Human-Centered EHS: Building a Culture of Safety and Well-being

Hilary Framke: Hello listeners. Welcome back to the Elevate EHS podcast. I’m your host, Hilary Framke I’ve got a really fun guest today, Emily Huegel. Hi, Emily. 

Emily Huegel: Hey, Hilary.

Hilary Framke: Thanks for being on my podcast today.

Emily Huegel: Absolutely. I’m looking forward to it. 

Hilary Framke: I am too. Love to just talk about EHS. So in your current role, you started as an entry level Safety Coordinator, you’ve moved all the way up to a Safety Director. This progression was six roles in five years. Wow, that’s quite an accelerated journey. 

Emily Huegel: Yeah, that’s one way to put it. 

Hilary Framke: So share with our listeners, how you navigated all these role changes. What skills you honed or noticed were necessary, like in the next role, we would just love to learn more.

Emily Huegel: Yeah, absolutely. With most of the roles being very similar to an EHS manager role, just little key differences. Number one way to navigate it is to just be adaptive. Really plug in where your organization, where your people need you.

 It’s being adaptive, being willing to jump into things that you don’t know all the answers to. And knowing that you have a network. Building that network cross functionally.

We all want to stay in our little sandbox and work with our people, our EHS folks. But working with groups like reliability and maintenance or engineering. And really maintaining those relationships. I would not be where I am right now if I didn’t have a network of folks who supported me along the way, too. So I think that’s the easiest way to describe that transition series for me. 

Hilary Framke: Did you find that people were almost like offering you the next step, right? Because of like the network growth and what you were doing, or were you pursuing that and driving that yourself? 

Emily Huegel: It was a mix. Sometimes it was a, hey we need you to go do this. But sometimes it was a, hey this is a role I’m really interested in. Tell me what I need to do to be qualified for it.

And there was, one role I asked in the beginning. They said I’m sorry, you are not ready for this. And you know what, I was not ready for that. And I did end up taking that role about 2 years after the fact. A little bit more than two years. Really it’s talking to folks and taking what people tell you and running with it.

Don’t just take advice and you’re like, okay, I’m done. Took what you said and I’ll do what I want from here. There’s a reason that folks are in higher roles. Most of the time it’s because they are really good at their job and they know what to look for. So it’s a mixed bag for me.

Hilary Framke: From what you just said, two things, resilience. I think it takes a lot of resilience to hear not yet, right? And to still stick with that same employer and put in the work. And prove that you can do it and that trust that you had in your organization, that you weren’t ready because they thought so.

I think a lot of EHS practitioners would probably say you don’t think I can do it? I’m going to go find someone who does believe in me. 

Emily Huegel: Exactly, right? You got take a step back from that pride, right? Yeah! And it’s not easy at all.

I’m not saying I wasn’t looking for another opportunity to show I was but I’m so glad that I wound up working through the same organization. It’s been really rewarding to see that. 

Hilary Framke: So I think the adaptability that you showed in taking on things that you were uncomfortable with is always a struggle for me because sometimes our organizations don’t understand what EHS is responsible for, so they’re constantly pushing things at us that really don’t fit, and then at other times, It’s a really good growth opportunity to take on something that you can shine in a project, right?

You can show them that you can take on more. So how do you balance that, Emily? How do you know when it’s something you should take on? 

Emily Huegel: It all depends on the situation you’re in, right? I can’t say, if it doesn’t fall under environmental health or safety specifically, don’t take it. I could never say that, right? I think it’s about what’s the evolution of where your company is, or even where your facility is, or a small group of people, right? It might be helping new shift leaders have their safety talks. And have all the sign offs. There’s something that seems so simple as hey, just go have someone sign a piece of paper.

It’s not that hard. For a new person, it might be. And so it’s all about what is the long goal. If it is more value added for me to do something right now, and it’s not a systemic issue that I’ll keep having to do just bite the bullet and do it, and you’re going to learn in the process, but if it is a teach them to fish. And then they’ll learn how to fish for a lifetime. One of those scenarios then it’s hey, we’re going to do this hand in hand and then you’re going to take it right. I know that’s a very political answer but it just depends on your scenario.

Hilary Framke: I think there’s breadth in that because it does depend, right? I think it’s always helpful, and I love to give advice to our listeners about how to work through those things, how to decide. I know that I’ve made mistakes in my career. I look back and I think, I said no to that, but I probably should have said yes, right?

Like you said, you get too on your island and tunnel focused. So I think you do need to take a moment and evaluate the opportunity. If your first inclination is negative is I don’t want this. Ask for more time, ask for more information. I wish I would have done that more in my career.

