Championing Safety as a Service: The Evolution of EHS Thought Leadership in Industry and Technology | Ep 4
Episode Transcript
Hilary Framke:
Hi Tim.
Tim Wade:
Hey, how’s it going?
Hilary Framke:
It’s going great. Thank you for being a guest on my podcast today.
Tim Wade:
My pleasure. Happy to be here.
Hilary Framke:
All right. So Tim, give us a brief synopsis of your EHS career, where you’ve been, where you are today, and then we’ll get into some awesome fun.
Tim Wade:
Good. So I’m the Director of Safety, mainly ground safety for a company called Flexjet, and we handle charter flight operations based in Cleveland, but our flight operation is global currently. So I started in EHS. Actually I started in aviation back in 2007. I was working on Apache helicopters in the army and when I transitioned out of the army, I obviously needed a career and safety was an amazing career path that I wanted to explore.
So I went down the fire and life safety career path for a little bit. I did emergency medicine at a children’s hospital. I was an EMT for a little while, and then I finished my bachelor’s of occupational health and safety at the end of 2015 and came on board with a company called Constant Aviation.
That’s where I worked for a few years before we were acquired by our sister company, Flexjet and that’s where I’m at currently today.
Hilary Framke:
Fantastic. Oh my gosh. The aviation industry. Let’s start with that. Recent events, right? Such as those experienced by Boeing. I don’t think we really need to reference them.
They’ve been such hot topics for everybody. Can you tell me a little bit about what that’s been like to be in that industry and like the broader implications for EHS? I’m sure this is impacting your approach to risk management. You’re getting questions from employees, from customers. Tell me about what that’s been like.
Tim Wade:
Absolutely. It has been an odd few years. Usually aviation stays out of the limelight for the most part. Now I can’t directly speak to Boeing or even commercial aviation. However, what I do know is because of our industry having obviously employees, but also being so forward-facing because we serve the public, we transport the public.
It doesn’t take much to not only instill a little bit of fear or make it into the news because it’s so forward-facing. Now, like I said, it does not take much to hit that mark. However, if you looked at it more from a risk perspective, you look more at it from a rate what’s truly going on.
There’s over 16 million flights a year in the US alone 10 million of those being scheduled air charter, what you would see in the commercial operation. So when you look at it from those numbers. Not to gloss over the instance that we have had over the past few years. The rate is actually very low.
Aviation is one of the safest forms of transportation in the world. It is one of the most proactive safety cultures of any industry. So though there have been some issues, the way we proactively look at those issues is what really stands aviation out from other industries.
Hilary Framke:
Absolutely. Do you find that there has been changes to your approach for EHS because of what’s happened in your industry, or is it the same?
Tim Wade:
Not necessarily for me and from what I’ve seen at least on the business aviation side, because you’re always going to have some sort of incident or hazard going on. That’s because of how we look at those incidents and hazards. It’s extremely proactive. We’re always looking for what is going to disrupt the flow and how to make it better.
We don’t just sit back and wait for something to happen. So though there have been incidents over the past year in aviation broadly, how we’re looking at those is staying the same. We’re looking into them. We’re treating all near misses as an accident because we want to look at them in the exact same light.
We want to investigate it down to as far as you can get to root cause which I personally believe you can never really truly get to root cause. But you want to look at all those causal factors. You want to look at what’s going to impact the business because if it can be a near miss today, it could be an accident tomorrow.
So how you proactively look at everything going on in our industry in a whole is extremely important.
Hilary Framke:
Oh, you’ve hit a really hot button topic. Now, not all industries believe that near misses are actual incidents. Now, tell me some more about that. Clearly you think so.
Tim Wade:
Oh, absolutely. I think a near miss is one of your best learning tools. It gives you almost start to finish a full accident without the repercussions of damages, injuries. Unfortunately in aviation, like I said, with how forward-facing we are, you are going to get that reputation impact almost always. You look at a 777 from United, it says United in massive letters.
You’re going to know whose aircraft that is. It’s not easy to hide an airplane. So you’re always going to have a reputational impact. But a near miss and feels weird saying this is one of the greatest things to look into because it gives you the entire synopsis of an incident without a ton of that major impact that you have had it actually occurred.
