Empowering Safety: The Intersection of HOP & EHS PART 2

Hilary: Hello, listeners. I’m Hilary Framke, your host of the Elevate EHS podcast back again with LaRhonda Julien. Hey, LaRhonda.

LaRhonda: Hello. 

Hilary: Thank you for coming back for a second episode. So look LaRhonda and I cut an episode on Human and Organizational Performance and this is such a new science and topic for me. So LaRhonda is teaching us all about what HOP is, what principles are, humans are fallible as a reminder to those who didn’t see part one. If we understand why events occurred, then we can work to prevent them.

For those who didn’t watch part one, hit pause. Go watch part one, you’re going to need it in order to follow us for part two. But a short little recap. So we went through the history of HOP. We talked about the key principles of HOP also what benefits can organizations get out of bringing HOP on board and making that a part of the way that they do business and then we ended with some of the challenges. So we’re going to shift gears a little bit. How does HOP complement EHS practices, LaRhonda? 

LaRhonda: I think that this is a good question. HOP is definitely very rich in history. As you said for those who didn’t see episode one, pause because that history goes back to the late 1800s. You also mentioned science. HOP is based on science. It has its own principles, its own tools and techniques, different terminologies that we use and it’s a very proactive measure that companies can take to mitigate risk. It’s very important to distinguish what HOP is versus what EHS is so that you can move in the direction of trying to integrate the two. So HOP from a human perspective that human part of it is, why we do what we do the way that we do it. Then from that organizational perspective, it’s an operational philosophy that leads to organizational excellence.

We’ll fold all those things into the organization, which is comprised of people and we’ll see how those systems in the organization affect the people and vice versa. So you move into how that intersection looks in the company. How those two things complement each other?

HOP is proactive. We want to make sure that we educate the workforce on HOP and that can lead to that worker behavior changing and organizations having safer outcomes which talking about that complement to HOP. If you’re not having accidents or incidents, I think that’s where those EHS professionals want to see the people that they are coming in contact with.

They want to see them learn those safety tools and techniques, learn those HOP techniques so that they will be operating safely and keep themselves safe and the people that they’re working with. HOP also allows you to be more deliberate. You’ll be more well practiced and you’re ready to address any adverse or unexpected outcomes. It’s also very comprehensive. We look at the behavior of the employees and the impact that has on establishments. Then there’s also a road map that we use that includes leadership, sponsorship, engagement, dedicated resources, prevention, training, different types of reporting, metrics that we use, event analysis and corrective actions. Always continuous improvement and all of those things are very much akin to what OSHA provides are the hallmarks of a good safety and health program. I think that all of those things in conjunction help to both distinguish between HOP and EHS and help you to see how they complement each other. 

Hilary: Let’s say there’s no HOP in my business. What’s the function that makes the most sense to get this up and going and to start to bring it to my business?

LaRhonda: You have to go to your leaders with your value proposition or your elevator pitch and let them know what the benefits of HOP will be to the organization. One of the tools that you have to already have in place though, is a just culture and psychological safety. 

Psychological safety is important because what that means is the individuals in your organization are going to feel comfortable enough with leadership to go to them and let them know that this value added service could help the organization by keeping the workers safe and saving the company money. Culture means that both the worker and the organization are going to feel accountable for what the outcomes of that is going to be. So you want to make sure that you get that leadership sponsorship and engagement and that’s how you start on the path to infusing HOP into the organization. 

There are other things that you can also do. When we first started with HOP officially and our company. One of the things that I shared with people is we’re already doing this. We’re just putting a framework around it now. What I also want you to remember is HOP is not just tools. I know that some people make that mistake. They’re like, Oh, we implemented HOP, we started doing pre job safety briefings. It’s a lot more than that but making sure that you have a just culture, that your people feel psychologically safe, engaging with that leadership, getting their sponsorship and their buy in is a good way to start.

 We want to make sure that we also get the buy in from the people who are doing the work and that we are engaging their opinion as we begin to develop this program to make sure that it sticks. 

Hilary: This is so interesting of a concept to me because as you said, just like me and my experience. I had already been doing a lot of these things. I just didn’t know that it was called HOP.