Can you give me a week to think about it, to talk to some of the stakeholders, to see what the scope of this project is going to be. How much time it’s going to take to do an evaluation. And then I’ll come back to you with my answer. I was one of those people who always felt like I had to decide on the fly.

Yes. It’s so unnecessary. Exactly. I watched so many of my colleagues ask for extra time. I’m like, Ooh, why don’t I do that? 

Emily Huegel: I’ll never ask for time. That’s something I struggle with today. So sometimes it’s asking for that extension that’s going to make or break the scenario. 

Hilary Framke: And then you can do a really thorough evaluation. You can come back with your reasons, yay or nay, at the end of the day, if it’s your boss asking, you may not have a choice. Certainly being able to call out, the potential pitfalls of a project, right? Like I will take this, but I do have concerns about budget or resourcing or, lack of technical expertise to do well in this role. To run this project. Could I get some training? Could I get a budget to be able to do this? Just something I never did enough of. 

Emily Huegel: Yeah, absolutely. I’m with you. 

Hilary Framke: So let’s shift gears a little bit. In our prep call, we talked about the COVID pandemic. And how much that had changed the landscape and because you had been through six roles in five years over the course of the pandemic, you were dealing with that while you were in your career journey, which I think is so interesting.

So what do you think about overall big picture, the presence of EHS in the business world? Did you notice any significant shifts or changes in how organizations approach EHS post pandemic?

Emily Huegel: Yeah, I think before the pandemic it was a hey, we had an incident. It was very reactive, right? We had this happen. We had a spill. We had somebody with a threshold shift for hearing, right?

With the pandemic, it was very much hey, we need to get ahead of the game. We need to have protocols. We need to have response plans. We need to know what is going to be the impact down the road, right? And one thing that we did really well as a group of EHS professionals, we talked a lot. We leaned heavily on science and our healthcare systems to provide us with information that we then took back to our teams and talked some more, so that we could, go through any misunderstandings or just misinformation in social media. And in doing so in relation to the business world, we had to embrace the health part of our responsibilities, which we haven’t done as strongly.

We always talk about injuries. But health from a outside of work perspective, impacting at work and not the opposite. So lead exposure at work can impact you at home if you take it home with you. It’s things like that and leading those discussions. We also learned about our teams. And so from a business aspect, it’s not just the operators, but it’s also different groups. We have to travel to different sites to do a project. Maybe that’s your engineering group. You have a central engineering group. Really learn about how these different functions interrelate and how everything is so dependent on one another.

And it’s putting EHS at the forefront. Might always say safety first in a meeting and you have your little talk. But with the pandemic, EHS was integrated into so many different parts of the process and parts of the business that we didn’t think about in the past.

 So from a business we worked with HR. Maybe someone came to you and said Hey, my mom tested positive. Or you had the crazy ones. Like my son’s girlfriend was exposed to somebody and I was around him for five minutes and it was all the wild things, right? Everybody had those. But you learn things, right? Maybe you had an employee with a son or a daughter that had medical conditions that made them high risk, so they were very worried.

Or you learned about another employee that, outside of work they also do firefighting, right? They’re a volunteer firefighter. And we humanize one another, right? So from a business standpoint we worked with many different groups. And then from a granular standpoint, we learned more about the people we did have.

And I think that was just so incredible. And we had so much more, opportunity to learn about one another and find common ground with one another. And I think that was a huge impact, from a business perspective and then how organizations approach EHS.

I remember personally, I had a couple of folks where I said, how’s this person doing? I know that they got sick during COVID. It gives you a humanized approach to each other. And yes business still persisted, but I really do think from a business perspective, we learned more about people too.

Hilary Framke: I love this answer. What I also think is a very interesting point of view with this was, for the first time being let’s say like non compliant with the standards that had been put out by the CDC, there were significant losses for being non compliant to business. And I think this idea that we’re going to check and make sure we’re compliant before we start working. We’re going to make sure that we’ve got the six feet distance. We’re going to make sure plexiglass is in place. We can’t run out of antiseptic. We can’t not do temperature screening if that’s a requirement. And this concept of we need to be compliant in order to run our business.

Otherwise, we will have loss was such a pivotal shift for EHS departments. This is the conversation we’ve been trying to have with our businesses for decades, right? If you don’t operate in a manner which is both compliant and acceptable amount of risk, we will have significant losses. 

