of is Division Safe Program.
So in short, the program was literally built by the frontline for the frontline and the short story behind that was that really the organization had from statistical data evidence what you would call a plateau. So we really didn’t see any massive improvements. We were just moving around the same. And the leadership team then asked, so are we really doing the right thing? And I came up with the idea that let’s go and ask them. So we took an external partner to get us out of the bias approach and then said, build us a sheet of questions that we can post to a number of people like a survey. Set up questions for personal interviews and then go to site and then get your own flavor of the day, so to speak.
So we interviewed customers, contractors, and our own employees. We did more than, I think, a thousand surveys. We had about 250 one on one interviews with all categories and we went to eight, no, sorry, 10 sites to get feedback and it was devastating. Boy, it was devastating because they were just telling us, you are making our lives so miserable and so complex that we literally have to just figure out a different way to do this stuff.
So what we agreed was we are going to gather customers, contractors, and our own employees over a two week period. Lock them in our Crotonville Learning Center in New York, and then tell them that you’re not going to get out until you have a solution. It was very interesting because they had a lot of stuff they just wanted to get rid of, and I just told them that’s fine. We’re going to stop that tomorrow, but you’re going to tell me what is it that you want instead.
Hilary Framke:
Can you give me an example of something they wanted to get rid of?
Claus Rose:
I can give you an example. You needed to put a ton of signatures on a piece of paper that you had done a pre job brief as an example.
In the US context, people are so afraid. If I don’t put a signature, I’m gonna go to jail and then we just said, no, show me one court case where signature on a pre job brief have actually put you in trouble. There is no evidence. So we’re just creating complexity in an organization that don’t need complexity.
So they came up with a systematic called planned to review. So literally what the essence of that is, you spend about 40% of your time planning. Spend about 20% doing. And you spend about 40% reviewing in your work schedule and everybody said that’s not going to work. We have to do, because that’s where we earn money.
So no, listen to the guys, they have it all figured out and it was very interesting because if you plan for the job that you need to do, ensure that you have all of the things that you need to get the job done right the first time. There are likely situation out of the equation.
Hilary Framke:
Yeah, you improve the efficiency.
Claus Rose:
Correct and if you didn’t just go do it right the first time, you spent less time doing and then the most important part is, in the review phase, and this is where we’re really weak, you have to gather, you have to huddle again with the team. So what did we learn? Is there any open items that we now hand over to the next crew coming in?
From risk perspective, is there anything that we need to change in our process in our work instruction in our tooling in order to get better at what we do? And then they just created in each of the site a map of things that they literally didn’t control. So let’s have their own audit system in place that they just kept following up on, and it was very interesting.
The 10 sites that we went to where we then started implementing this. They had after six months, zero serious injuries or fatalities. They were delivering on time, in some cases way ahead of time, with no quality issues. And you had to have a customer at the end of the day.
Hilary Framke:
That was a happy business.
Claus Rose:
And a happy business as well. It was really interesting and then based out of that, we took a lot of complexity and we had more than 900 different processes in the different businesses. So we created what was called a Project 56 that just said, we just need 56 items. That’s it. That we can control the entire business with.
So that was one part and then the other part was the frontline then told us, we want all of the senior leaders to be part of this training. No exceptions with us.
Yes.
We want them to understand how better to do investigations. We want them to be part of an investigation and we want them to make sure that they stop blaming us, but understanding that your inherent underlying problem is.
Hilary Framke:
Yeah, the process issue that led to the behavior choices.
Claus Rose:
I agreed with the CEO. Okay. Then let’s use that as a bonus package for all your leaders in the business. Not metrics. They just have to do these four items. The plan to review sessions or division safe sessions. They had to go through an investigation training. They had to be part of an investigation and they had to go out on site.
And if they go out on site, they could not leave without fixed one item as an example. I went with the CEO to a site in Ohio in November and people from Ohio know it can get pretty windy and when it gets windy, it gets really cold and if we’re in a wind turbine, it’s really cold and they complained that they have no heaters.