So I understand a lot of people don’t view those. What I’ve seen auditing outside of aviation and working with other companies, a lot of times they don’t look deep enough into those near misses. They just go, Oh thank goodness it didn’t happen. Let’s move on. You’re missing one of your greatest tools to investigate and to train and to learn from.
And like I said earlier, it’s a near miss today. It could be an accident tomorrow. I think too many people not only view near misses as extremely minor on their risk scale, they also look at minor actual incidents. In aviation we were in maintenance for the longest time. Scratching the paint, scratching your interior. Most industries and possibly even most companies would look at those things as too minor to report.
What would actually be a major thing to report then? You want to use those small things that you’re in control of and that you can change because what could be a minor partial damage today could be something huge down the line. You want to really use those in your tool belt and in your risk assessments to really learn from them so you can be proactive.
Hilary Framke:
In the Medical Device Industry where I was for a part of my career, paper cuts is what would be the similar thing, right? I always ran into many sites that didn’t do anything about paper cuts, right? And so we’d go to restock like the first-aid cabinets, right? This was always something I used as like a clue finder. We’re restocking the first-aid kits and we’re replacing tons of band aids and antiseptic and treatment but there aren’t any incidents reported, which is very interesting. We’re using equipment, but we don’t have any data to go review and their feedback was they’re just paper cuts, right? They’re just minor. If we reported every paper cut, we would never have time to do operations. That was a coined term by one of the supervisors that I ran into. And to your point, there is information here. There’s data here that needs to be trended which machine, right? Are we having trends where it’s a machine we’re being cut on repeatedly? Is it a specific guard that has a sharp edge, right? It’s only gonna take one small change of chance, in circumstance or the employee or the type of work that’ll be a laceration, right? That paper cut very quickly expands into a laceration, expands into potentially an amputation, depending on the risk profile. If you don’t investigate the paper cut which is a first-aid incident, it’s not even a near miss like something happens, right? You missed the opportunity to change the things that prevent the laceration or the amputation, right? And I always like to say, with no data, you have no idea where to look.
Tim Wade:
Exactly. You
brought up a good point. Yeah, paper cuts are minor. But you can see two different risks here. First off, if you’re restocking your band aids that often, you’re missing a whole half of your risk assessment right here. Yeah, your severity is not big. Your likelihood is through the roof right now. How is that not escalating your risk? And how are you not exploring that down the line?
Hilary Framke:
Seeing a high likelihood low severity. It should still be showing itself in the risk profile for something that needs attention.
Tim Wade:
Exactly, and you know another portion of that risk. The way aviation looks at risk, we have what’s called an SMS, a Safety Management System and a lot of industries are starting to go over to that. It shows you that safety is not just hard hat safety where we’re protecting people. A risk to your industry can be in every department, could be in your HR with who you’re hiring, could be in your accounting team with how you’re managing your funds. So that simple thing that you mentioned of, we’re burning through band aids all over the place. If you put that on a large enough scale, you could now be hitting funds that the company is not budgeted for. Why are we burning through so many band aids? We’re spending tens of thousands of dollars on bandages and we have no data to back up why we’re trending in this direction. So yes, minor reports impact everything and they’re one of the best tools you can use to proactively prevent something from happening in the future.
Hilary Framke:
And what’s interesting, speaking of the investigative process in another business I found they were using band-aids to act as little finger protective material, right? So in doing the job they were getting blisters. The contact pressure of manually assembling the device, right?
So they were wearing band-aids to function almost as a glove, right? To prevent that contact pressure. And so that shows a gap in your PPE program, right? Again, still impactful information, that should send us back to the PPE assessment for that job, to say, we do not have the right PPE here, we might need some cotton gloves, or finger protectors to do this work.
We shouldn’t force employees to go use the band aids out of the first-aid cabinet in order to protect their body from harm in the work they’re doing.
Tim Wade:
Exactly, and is that also showing a gap in your training program that you guys don’t know? Should we be going to gloves or should I be emptying the first-aid cabinet to prevent injury? Okay, that seems like you have a gap in a few places there.