LaRhonda: So that’s another way you’ll be accomplishing the same goal and doing the same thing. But it’s a trigger and you don’t want people to be triggered trying to go into this thing that you want to teach them that’s going to save their lives. So even changing some of the terminology that already exists across the corporation can be an addition or an improvement to your current HOP practices. 

Hilary: Yeah, that could be like a really good step that doesn’t take more resources that doesn’t take all this program change. I think there’s probably a lot of proof that we’re not doing HOP well in like downtime. All the time that we’re spending on jams and issues in the organization, quality defects that keep happening that we haven’t solved for. So I would suggest maybe for those businesses that are trying to get started ,go out and attempt to quantify the loss for not having a strong learning process and bring those figures to those leaders when you make the business case for why we need HOP. 

LaRhonda: One thing that I want to add to that, when we’re trying to learn, one thing that we don’t want to do is we don’t want to learn in silos. At my company, we are a matrixed organization. So we are all interwoven together in the work that we do. If something happens, in construction, after construction is over, it goes to maintenance. So we want to make sure that we’re sharing that with the people that we’re handing off this work to. But we also want to make sure that we’re looking upstream because if something happened in construction maybe it was a result of a design issue. So we don’t want to learn in silos at all. 

Another thing to your point is we don’t want to just learn from our failures. But we also want to focus on our successes because guess what? We are a high reliability organization and by definition, what that means is that we repeatedly do high hazard tasks with great levels of success. So we want to make sure that we’re learning from those successes just as much as we’re focusing on those failures.

Hilary: Oh, love that. How do you think the infusion of HOP could change EHS performance?

LaRhonda: Infusing HOP into EHS, you’re going to have people who are comfortable with each other. Who trust each other. Who know that they can rely on each other to get work done. Who feel safe enough in that environment to bring issues to their EHS workers in the organization. That training that you get with HOP is going to be a complement to that EHS training that you’re going to get and your employees are going to have even more specialized skills to help address any issues that might arise across the organization.

The continuous improvement principles are practices that are associated with HOP, those are going to lead to long term desired outcomes. It’s not just a one and done kind of thing. Which is going to help you to meet your corporate goals as well as any employee expectations and goals that they might have.

Additionally, I think with HOP being proactive, it’s going to help you to identify risk and develop ways to prevent, detect, and correct any issues before they arise. So I’m thinking that’s going to make our EHS folks very happy as well. 

Hilary: Just having, I know we don’t like the term investigation but I’m going to use it because EHS people, so they know what I’m talking about. Even if we just did that better how much would that change our EHS performance?

It would change it exponentially. Because there’s so often we’re having to go back in this function and go back to operations and say, really, we just retrain the worker on safe lifting techniques? That’s all we got out of this? How is that ever going to prevent reoccurrence?

And I feel this frustration exists. But there’s a real problem as LaRhonda with resource management inside EHS, and there’s so much data, like how can I ever, I always felt like I was never doing my job at a superior level because I felt I should have my hands on every single incident report. I should be reviewing every single investigation, every root cause. I should be identifying all the areas where it was inadequate and pushing back and sending back. But to be frank with you, I could never get to all of them. I really had to depend on the team and their teams.

Had to depend on the frontline supervisors to put their hands up and say, this is something you should look at. And I’m concerned. I don’t think we did this well enough, right? There’s this real problem with having enough bandwidth to look at all the things that need to be done and to do them better.

What I think is really interesting, what you said, the term you use “trust”. So imperative for EHS performance. That employees feel, I do authentically care about you. I care about your physical safety, your psychological safety. I care about the planet. I want us ethically to do the right things. And I think what you had said about HOP instilling this I want to dig into this a little deeper.

Even just this idea of work as imagined, work as done, right? This whole concept and normalizing the fact that there’s going to be this big gap in between, right? And we expect that. This is just a reality, even just that concept to me is so transformative in EHS because I think there is this thought process that we do the risk assessment.

We understand what the risks are. We put these controls in place and then we put that directive out. And as long as people comply, they will be safe and we will have an acceptable level of risk. But once you think about the HOP principles and that work as imagined, work as done, the reality is there’s probably a big gap between what we imagined the risk was and what it actually is, right?