And then we asked the question, so why don’t we have heaters? Their engineering have told us we can’t do it. Okay and then we called up engineering and said, what’s the reason behind them not able to plug in the heater? There was no good reason and then we just told the site manager, yeah, here you go buy them and then fix it and tomorrow you have a new set of procedures. So that was the four items and they had to be documented. So if they decided they want to do it, it took eventually 10 percent off their bonus.
Hilary Framke:
Yeah. Out of their bonus package. Nothing more incentivizing than money.
Claus Rose:
But it was interesting, the comment from the leaders were, boy, this is the first time that we actually control our own destiny.
We are not getting penalized by other businesses, not doing a good job, when we are doing a good job. Or hey, I already get penalized, so what does it matter?
So that has really driven down a significant step change and also, I think, a different way of working with our contractors and our customers that has been recognized and what we then said in order to make it stick, it has to be visible to everybody. So everybody can go and then they can download all of the information around vision safe because it’s not a state secret.
If it works for us, why wouldn’t we just give it to anybody else? For them to utilize and then have the same experience. Because at the end of the day, if we hurt somebody, it hurts the entire industry. If somebody else hurt somebody, it hurts us as much as them and that’s a different perspective and I think for an American company where they’re so afraid of sharing, I think that was really a step change in the right direction.
Hilary Framke:
I couldn’t agree more and how cutting edge, I love that it was cross functional, that you cut out processes, not just like EHS processes. Other operational processes that were overly complex and, because all those things, I think this is sometimes what gets lost on businesses is the employees are having to comply with EHS things, operational things, quality things. They’re getting all these functions and activities thrown at them. So anything we can do in any of those functions and certainly cross functionally to reduce the load is going to get them more engaged in the process. So what an excellent initiative. Thank you for sharing that.
During our prep call. You also talked a little bit about this very cutting edge machine learning and AI tool for EHS. So I can’t wait for you to tell our listeners about what you’ve been working up and that.
Claus Rose:
So it’s an extended arm of division safe, because what we realized is that we just had so much data. It was unbelievable if you just imagine you have about 1200 records coming in every week. 1200 records, which was the actual case and you had a backlog of close to half a million.
Hilary Framke:
And share like the types of records.
Claus Rose:
It could be a stop work. It could be a near miss. It could be an actual event. So an incident. Could be an accident. It could be a concern that is being raised. But all of that creates a data point and a data point that requires some form of feedback and I just stick with the numbers one. If you are an organization that get 1200 records every week. How on earth are you gonna manage that with humans? You can’t. Let’s be very honest. And that was part of the frustration with when we had the conversation with the frontline. Yeah, but we provide you feedback. But two things. We don’t hear any feedback from you guys. What has changed? Point number one. Point number two, we don’t share any learnings from other places. So how are we gonna become a learning organization?
Because in essence it’s the best kept secret. It’s not entirely true, but that was the impression on the front line. So we said we needed to fix that. We needed to make sure that the feedback was imminent and that’s difficult because then you have, when you get into the machine learning and AI, you have to work with a principle, you have two principles.
You can do supervised learning and you can do non supervised learning. The difference between the two very simply is supervised learning is you give direction to the machine on what it needs to learn, whereas non supervised learning is the opposite. The machine is digesting the data and giving you its learning.
We said we don’t want to be involved so we want the machine to tell us what it learned, point number one. And point number two was from an AI they wanted to make sure that we get as much as possible, human bias free injections because if you’re trying to control the machine learning part with your AI interface, you’re not going to get, without relief, the entire truth out of what you potentially could learn.
So you’re limiting yourself and that was difficult. So we started this quest in 2020 and went with large corporation, IBM, Microsoft, Amazon. They couldn’t do it. They could do some of it, but they couldn’t do where we wanted to go and then we just kept searching until we find somebody that took the challenge. Hey, I think we have a solution to it and then after about three months time, we then created MATE. Machine Learning and AI for EHS. Which in essence were a system that learned our risks. So it created a heat map based on severity and frequency. So how often is an event registered and how severe is it? And then it created the heat map.
So the one in the top right hand corner was your primary risk, and that is in real time. So the system generated 26 top categories, and those top categories were very lengthy wording. Where we then had to look at them. So how can we translate that into something that we can understand? So if I take a simple example, lifting operation.