Hilary Framke:
Just a GEMBA walk. Why aren’t we having this conversation? It’s sad how often that gets missed and then too, why aren’t the supervisors as they’re walking around and they’re seeing their employees with band aids on their fingers having that conversation? Like, are those cuts? How come they have four band-aids on? Strange activity that we should investigate a little further. So yeah, it says a lot but I think what this comes back to is exactly what you said and let’s dig into that the proactive risk assessment.
Tim, could you elaborate on the critical role of proactive risk assessment, especially in the aviation industry, in addressing this dynamic nature of operations to ensure the safety of your employees and passengers?
Tim Wade:
Absolutely. You can never predict the future. However, in an industry that is so forward-facing, reputation’s fragile especially in this past few years. And we serve the public, we serve our employees. The more proactive you can get with your risk assessments, the better. Your audits are only one small piece of that.
That’s just me looking out in the facility or anybody else on the safety team. What it really comes down to, I would say the bulk of the information we’re getting in, hazard reports and incident reports and learning from what’s going on, learning from the feedback you’re getting from the floor and that takes a long time to build that reputation, build that relationship with the employees, build that respect and the trust of your safety program.
I think a lot of it really comes down to trusting the safety program. You can’t just walk out and go, Hey, everybody submit a hazard report this week. Let me know what’s going on. You’re not going to get anything and if anything, a lot of the old school people who have grown up in an industry and grown up in a culture of, if I say something, I’m the next one getting fired.
Super old school safety. They’re not going to trust into that. So a proactive risk assessment is extremely important to us and the way we do it and the way a lot of aviation organizations do it is everything that comes in the system. Whether it’s a hazard report, word of mouth, incident report, doesn’t matter. Is at least going to get an initial risk assessment.
The issues you were bringing up with the band-aids. Possibly that’s just a quick initial risk assessment. Okay. We’re pretty minor. That’s fine but because we have that trend going now once we get that fifth or sixth minor cut in the same department possibly the same employees same process we can go, Okay, our likelihood’s starting to shift severity still pretty low. Likelihood starting to shift.
What’s going on here? We need a more in depth audit and it’s going to lead into an audit. Hopefully that’s going to induce proactive change. Hopefully it’s going to, like we mentioned before, cut gloves, different training programs, things like that. Something is off to where we’re now looking into it. Now those proactive reports are your best tool to do that.
You’re only waiting on the incident reports and you’re just reacting to everything. At some point, you’re gonna have to go, why is this happening? And you’re not gonna have any data to back up why they’re happening. You’re gonna have a whole bunch of causal factors, which is great, but it doesn’t paint the whole picture. The proactive risk assessments In the proactive nature of the hazard reports coming in. That’s what’s truly gonna paint that picture of why something could happen or why something did happen?
Hilary Framke:
And don’t you think, this is something that I’ve run into, we need to have flexibility with the type of investigating and reporting.
So my feedback with this paper cut issue, right? I’m not going to subject them to a full incident investigation that I would do for a first-aid, with the whole breakout and then investigation, classification, all these things unless it’s of a certain severity. What we ended up building was, like a very short four to five question paper cut survey, right?
So every single time there was paper cut, they had to do this four to five question analysis, so that we could trend the data and see, like you said, be able to look at that on every few weeks, see if there were trends address it. If there was a trend, then it would become a larger incident report, that we would put together. We would pick one of those and then do a larger report put that in. So having the flexibility, I think as an EHS leader to right size the response to the potential risk is something that I see EHS leaders they don’t do enough of. They’re so black and white about, no, this is the incident reporting process.
This is what you will do and then people don’t report because they think it’s ridiculous, right? I’m not going to do this every time I have a paper cut from so many with that point of view. So I’m just not going to report it. That’s not what we want. It would be better to have something so find that way, find that common ground to compromise, to get what you want that still meets the needs of your business.
Tim Wade:
Exactly. If I just know what happened, everything else is icing on the cake. I just need the description. Now, who’s submitting the report? Extremely important to me, but not as important to compromise the integrity of the program.
Somebody doesn’t feel comfortable reporting. That’s on me. That’s not on them. I should have created a culture and a situation where they feel comfortable reporting. So I believe in anonymous reporting and then as you said, scalable. It needs to be scalable to the operation, to the department, to what’s going on.