And so normalizing this concept and saying to the organization, I expect that there will be drift, and I expect that we will have to go back and evaluate these risks and reset the controls. What a transformative idea.

LaRhonda: What you’re describing, what you’re talking about is practical drift and you’re absolutely right. You have your work as imagined, right? What’s laid out in your contracts or your prints or your maps. Then you have your work as done. So what happens out in the field or what happens in actuality? What I like to tell my people similar to what you said is there may be times that you have to deviate from what we have established as what we expect you to do, that scope. Let us know because going back to the learning from those different issues and not working in silos. We need to know and we need to understand where you had to go outside of the spec or outside of the contract because it might look like a good idea what you’re going to do in the moment and you might think oh hey, I’ve done it this other way a thousand times and it was never a problem. But you don’t know if there are any latent organizational weaknesses that might be present in the system at that moment. So that when you deviate from what has been established, it can actually lead to an accident.

So we do recognize that we might have to deviate but we also need to be aware of when that deviation happens so that we can make sure that we are working safely through it. We do trust the judgment of our people but we have to work together and make sure that we’re not doing things that are outside of that scope.

It becomes habit, which leads to an eventual accident. We want to make sure that we are addressing those things that we see in the field or in practice as issues. Making those changes, that’s that continuous improvement so that we can work better moving forward. 

Hilary: Yeah. And the fact is, these things are happening, right? And it takes professionals with the eye to go out and to monitor and to see the deviations, and ask the questions. But what I think HOP pushes is that let us not wait for the leaders to come out and monitor. Let’s put the power in the workers who are doing the work and delegate to them some authority to tell us like you said, communicate what’s wrong, feel enough trust to go back to the organization and say there’s deviations. How do we feel about that? Is it the document that needs to be changed or is it the practice that needs to be changed? Allow them some authority to make these decisions.

LaRhonda: Absolutely. Again we’re in a matrix organization, so it’s all a partnership and whether it’s our engineers or our people out in the field, they’re all subject matter experts. They are experienced trained professionals and we all rely on each other to make sure that we have safe and repeatable outcomes.

Hilary: I want to shift gears a little bit going back to the data. You’re getting so much data. All the risk, the quantifications, the inspection results, the corrective actions, the quality of those corrective actions. The trending root causes, the contributing factors. I could go on and on. But so you’re getting all this data in. How do you think, technology, analytical data tools, business insight tools that are available today could help us support this intersection of HOP and EHS? 

LaRhonda: One of the things that we are doing and we’re in our infancy with using AI and all of those data management applications that you talked about, where we’re starting is with things like near misses. We’re taking and we’re looking at those near misses, we’re also looking at lessons learned that we do because lessons learned are going to be on every single project near misses happen whenever they happen. We’re taking that information and we have our AI department who are putting these into dashboards. Then those dashboards are showing us different trends and then we’re able to take and analyze those trends and decide how we need to move forward based on that information.

Right now we’re just doing it with a small number of things because we want to understand it and we want to change it and we want to perfect it before we open it up to a larger number of things. So we want to get a hold on it first and then we’re going to expand it. 

Hilary: Oh, that’s incredible. I think AI has so much potential. It is very infancy. We talk a lot about this on the podcast. Everyone should still continue to be cautious. We’ve still got a lot of work to do with these relational models and taking things in the direction we all wanted to go, which is predictive analytics, right? 

LaRhonda: One thing that I want to say about that is predictive analytics, right? But it’s analyzing what is now lagging indicators and that is where that human comes in it. That’s why you always have to have a person that’s going to be married to that process. I’ve received this information based on these now lagging indicators, what are we going to do to proactively address what we have identified are issues?

Hilary: Oh, exactly. Any EHS leader who thinks they’re going to be replaced by AI. No. 

It’s not going to happen. 

 I think ,it will optimize and it will take away some of that administrative burden. 

Too few organizations are even fully utilizing cloud based EHS software in a way that it can be used to take your organization to the next level. What I want to touch on, an interesting concept, I think, with data analytics and technology, HOP moves you away from a people based look into more of a system based analysis. 