Lifting operation in MATE is lifting operation. It is loads. It is wires. It could be crane. It could be mobile crane. So it’s just a lengthy number of words that all follows into that category that we then say that sounds like lifting. So we then created those 26 categories, but we said, that’s fine.
That’s the easy part. We can categorize that. But what you have to ask is, let’s just stay with lifting. If our brain hears lifting, we automatically assume that we are not able to take a load and lift it from A to B.
Hilary Framke:
Yeah, you assume manual lifting, not machine lifting.
Claus Rose:
Correct. But even with machine lifting, you are just assuming a lifting operation.
That must be when I take the load, move it from A to B, that’s lifting. But it’s not. If you look at everything that is surrounded by lifting, and if your measure then is that we need to tell people how to do proper lifting. So we put in tools. We put in trainings. We took in awarenesses and all of that and what we figured out with MATE was, Hey, you’re all wrong. So let’s understand what is the underlying activity to lifting. So asking that question and then the system created more than 250 somewhat subcategory and now you didn’t dig into it and then you figure out lifting. Your primary area of concern is driving or transport has nothing to do with lifting and then you say, okay, I want to understand exactly that topic and then it goes one step further down and then it tells you exactly in your lifting activity why this is now an issue and then you figure out, holy crap, I have a massive issue when it gets to mobile cranes on the pre mobilization. So where I actually move the crane to the closest point where I can then assemble the crane before I actually move it to the actual crane pad for doing the actual lift. That’s where I have the problem. So you now see that, hey, we’ve done a lot of efforts trying to be better at lifting, but ultimately we are really good at lifting.
Yeah. But we’re not very good at doing the pre mobilization or the demobilization. So you now have a system that from a risk perspective gives you the ability to do deep dives to laser focus your efforts on where it matters.
Hilary Framke:
And to clear out that almost like that inaccurate categorization, right? Like you said, that’s such a good example, right? It looks like if we just risk categorized that we have an issue with lifting, but actually it has to do with driving and it just gets put in the lifting category, right? Because of that lack of peel back to see where the risk is coming from.
Claus Rose:
You have to remember that when we had this up and running, we now have an accuracy rate inside of the tool that varies between 92% down to around 77% and that is for a machine learning that does non supervised learning.
Hilary Framke:
It’s very good. Yeah, I was going to say, what was your goal?
Claus Rose:
If you look a little bit on history on machine learning, if you get a tool in the initial phase that is above 30% you’re good. So I think we beat that by a long shot.
Hilary Framke:
Yeah, no doubt. So you’re three years into your journey. Are you happy with where you’re at? Are you continuing to develop it? Where is it today?
Claus Rose:
No, we’re still developing. So we’ve I would say we now have MATE 2 0 just around the corner and now you have the ability to talk to MATE so you can ask questions like ChatGPT.
You can ask, so what kind of measures do I need to take? So it now goes into your action tracker, and then it just takes the data out and then it gives you suggestions on how to mitigate. And of course, you can say some of those are yeah, they’re just on the lower end of the scale.
Yeah, but you have to remember, the more you use the tool, the more sophisticated. And that’s the whole point. And then the other part of it is that we now have the ability to give outputs in different formats. So we don’t need to use heat map, we can just ask simple questions.
Show me who has the most incident related to this category and it takes 10 seconds and then you have it and then he said just show me in Power Point format. I was just transferring to Power Point and it can do that and you have to. If I to give you a little bit of statistical evidence of not MATE alone but MATE alone with some of the criterias that we set in place. So we said, if you want to drive change from an operational leadership perspective, you have to use, eliminate, substitute, or engineering control. So at least one of those measures have to be implemented. If you do not, then nothing is going to change on your heat map. People didn’t believe it, but very interestingly enough, you can have some sites that have massive amount of problems in certain areas and you look at the heat map back in 2021 compared to 2023, you can see that it had changed. So it’s not on the top any longer. It’s maybe down to the sixth, seventh or eighth place and now they have a different top risk that they need to focus on. So they can see in real time and the frontline can see real time. Hey, the thing that we are actually complaining about is actually now being handled by the team and they can manage and they can see the benefit of it. Everybody has access. They could go in and have a look.