 And then the pandemic came and people saw for the first time what would transpire. Now, obviously the probability of the loss is far different from an EHS perspective as with a pandemic perspective, but to me the concept and this very quick loss scenario, if you break the rules, we will lose this entire assembly line this entire department. It was definitely a huge shifting point, don’t you think?

Emily Huegel: Absolutely. Yeah. Look, you have some leaders now that, if you come to them saying OSHA says or CFR says this, they will throw a hand up and say I don’t care what that says.

Tell me how to be safe, right? I’m going to do both of these. Just that dramatic shift was both enlightening and it was a little frustrating because like you said, we’ve been trying to do this for so long now but we’ll comply so that we can keep operating. But yeah, that’s a really good point to make there.

Hilary Framke: And I hope that it’s something that EHS practitioners will continue to use. As a use case. I’m really big about using metaphors, when we’re trying to bring home a topic and get our business leaders to understand the importance of something. 

But just to put it in layman’s terms. I once talked about the success building, like a winning formula as baking a cake, right? And I went through what you need to bake a cake. You’ve got to have a great recipe. You have to have quality ingredients. You have to have quality equipment.

If you put it in a 1960s oven, it probably won’t be a very good cake. You have to have behavioral adherence to the recipe that whole concept. And then I said okay, now winning formula for EHS, right? Having a management system. Having behavioral adherence to your rules, having great equipment that’s not breaking and difficult to use and not designed for operation, all these things.

And just to show the metaphor of what’s our cake gonna look like with what we’ve built today, right? And what we have if the management system isn’t used, if we don’t manage behaviors, if we don’t keep our equipment in good standing. Why are we surprised that our results aren’t good?

Yep. Nobody should be surprised by that. 

Emily Huegel: Yeah. Look, we have a recipe for success. If we follow it then we’ll be good to go. We know what the outcome would look like, right? It’s not like we don’t know what the outcome of a good management system looks like.

So yeah, really good. 

Hilary Framke: Exactly. But I love that. I love using that and bringing up the use cases and bringing it home with real life examples because I think sometimes as EHS practitioners, we can just be so technical. We just assume people understand and we throw those words out in these acronyms out, we lose people.

That’s right. Yeah, absolutely. 

How do you think this point of view on EHS as a service organization gains buy in within an organization?

Emily Huegel: Like you said, this can be a polarizing opinion, right? There’s very different perceptions of what safety plays as a role. But yes, I fully believe that EHS is a service provider and operation. And that’s for both operations as a system from leaders, right? Even down to the operators around us.

So unless you’re a safety or risk consultant, hate to break it to you, but fairly certain that safety is not paying your bills, right? It is whatever product, whatever process, whatever service that your organization provides. And to me, once you come to that common understanding with your operations leaders, you can start to facilitate conversations where EHS can be plugged in more, right?

So often you’ll hear frustrated EHS teammates say, they’re never informed. I don’t ever know when we’re doing something right? This happened, they dropped this object and nobody ever even told me. But to me, that doesn’t mean that they’re poor planning from an operation standpoint. To me, that means that we as EHS pros are expecting others to cater to us.

So I’m expecting you to bring me the information. You have to tell me when I’m needed, right? But once you see yourself as a service provider, you start asking questions. And at the end of the day, it’s not my job to tell operations what to do. They know how to make widget they’re making or service they’re providing.

But my job is to tell you, how to do what you want to safely. And we work that out together. And that is not something where we can sit back. It has to be a process where EHS leaders are involved. So I have to plug myself into planning meetings, right? Maintenance issues. If you’ve got an outage coming up and you’ve got your team sitting in a room talking about it, you need to be there.

You need to learn about what’s happening, but also you have to engage in the process, right? Engage in the planning ahead of time. And that doesn’t mean that we go to a turnover meeting, give her a little safety talk. And then we daydream the rest of the time, or we just let them talk about the operations issues.

We have to plug ourselves in. We have to be aware of what issues our operators and our maintenance techs are facing. So until folks know that you can be a tool for them, why would they even want to come to you? A lot of folks see EHS or the safety guy or safety cop, right? But at the end of the day, we have to sell safety to our leaders, to our operators, to our managers, and all of our frontline employees.

And if we’re not doing that, there’s just not a way for us to proactively engage with our teams. So when you think about yourself as a service organization I imagine a server in a restaurant, right? I am serving you. I’m involved in your experience at the restaurant. And my performance is going to be a direct reflection on the restaurant itself.

And, what was your meal like that night? So I think that’s my perception. At the day it would be fabulous for everyone to know that safety is at the forefront. Safety is always the priority. Safety is the value that we talk about. But we have to be realistic as well.