So for example, on our reporting sheet, it’s not just an 8 page PDF that I’m requiring somebody to go out, print, hand jam it, then scan it back to me and email it over. Who would fill that out? That’s extremely old school and no wonder the reporting culture didn’t work back then. Now if you go scan a QR code, you click that you had an injury, and it’s going to ask you one question.
Did you go to the emergency room or urgent care? Was it just a trip to the first-aid cabinet or did no injury actually happen? Okay. Pick one of those three. Obviously, if it’s going to the emergency room urgent care, we’re going to start filling out the 301 questions that we all love. But if it’s just a trip to the first-aid cabinet, all right, let me know what happened.
Cool. And if I need more information, I can go track it down. At least I got a department and a location, possibly a name. I can go investigate it further that time if I feel the need to do that but I don’t want to pull these guys off the floor any more than they want to be pulled off the floor. These guys want to go work aircraft.
They want to turn wrenches. They want to be flying. That’s what they want to be doing. They didn’t come into work hoping that they’d fill out a three hour report on a minor cut. Quicker I can get them back to an aircraft, the better for everybody.
Hilary Framke:
If your incident reporting process is extremely antiquated, or very long, complicated. We shouldn’t be surprised at all that nobody’s reporting something. We need to scale this back. We need to make this easy to participate in, because I’ve always believed this is one of my kind of cornerstones around EHS, nobody comes into work and wants to be hurt today.
So if they have gotten hurt, we have messed up. This is a process gap. Now of course there’s always human factors. Human error traps are real, human contributing factors are real, but we’re almost always included in some way, sometimes more often than others, and that can be addressed in the investigation process, but there is also always a process gap and not enough businesses are willing to admit that. They immediately want to go to the human contributing factors and look past all the process factors which sometimes are things like, it’s difficult to report an incident, right? We make this too difficult for them. I love your process. You’re almost doing like a triage of come and tell me what happened. Let’s do a quick triage and then I’ll decide once I have that information, how much further I want to go in the investigation process based on what you told me.
Tim Wade:
And not only does that save them time, it saves me time too. If an incident report comes in and it’s got one block checked and a little description in there, I know it was not a major incident because they never got far enough in the report to go into all these extensive questions.
Saves me time doing the risk assessment, saves time for them filling out the report. Now when a major incident does take place, obviously we’re going to need all that information. You did mention if it’s a very cumbersome and it’s a difficult to access system to do your reporting, you’re not going to get much.
You’re only going to get what I would call the, you can’t sweep it under the rug reports. All right. Oops! We burned down the hangar. Oops! We destroyed a million dollar engine. You’re not going to get away with those obviously. It doesn’t matter how difficult the report is that’s getting reported.
But those are the only reports you’re going to get. You’re not going to get the 15 hazard reports leading up to, we had a fire hazard in the hangar and it was never assessed or you’re not going to get the hazard reports and the minor incident reports saying that maybe your engine mount is unstable and we need something to happen. You’re not going to get those and then all of a sudden you’re going to be looking at a major incident going, how did we get here? I don’t know. You told them to print a report that’s eight pages long. And that takes three hours to fill out. Of course, you didn’t know proactively that something was going to happen.
Hilary Framke:
So there’s, I think, like a dynamic risk assessment that you’re doing in your head. Very quick kind of severity, likelihood, et cetera. But then there’s the actual structured risk assessment process. Which I think our European colleagues, because it’s built into the regulation, do this very well and have structured approaches.
I don’t see as much high performance and risk assessments across the US because of the lack of regulatory obligation, right? And that being like baked in. But I’m interested to know do you have a structured risk assessment process? And if you do, how are you doing that? Is it by process, by task, by job role?
Tim Wade:
So we do and it depends on what the initial risk was when it first comes in. As we said, if it’s extremely minor, then we just track and trend. Once it starts getting into your medium or higher risks, then we’re going to go towards what’s called a safety risk assessment. Full blown, we’re looking at different hazards and what controls are we putting in place to mitigate those hazards?
Now our main risk assessment for that is your typical just what we’re using for the initial a five by five block, what most people will see. The difference in it that you will see is a lot of definitions because I hate when you get somebody’s opinion involved in a risk assessment because that just voids it out.