Hilary Framke:
And that’s trust, right, in the EHS program, by seeing the change in the risk profile.
Claus Rose:
Correct and then if you look at 21 to 22, just statistically, we took close to 90% of our severe injuries and fatality out of the equation, 42% of all our recordable events and 56% of our potential severe event in a year.
Hilary Framke:
Those are incredible results. I want to know, how did you do this? How did you, certainly in 2020 influence your stakeholders on a project like this that’s so cutting edge and there’s no direct cost savings. You didn’t even know if you could do it really. You’re making something from scratch, so you didn’t even know if you could do it much less make a difference right in the program and in the lagging metrics for some cost avoidance.
So what key strategies, what approaches did you employ? If you could give me a general idea that our users could use to make a EHS business case, be successful like you did.
Claus Rose:
I think there are two parameters. One, you have to build your elevator speech. So if you want to convince somebody, you have to be extremely vigilant and saying the same thing over and over again in a very short time frame.
So the human capacity when it comes to short term memory in this 20 to 30 seconds space is the male population can handle three to seven items in a row. So you have to remember that the female population. So if you have a female boss, that’s good because she can handle a little bit more five to nine.
But those are things that actually does not go away. So you have to create an elevator speech where you just keep saying the same thing over and over again to a point where people and say either this guy is brilliant or he’s crazy. Because you have to learn that’s difficult. If you haven’t done it you’re going to struggle. So find somebody that’s really good at doing elevator speeches and then just testing. And then the second part of that is everybody on the team has to have the same capability. You just have to sound extremely convincing. Why do I say that? That leads me to the second part.
Humans have a very gifted talent. They always manage to solve very complex problems. Why? They just keep doing it until it works. So just think a little bit about all of the inventions that we have today. How did they came about? They came about believing, failure, learning, failure, learning, failure, learning, success.
It’s non different and then, when you then, you have to believe it in yourself. If you don’t, you’re never ever going to be successful. But if you don’t believe it, it’s going to be possible. It probably will not be possible. If you believe it’s possible and you just keep working on it.
It will eventually be reality. And then when it comes to these tools, start small. Don’t boil the ocean. It doesn’t work because a failure will happen and then if you start small. Corrections are easier. So and that’s okay. The benefit of that is the money that you spend is a lot less than if you just go full scale, and that leaves you more freedom financially to get to the next level and the next.
Hilary Framke:
So phasing a project so that you have milestones.
Yep.
Thank you so much for that advice. I just think this is a problem. It’s so ubiquitous with EHS leaders, right? I’ve heard this so many times from our colleagues. I can’t get funding. I know what the solution is, but I can’t get it approved or my budget keeps getting cut. I can’t push this over the finish line and I think based on the advice that you gave, the answer would be we’ll go back and try again and maybe scale your project down a bit, phase it in, right? And that’s something I always did too. When we would run into a problem, let’s say machine guarding overall, right? We have a huge machine guarding upgrade improvement that needs to happen.
We’re talking 70 different machines that need interlock improvements, guarding improvements, to make it either compliant or reduce the risk. You don’t need to do all 70 in year one, ask for five, get the five highest risk ones done and knocked out, and then go back and ask for the next five. But so often when we hear no, we just go, okay that’s too bad. Guess I’ll try again next year.
Claus Rose:
And then that’s exactly where I think I always tell my employees in the EHS space. They have one job and only one job. That’s to get out of a job. And let’s be very clear.
Our function provides zero and I mean it literally zero value add to any business bottom line. None. We are in a financial term, an overhead cost allocation. Yes and we have to be very mindful of that. So people have to ask themselves if they are constantly submitted to budget cuts, these kinds of discussions, they haven’t done a good job. Because now they’ve become exactly what they don’t want to become. An overhead cost allocation discussion.
So again, you have to find your best friends. You have to understand how they think, which is the finance team. So my best friend was the CFO. I always tell this today even though he’s not any longer with GE. I still speak with him and he still has things where he said, boy, that was fun. That was really good.