It’s not people who failed. It’s the system that failed and how we executed it or what we looked at or whatever it may be. I think this is what technology does well in today’s let’s say cloud based software for EHS is it standardizes our practices. It creates one version of the truth. Everyone’s doing the same incident report, asking the same questions, logic driven analysis. Technology is already moving towards that system based approach, where HOP is. What I think is interesting, I’d love to hear your thoughts on it, LaRhonda is configuring some of that EHS software to address and systemize how we are doing EHS. 

So for instance, I’m thinking, updating your investigative process or learning process to ask questions about like human error traps, what types of human error traps.

Categorizing and using high energy sources to do classification of SIF, PSIF, even control grading. If my learning process when I had incidents would have forced the users to grade the control or the corrective action into engineering or administrative or PPE. I could have easily then done a report and seen what’s our percentile of administrative control versus engineering control and learned a lot about my business, right? So couldn’t we also use technology by introducing some of these HOP principles into the tech and configuring it to tell us a little bit about our activity?

LaRhonda: Absolutely and definitely if I had a million, billion, zillion dollars that would be a passion project that I would love to work on because you are right. We can take a look at those things and we can say okay, we’re about to do this task, complete this form associated with it and as a person is completing that task or doing that form based on what they select or what they enter, you can have your HOP clues. 

Hilary: I think that there is a bunch of potential here in technology for those who are ready to intersect. Technology and then these cloud based platforms with HOP principles and EHS. 

LaRhonda, this has been amazing. I’d like us to end with, do you have a good success story about the usage of HOP and it improving EHS? I would love to leave with that. 

LaRhonda: Going back to what you talked about technology and AI and data management. One of the things that we first started out doing was what is something that we use now we use often we use all of the time that we can put this in. Begin to use, begin to get people familiar with, begin to push out that data that we would like to see. The first thing that we did was put our pre job safety briefing in that format and we have been able to get some real time data to get some analytics from that document. What’s important about that is our people in the field are using that to keep themselves and their crew safe? When they step away from that information is still available to the people who are on site but immediately it’s also available to us in the office so that we can begin to make those continuous improvement changes for them.

The other thing that I think has been somewhat of a success is bringing in as I shared before, those lessons learned or those near misses into that same pool where we’re able to analyze that information. So that we can begin to streamline processes, real time information which has been huge because in our business pen and paper, people love it. They love it. 

Yes, but being able to take and integrate that information into something that is electronic we’re able to reduce the mistakes that are made by human error. Right? Now we might have some fat finger issues but that’s when we build in certain controls to help to address that. But by having our pre job safety briefing, our near misses and our lessons learned integrated with this new technology, we’re able to now make predictions and again continuously improve on the spot. We’re able to make better decisions. We become more efficient. We’re able to direct our behavior in the moment to address risk that is going on. Then we have safer outcomes, our profit increases. Of course, our competitive advantage gets even larger. The morale of our people actually gets higher because they feel good about having those very safe outcomes, about keeping not just themselves, but others safe. We have a decrease in accidents and incidents as a result of that.

Hilary: Amazing. No and talk about trust building. So you’re saying, know what activities will lead us to higher levels of success. 

Correct. 

If you participate in this activity, we will review it. We’ll make changes based on your feedback, right? Is trust building and trust even further within your higher organization like you just said seeing less incidents, seeing an improvement in margin, right? Because you’re having less losses gives them the trust that you know what you’re doing and you are putting in value created activities that take your organization to the next level.

Incredible end point, LaRhonda. Thank you so much. Thank you for everything that you shared about HOP. For your expertise, for your history background on the topic, and for just opening up this discovery conversation about where HOP and EHS intersect and how an infusion of HOP just accelerates your EHS program. It supports it, like you said, it complements it. I think all those things are true. So for the EHS leaders out there who are looking for something to transform your current EHS program, continue to drive its success HOP might be a good place to look. And certainly drop something in the comment, like our podcast, let us know if we’re going in the right direction and feel free to add in your own learnings.

We’d love to hear from you. Thanks everybody. Thanks, LaRhonda. We’ll see you next time. 

LaRhonda: Bye.