Everybody has a different opinion of what occasional is and occasional for us at Flexjet could be completely different than occasional at United Airlines with a much broader operation. So we wanted to find those out to where it’s specific to the organization. So as many definitions as you can.
So what we do is we drop our risk assessment down to a second page beneath it, which goes into I believe eight different categories of risk. We’re going to look at reputation to the company. As we mentioned earlier, this is a big thing going on right now because any little issue with aviation is going to be very forward-facing.
So we want to look at reputation of the company. Want to look at damage. Now if this is a reactive risk assessment, obviously how much damage was assessed, a couple thousand dollars all the way up to a million dollars. Our aviation is extremely expensive or if it’s proactive, what’s the chance of hitting those marks with how much damage?
Going to look at injuries, going to look at regulatory, going to look at a delay to the system. If you have an aircraft down for one day, unscheduled, where they were not intending on that aircraft being down for the day, it’s extremely expensive to keep an aircraft on the ground. They only make money when they’re flying.
So that’s the categories we always want to look at the severity of each of those categories. And like I said, there’s eight of them. We can go into that at another time. Yeah. So we will take that risk assessment and we will look at all of those categories and then we will start to build out hazards, controls for the hazards, who’s getting assigned those controls, and then who’s going to be the actual main buy off at the end of it.
And so once we get into a medium or higher risk, we’re really getting into a pretty full blown process where there’s a lot of different teams coming in and we’re all really focusing on what needs to happen to completely mitigate this risk out of our system.
Hilary Framke:
That’s awesome. Look again, back to my earlier point, I don’t think that this is done enough. I don’t know if this is adopted as it should be, right? Especially when we run into a situation where we find that the control is not at a high enough level to actually prevent an injury from occurring or a loss from occurring here, whether that’s environmental or compliance or property, et cetera, right? We need to be more diligent, I think, about going back and doing a full blown five by five, right? And giving it another go.
Tim Wade:
And what you had mentioned about our European partners, you’re exactly spot on. And the joy that it’s been to work with our safety teams that are located in Europe is because European aviation safety is always been beyond US. The FAA has been struggling to keep up with what we call EASA, which is their version of the FAA. And so we’ve learned a ton from them. We’ve revamped a lot of the processes we do in the States based on how they’re operating over in Europe and Europe does have some great safety regulations are doing an outstanding job with those.
I love seeing the proactive changes we can see based on the cultures and how we can impact our processes we have over here.
Hilary Framke:
We could spend an entire podcast talking about global perspectives. This was a shock to me the first time that I went from just US based sites to adding in the rest of North America and then eventually Europe and APAC, right?
To see the significant differences in application of EHS across the different jurisdictions and, I think look, you’re always going to like what you know best is what you’re going to feel linked and bias towards. And don’t get me wrong. I think OSHA & EPA have many, strong rules, regulations.
And I think where they excel in some cases is in the structure of laying out what should take place, in order to garner the risk reduction. I always saw that as a gap with some of those other regulations outside of the US. They say, do a good risk assessment and then your risk assessment should tell you what to do.
But the fact is, we don’t really know exactly what to do, right? That’s where OSHA and the EPA have been better, I think, in laying out structure. Now, in my opinion, sometimes too structured. Which can be, a significant burden.
Tim Wade:
I think OSHA tends to overcomplicate things sometimes but you’re right, they have outstanding structure because they look at so many different avenues of injury potential that other countries just don’t.
But one thing I liked about I was looking into our Canadian regulations recently, and when you look at fall protection in Canada, they got one. 10 feet or greater, you’re into fall protection. I’m like that’s pretty cut and dry. But when you look at the US and like, all right if I’m general industry versus construction versus maritime versus on a rail car, it’s going to hurt either way.
Hilary Framke:
I guess what’s frustrating about that. This is where the risk assessment comes in, right? Company should really seek to go much further than compliance. Just because this activity doesn’t put us in a bucket based on our industry doesn’t mean it’s not risky. It doesn’t mean it’s not dangerous.