Coming back to your point of just taking five items. So when you decide on these five items that I want to use for my machine guard, you have to provide the evidence why is it those five and what is it going to bring and this is where you then have to go out of your limb and then come up with something that you’re not comfortable with.
Say, it’s going to provide me this benefit or this improvement, may not turn out to be true, but if you get very close, there’s a very high likelihood that he’s going to come around or she’s going to come around and say this guy knows his stuff. He’s trustworthy. I can rely on him and then you do the next bit, do exactly the same and at a certain point in time, you’ve earned your credibility and once you’ve earned your credibility, you’re going to have a very easier discussion going forward. So you really have to find your stakeholders and you have to understand how to manage your stakeholders and just ask yourself the question, do I understand how my business is run?
What kind of metrics is being measured on? Do I understand exactly what those metrics mean? If you don’t, boy, you need to sit down and read and learn because that’s important. That’s how a business is run. It is not run by EHS metrics. It is one run by financial metrics that are different from company to company, but you have to understand how you can impact that metric and the measures that you are doing is actually helping that metric. If you don’t, it’s a lost cause.
Hilary Framke:
I totally agree and I think the other thing that EHS people don’t do enough of is go to your counterparts in engineering and operations and quality and take them out to this machine that you want a guarding improvement made on and say, is there anything else with this machine and the guard that might help your function?
Do we have a lot of jams on this machine because the guard is like hard to lift? Do we have some issue with loading it from a quality perspective that leads to quality issues? Let’s include and infuse those improvements into my machine guarding improvement project. So that we can go as a team and say we want this machine guard improved.
It’s going to give us EHS improvements, quality improvements, engineering improvements, productivity. Much easier sell when it’s for the whole group and it has more ancillary benefits than just EHS.
Claus Rose:
And there’s one simple philosophy. There’s a very famous wording, “Go to Gemba”. Go to where the work is done. Because as I mentioned, when we talked about Division Safe, we discussed this heater issue.
So yeah, the heater issue cost us let’s say $5000 for a site of 100 turbines, but productivity wise, boy, that saved us a lot of money. Because instead of only being able to work for an hour, they could now work for six hours in the turbine. And for every hour they have to climb down, go to a place where they can heat up and then go back up. Yes. It’s waste.
Hilary Framke:
It’s so inefficient.
Claus Rose:
Correct and that’s why you just, you have to understand the process. If you understand the process, you can interject safety measures that brings improvement. Because what you have to remember is once it gets to become an EHS issue, it’s at the end of the line.
Before that, there are quality related items. There are, to your point, there are operational related items where things are being done inefficiently. Then you have engineering items where the whole design may not be fit for purpose. So there’s a whole chain of areas where you can then move in and then attack in order to fix the issue and you always gain productivity.
Hilary Framke:
That’s right and, at the end of the day, I always said, we’re going to get what we need. It doesn’t matter why they approved it. I think too many EHS leaders get caught up in this, that almost this like they want to strong arm a business into just choosing EHS to prove its value or its commitment.
This does not matter. What matters is that we get the right improvement. We get the progress, why the business approved it for what reasoning. Really pays no mind.
Now, last question for you, Claus, and I think based on what you’ve said, what you’ve done in technology, clearly you’re a big proponent of a business that has a tech enabled infused process, and it’s clear to me that you see that value. So there are those so many leaders and frontline employees, I’ll say.
Who are still adverse to technology, right? How do you suggest organizations who are listening in, how do you deal with this? How do you deal with a business, an organization, or an employee group, who’s resistant to technological advancement?
Claus Rose:
It’s about embracing reality by actually engaging people directly involved with the process, having a conversation.
So what is this going to help me do differently? Because a machine learning AI tool is never, ever going to take over humans that are creating the products that we are creating, because it can’t, right? And even the EHS function, we are dealing with culture change. Culture change can never, ever be dealt with by any machine.
It’s, at this point in time, it’s impossible. Is it going to be possible at some point in time? I’m not going to say no, but it’s probably going to take some time. Yeah. Let’s just stay where we are.
Hilary Framke:
We’ve got some years of security.
Claus Rose:
We have some years ahead of us, but right now there is absolutely nothing that is going to take over the human capability.