And know that folks have focuses in many different areas, and we’re just one of the things that they have to juggle. 

Absolutely. Two significant levers. If you are going to pursue this EHS as a service organization, talk about winning strategy, right? This can really work if it’s done well.

The two levers I want to bring up in response to this. One, transparency. So many EHS people who claim to be, I’m here to serve my customer but I’m not going to tell my customer any of our results or any of our strategy or how we’re doing. I’m going to keep all of this info over here behind closed doors, right?

You won’t gain the trust of your customer this way. So if you are really going to serve and you’re going to be here to be that conduit for whatever customer you’ve determined, then you also have to be willing to open the doors and be transparent. Here’s how we’re performing. Here’s what we’re good at.

Here’s what we may have opportunity in. Here’s the programs we’re working on. Here’s how you can get involved. All those things. Number one. Number two. And this is my big soapbox moment. Action oriented. So many EHS practitioners who call themselves like I’m here for my people and I walk around and I know everybody’s name and I know their kids and their nieces and what they did this weekend and I chat with them and I’m so engaged.

This is all good. I’m not saying this is bad. But then they bring things up to you, right? And they say, oh, so and this machine guard, I’m having trouble with, or I noticed that this corner is always messy and people trip over here, right? And so you’re getting off that trusting relationship.

You’re gaining some traction in the EHS hazard observation category, right? And then this EHS person yep, we’ll write that down. We’ll get that taken care of. Yep. Let me write that in my little notebook, right? And I’ve got You go into their office and there’s 30 notebooks. And so we’re not action oriented.

We’re not actually driving change and leveraging this relationship that we’ve built by being a service provider to actually derive change in the function. 

Yeah, absolutely. That’s right. 

Huge pet peeve of mine. 

Yeah, I mean if you’re not showing what specific things you’re doing to improve, then you’re absolutely not going to be brought in, right?

What good is a server who never brings your food? That’s exactly. Yeah, precisely, there we go. Bear that in mind, right? Absolutely. I think the biggest reason that this type of structure of EHS management can be successful is because you build relationships, right? You build that trust, you build that credibility, but then on the backside, you have to actually run strategy projects and action orientation in order to sustain those relationships.

Awesome. 

Hilary Framke: It sounds like, Emily, and correct me if I’m wrong, right? You have worked specifically on this idea of not having EHS as a separate entity and EHS on an island. Positioning EHS more as a partner, right?

For those listeners who are struggling with this, and they are out on that island by themselves now, either sent there by their predecessor, or they put themselves there through some ways of doing things. What ideas or advice can you share to our listeners to help gain traction to move into a partnering role?

Emily Huegel: Yeah, that is the hardest thing, right? I was there, had to work through it in a couple of different instances. And for me there are two main ways that I think that I was able to merge the two, right? First was through operational knowledge. For one thing that I learned, yeah.

One thing I’ve learned in my career is that, when you work with folks further up the chain is that time is incredibly valuable, right? And if someone has to spend time explaining why this is a problem to me, or why safety is slowing down production or things like that, then they’re not going to buy into me.

Why would they waste their time? Everyone has 24 hours in a day. And the further you go up or the more operational responsibility you have, the harder it is to prioritize all the different needs. One of my favorite roles that I’ve had within my entire career has been actually a process safety manager, right?

So I got to merge safety, but I learned so much about the process at many different facilities, many different layouts. And it forced me to work with operators, maintenance technicians, engineers. Like we talked about earlier, accounting, right? Making sure that we have a spare parts, the PSM, right?

And this knowledge really allowed me to understand what problems sites experience, but also, what is the impact to safety when they encounter these issues, right? And we did everything from safety failures, but also, production losses we talked about tremendously.

And so that just gave me so much knowledge there. It’s very hard to figure out where to stop and end it. But it just really allowed me to understand during a normal operation, if something goes wrong, what’s the impact to the team. And having to slow down and explain everything to me and the heat of the moment no one’s going to be able to do that effectively without feeling pressure.

And so me starting off with that groundwork really allowed me to build up. 

Hilary Framke: Okay, before you go to your second point, because I love this point so much, I want it to be emphasized. Business acumen is probably the most underrated skill that an EHS person should carry. Yes. Because it is so closely linked to credibility and to trust, right?

If you don’t know your business, you don’t know what your business makes. What the products are called, what the machines are called. How can you possibly understand the risk? 

Emily Huegel: You can’t. There’s no way.