It just means we don’t have the compliance burden. We’re not required by the compliance burden to go do these said things. Maybe we should still choose to go do said things based on the risk analysis. That’s for us to determine, not for the regulator to determine and again I feel too often businesses will say I’m not in. That’s three feet three and a half inches I don’t have to do fall protection. But it’s still dangerous, right? So we need to ask ourselves, what’s the risk burden? What’s the right thing to do for our employees?
Tim Wade:
Best practice always wins because you got to think OSHA is a job for some people, and especially some people writing the regulations. They might not be familiar. And we find this all the time in aviation. OSHA has no idea where to place us. They’re very confused when it comes to aviation, because they’re like, I don’t know if that’s the NTSB’s regulate or just, you know, jurisdiction I don’t know if it’s the FAA’s. They don’t know where to drop us. So a lot of the regulations are not written with us in mind.
And sometimes can be very difficult to place us into those. So yes, best practice always wins out over a 100%, just going by the book and by the regulation. Best practice is going to be a lot better for your employees.
Hilary Framke:
If it’s dangerous, we’re going to have an incident and when you have an incident and it’s serious enough that it warrants, let’s say a mandated reporting or an investigation.
They’re going to come back to sites anyways, under the general industry standard this is a catch all. It is a recognized hazard. We should be doing something. They’re going to touch us no matter what, whether we’re in the program or outside of the program. It would just be better for us to address our risks.
Tim Wade:
Exactly.
Hilary Framke:
All right. Let’s skip gears a little bit now, something that we had chatted about inside your industry, you’ve got some niche requirements, right? When you decided and you had brought up you had moved to technology that was like in house. Talk to me a little bit about your journey.
I assume at one point you tried to go to market, you tried to find a technology provider that would work for your industry. What was that like? What did you find?
Tim Wade:
It was a mental marathon. So when you think aviation and you would be right to think this way, when you think aviation in the US you think the big carriers. And that’s commercial aviation to drop that down a stage further than you have business aviation.
So Part 121 of the regulations is commercial aviation. And then we have what we are, which is part 135 and that’s charter operations, unscheduled passenger air travel. And then one step below that is what you call a 145, which is maintenance. And that’s what we were a few years back when we really started looking at technology and moving past just a paper report in an excel sheet to track it. Okay, we needed something more proficient because we were going for the FAA’s SMS program. We wanted to be one of the first maintenance organizations with it. We actually ended up being fourth out of I think there’s 4500 maintenance organizations in the US, and we were number four that actually got accredited by the FAA. It was amazing because they came out thinking we had this giant robust safety team and i’m like it’s a couple of us and we just were passionate about it and we wanted this done and that was our focus for safety.
We wanted to excel with it. We wanted to show our employees that it’s not just a number. We didn’t just want to be first in line or something like that. We saw the proactive nature of this program and we wanted it for them because it was life changing and it truly was. Reporting first year went up 236%.
It was outstanding and recordable injuries dropped 56%. So we skyrocketed with reporting and immediately dropped with recordable injuries with a medium or higher risks. It was amazing to see the metrics split apart. So back to your question about technology. A lot of the aviation tools are first built to the biggest players, which would be your commercial divisions.
And then some of them get tailored a little bit down to 135, but there was hardly anything that spoke to us as a business aviation maintenance repair organization. Even though, like I said, there are 4500 certificates in the country that could work business aviation jets. So we tried a few out. And I’m not knocking any of them in the aviation sector, cause I know a lot of these software providers and they have a great tool, but none of them worked well for us at that time.
So we started looking at what we could do a little bit better with and try to keep it as a small enough budget. And the benefit we found was doing it in house, not only opened up ease of access for our employees, because it was a two way street, just us to them, but we were able to. If an employee said, hey, love the report, this question didn’t make sense, or this didn’t work the right way, or something screwed up on the form over here.
I didn’t care if it was three in the morning, I could get into the system and update it because it was ours. I didn’t have to put in a help desk ticket to a company in Germany and wait two weeks for it to come back. That wasn’t going to work for us. It was a very fast moving operation and still is.
And I’m happy to say today we’re actually still using the same program that we designed four or five years ago now. And it has just evolved over time. Originally it was for just incident reporting. And then some of the guys came in and said, some of these same questions, we could just flip the wording a little bit.