Point number one. The second part of the reality is who created machine learning and AI? As an example, we did. The human. Back to the point that I said earlier, we are the only creatures that can manage to get things moving and transforming to places where nobody have ever been before. That’s just the human nature.
And here again is keep that thought process with you for a bit. And then think hard about what does that mean to me when I’m working at a machine. It means that I can get help to do my job smarter, better, without me being injured. That’s an example. What’s not to like about that? And if you have that kind of conversation with them, nobody’s going to say, Hey, I don’t want that. Or if you say, Hey, here, by the way, something that’s actually going to make your posture, the way that you operate very different, would they say no to that? No, it’s still, it’s evolution. and again if we take our projects from the management system really cut down to the bare minimum. It took 16 people out of the equation that did nothing other than just updating, changing, extending procedures. Day in and day out. 16 headcounts, 16 people, what did we do with those 16 people? We just took them out to the front line. Because they served their purpose a lot better being close to where their work is being done. And sitting in a back office trying to figure out to do something that was nonproductive. But being out on the front line, that’s very productive.
Hilary Framke:
Which actually backs up their human value, right? That’s something I always speak about as well. We’re not valuing our employees if we’re having them do product work. Administrative work that is so repetitive. It doesn’t even require human interaction.
Claus Rose:
And everybody is right now screaming for labor. So labor is going to be a massive issue because the generation that you belong to is smaller than it used to be. So the whole gap, vacuum that we are creating now with a lot of people going into retirement, that void needs to be filled.
And the only way we can fill that void is by coming up with a solution that can actually help those that are going to be working with the workforce.
Hilary Framke:
Yes.
Claus Rose:
Out in the field, right? So we don’t have any other option and I think that’s the whole point is that you just need to have this open and honest conversation.
But it also means that you have to get yourself probably educated to understand what’s happening around you. I’m not a machine learning and AI expert, but I read a lot about what it means and how to do certain things. But I’m still not an expert, but I know what it does and I think that’s what everybody else should be doing and why are people resisting change?
Two reasons. First and foremost, they don’t know what they don’t know. And the second part is, they are not being very well informed, and then it’s our job to make sure that we at least provide the second half of the story, which is making sure that people are informed. They are brought along on the journey. And if you do that, then there’s also going to be no resistance because they feel that they’re part of something bigger.
Hilary Framke:
I love that, Claus and I would add on to that. I think the other thing that I’m seeing is people have had bad experiences with tech in the past. Not working, making a process more difficult because of different technical issues getting it up and running, getting into the system, using it, getting reports out, etc.
So what I would add on to this is tech by itself is just a machine, right? It’s going to do what it’s going to do. You have to have good process and you have to enable your people to work and use the tech well, in order for that to be a successful experience, right? We always like to say, garbage in, garbage out, right? If you don’t give it good info don’t be surprised that it doesn’t give you good info back.
Claus Rose:
So true. Trust yourself. If you don’t, then nobody else is gonna
Hilary Framke:
That’s right. That’s right and if, look, if we failed in the past, like you said earlier in the podcast, I couldn’t agree more, that doesn’t mean that we should quit.
It means we should go back and we should try again and we should learn from our mistakes. So why did the tech fail last time, right? What was it that wasn’t working? Let’s make sure we have a plan for that in the new implementation. We shouldn’t just drop the topic altogether. We need it. We need it in order to be successful. So let’s figure out how to work, what workarounds we need and let’s make it successful this time around.
Claus Rose:
Absolutely.
Hilary Framke:
This has been a fantastic episode. Thank you so much for your transparency. For your thought leadership on this topic.
And look, this is a topic that I think is really at the forefront of many EHS employees minds, right? How to be successful in building a business case, AI, technology. Continued good luck to you for what you’re doing with MATE in your business, MATE 2 0 coming out soon. I hope that it continues to go really well. I know that it will with you at the helm and thank you for everything you shared.
Claus Rose:
Thank you, Hilary and it was a pleasure talking to you and appreciate having the opportunity to be part of your podcast. y.
Hilary Framke:
Absolutely. Thanks so much.
Claus Rose:
Thank you.