And now they’re hazard questions. I’m like, all right, sounds good. So we added hazard reporting onto there. And then a couple of the other guys were like, Hey, is there an easy way to request training? We wanted some training on some machinery. I’m like, I just got to add three questions. Boom. Now we got training and now we’re on the flight side.
Can we add fatigue reporting in for our pilots so they can call fatigue? And it has just evolved over time to be completely scaled to whoever needs to use it in our organization. And that has been one of the biggest benefits. The other thing is. Because it’s ours, it doesn’t come with 90 modules that we don’t need that don’t speak to us, which is what we were falling into was every software.
I’m like, I love that module. I really like that. How much is that one module? And they said, you got to buy these other ones. I’m like, I don’t need those. Those don’t do anything for us. I don’t need your emergency bloodborne pathogen training that doesn’t do anything for us. Things like that. So because we were able to scale it so much.
Hilary Framke:
And I think a lot of people until they get into this RFP process and start to do the discovery, they don’t realize every company is different. There’s a whole host of companies that will only sell as an enterprise suite. And look there’s some benefits to that.
I think there’s certainly. A desire in the market to have a one stop shop, right? I just want one system so that everyone gets comfortable with it and it has the same user interface and it’s easy for them, and we’re not constantly going into different tools to to do our programming.
Like you said, the significant downside of that is you’re paying for every single one in the suite, even if you only want two. And so it becomes very cost prohibitive. I think companies, as I see this like pendulum swing in technology, companies that are flexible that will sell modular or enterprise, based on your desire, right?
Are the companies that are best, are really thinking more modern, with technology application, because really there are some customers who I just want this one module. I just need this one pain point solved, right? It’s a bear for us. I think about programs that are really good fit for one module, like chemical management, that is a huge burden, to take on a safety data sheet library, chemical profile assessments.
Chemical approval process, procurement, then like the labeling, the reconciliation on the back end, the reporting, this is a huge bear of a program that technology can take you to the next level and elevate you immediately. And very hard to build in. It’s those sorts of programs that I see businesses, they don’t take advantage of them enough, right?
They don’t go get technology to take them to the next level. And I think that’s so sad, because these are the best fits, right? Where tech comes in and it can really get you compliant and reduce your risk and improve your time efficiency so quickly.
Tim Wade:
It’s very discouraging when you walk into a an organization, any industry, and you see the yellow binders on the wall and you’re like, oh.
Hilary Framke:
Oh, so there.
Tim Wade:
Let me guess, that SDS on the first page was rewritten in 1999. I’m guessing you haven’t updated it since. Okay, let’s go from here.
Hilary Framke:
I’m very, very, like, impressed to hear that you built something in house, would you be willing to share what program you’re using for that technology?
Tim Wade:
Sure it’s actually no reporting program at all. We’ve even gotten with the maker of the program and told them how we’re using it and they said oh that’s great. Do you guys want to take this to market? There’s a lot of aviation companies that would do it and they said It’s not really our field, but we’re glad it’s working for you.
So we use a program called air table and it’s like Google sheets and there’s a ton of different programs like it, but we were able to just tailor it the way we wanted it. And it was a couple path process where we built the database that we wanted, all the columns that we wanted, organized the way we wanted it to.
And then built the form that they would fill out. The electronic form and it has what’s called conditional formatting. If I click that i’m submitting an incident, i’m only going to get incident questions. I’m not going to get the hazard. Does all the workflows for you And then you can take that url code for that form toss it into a QR code and bam, put the QR code everywhere, plaster your organization.
You guys can report wherever they want. And then on the back end of that, it has what’s called automations. When somebody submits a report. And for example, if it’s a hazard out of our Cleveland Hopkins location, There’s a distro list that is going to get emailed with that information so that you’re not getting 1000 emails all day long with everybody submitting incidents and hazards and things like that.
It goes to a specific group of people based on what the report was. And they’re all like that. So if we’re submitting an injury, it’s going to loop in the HR team. If we’re submitting an incident on the hangar floor, it’s looping in the supervisor team for that location.
Hilary Framke:
We like to call them automated escalations at SafetyStratus.
Tim Wade:
I like that. I like that. Yes. So it does the, it does exactly that. It automates the escalation to the supervisors who need it.
Hilary Framke:
In part. And I think again, technology companies that sit back one huge, like soapbox. If you’re selling EHS software, you better have EHS practitioners on your team, who are influencing product development, and capability and features. Because how can you build something if you don’t know what you’re trying to solve? So that’s one of my soapboxes. And less is best, right? I think this is another thing that gets a nuance, right? Is that incident investigation is just one of hundreds of programs EHS leaders have to manage on a daily basis, right?
So whatever can get me there the fastest. The most efficiently, right? Let me decide as the customer, what questions I want, how many questions I want. Don’t put me in a box where I have to answer these 40 every time. If I’ve decided for my business, I only want these eight. That’s my decision. It’s my program to run.
Give me the flexibility and the tech to be able to do that, which is something we offer, by the way, because that’s what we believe in. It’s for you. It’s a playground for you to go build and make the best with your business. But, let’s pause. And this has been amazing. What I want to end with is a little of the summation right about what we’ve chatted about.
We’ve chatted about leveraging technology proactive risk assessment. We’ve talked about the aviation industry. Thank you for your insights on that. How do you envision thought leadership evolving in these categories? Where do you think some of these categories need to go? Leave us with a final thoughts on the topic.
Tim Wade:
I would say almost more of a broad statement on that. I have always felt in a lot of my mentor that I’ve learned a ton from and the amazing people that I’ve seen in our industry, What creates a great safety program, what creates great safety leaders is the understanding that safety is synonymous with service.
We are here to serve. It is an honor to be in this role. It is a privilege to be in this role. There are not many opportunities in any organization where you get to see so much of your organization and that should be thought of as a privilege and an honor and something that not many people get.
And it’s great to do it. Don’t ever lose focus on that. You are serving others in this role. I think once you do that, all those things that you just mentioned, what is great about your risk assessments, what’s great about the data coming in, what everything we talked about today, if you look at it from a point of service and serving others, All that’s going to fall into place because you’re going to look at it differently.
You’re going to look at well I am serving this person. How can I make that easier on them? Oh, he submitted the hazard report He took that time to submit it to me goes back to when you were five years old and you got a birthday card in the mail and your mom said write a thank you note. That was out of respect and to give something back and by serving others You’re going to give a product back and you’re going to look at everything coming into your system not as a burden Oh my gosh, I have 10 reports.
I got to go through today. More or less as I have 10 people that entrusted me with their information and their concerns, and they expect a great product in return. What can I do to serve them? And when you work a long hour, when you work a weekend, you mentioned that you travel all the time for your position.
You’re going to do it with a different mindset because you’re doing it from a place of joy and servitude towards your people that you’re serving.
Hilary Framke:
I love that so much, Tim. I think, like you said, it is such a huge responsibility to oversee EHS, and it’s grueling. It can be very grueling, and there sometimes is a low, lesser amount of gratitude towards EHS leaders, I’ll say, than there should be, but ultimately, if you’re doing it with the right mindset, right?
With always people in mind, right? Like you said, the people that you serve, the value of what our programs do. This is life changing work. You prevent a serious injury. You change someone’s entire trajectory of life. Injuries can cause divorces, can cause losing relationships, losing jobs, losing homes, finances.
It totally changes people’s lives when we prevent serious injuries, and there’s just no greater work in the world, I believe.
Tim Wade:
I oftentimes hear that safety is a thankless department and it can be, but I always say, let the metrics thank you. Let’s seeing that data flowing in and the proactive changes and even the boost in morale you see when you’re making those changes based on the hazard reports.
When you have a brand new employee, finally, get up the courage to submit a hazard report. You see someone who’s been on the flight line for 40 years and he finally, he’s never done a hazard report in his life and he submits one and you make a proactive change on that. You will see them walking tall coming into work the next day.
That’s your thank you. The boost of morale and the changes in the metrics and the overall, Dave Ramsey always says when you get your finances in order, you change your family tree. It’s the same thing for safety. Make those proactive changes. You’re changing the tree out in your workplace to be a more proactive, more enjoyable environment for these people.
Hilary Framke:
Tim, it’s been an absolute pleasure. Thank you so much for being on my podcast today.
Tim Wade:
It’s been an honor. Thank you for having me.