Hilary Framke: You have to be able to navigate the floor. You should be able to lead a manufacturing tour floor on your own, without having to oper—. Now, I think there’s great value in operations doing it. I’m not saying that’s not true. But you should, as an EHS person be able to do it as well because you know that layout so well, and you understand the process so well that you can do it from start to finish, right? In a way that makes sense.

Because it’s like you said, when an incident occurs or when something is transpiring and I have to back up 10 steps and explain to you, okay, this machine which is in this area makes this process, this is how it works. Now, I definitely don’t feel like you’re going to be able to help me. 

Emily Huegel: Absolutely not.

Hilary Framke: Yes, that in the assembly area. Yes, I’ve seen and it goes up, I’m with you. Now, what do you say? That adds so much. And I think every EHS person I know, I learned this in a grassroots way because I started at a very entry level role like you with my business. I had to go live out on the floor to learn the language, right?

But I think there’s significant value in doing this no matter what role you take on. You should live in the trenches for a while. Absolutely. Loan yourself out to the departments and, see the jobs, learn the jobs, talk about the equipment, right? There’s another reason this adds significant value.

When you find an EHS issue, let’s say there’s a very highly repetitive ergonomic problem. You see the indicators that tell you it’s a problem before you actually ask anyone anything, they’ve got band aids on every finger and there’s no cuts. That contact pressure, right?

Is creating constant cuts and blisters, right? Because we’re handling it. We’re doing it all manually. So you see this ergonomic issue. And if I go to my business and I say, hey, there’s this problem. We’re making the sensor, it’s really difficult, right? Look at people and they’re having to wear band aids, etc.

It’s really hard on their hands, right? And I’m trying to make a case for automating this process, improving this process. I don’t have a budget set aside, to spend hundreds of thousands of dollars to improve a process. If in fact, it is also for productivity at said sensor assembly and for quality at sensor assembly, right?

And I knew that then the three of us, the ops leader, the quality leader, the EHS leader can go as a united front and say, building the sensor assembly is difficult to do. It’s hurting the production on our line. It’s hurting our quality results. We’re constantly seeing problems at this area, and it’s very difficult to do from an ergonomic perspective.

It’s highly repetitive. It’s hurting our workers. How can a plant leader say no to that? 

Emily Huegel: Exactly. Absolutely.

Hilary Framke: But if you don’t have the business acumen to understand, like you said, where are the production losses? Where are the things that I should know about the areas that are difficult, from an operations perspective, I can guarantee there’s also a safety issue there.

Emily Huegel: Absolutely. Yeah. Hands down. And, I think half of the time it’s figuring out where to even get this knowledge from without bothering somebody or adding to someone else’s workload. One thing that I had a operations leader a few years back and he challenged everyone that was a corporate or regional employee to go spend a day in the life of an operator. You show up when they show up, you take a break when they take a break, you do every task with them. And that impacted me so strongly. That’s something I actually require anyone that works for me. They have to start by doing a day in the life of three different operators from different groups, right? So quality tech, operator, maintenance tech. But also spend time with all the different area managers to understand from an operator perspective.

What are the stressors? And then from a management perspective, what are the stressors? And it’s just incredible how much you can learn. Plus you build that relationship, right? You always have someone you can go back to say, hey, we’re seeing this at a different site. What would you say we should look into here?

So the second point was communication. But like we talked about earlier, it’s got to be targeted communication, with key actions. Because think about when you go on vacation.

And you come back and you see your inbox, you don’t even know where to start. Do you start by reading everything and prioritizing? Do you just go back to the first day you were out. Just imagine that, but daily from an operations leader perspective, because, they’ve got safety, but they also have production, reliability, quality, supply chain issues. Yeah. Good grief. There’s a reason I’m in EHS and not operations because I have so much respect for those folks, but I could not keep up with everything. And as someone that is juggling all those different things, you’ve got to have communication that is clear, it’s direct, and it’s routine.

So maybe for some folks, that’s the equivalent of a weekly update email. I’ve got some leaders I do that with. For others, it’s a bi weekly thirty minute touch point, right? Because if you don’t put time on my calendar, I’m not going to read your email. I get that, right? But it’s catering to your audience, what that targeted communication is, because the target is the person who’s receiving the communication, right?

It’s not the message. You need to figure out what is the best way to communicate with whatever leaders are going to make the most impact for you and your efforts as well. 

Hilary Framke: Yep. I think too often we make assumptions, right? About how you’ll want to hear from me. This is how you’ll want to connect.

This is how often you will talk to me, right? And sometimes we should ask first. We should say, I’m gonna make the assumption. The only assumption I will make is that you want to do a really good job from an EHS perspective with your team. Let’s make that assumption. So if that’s the case, here’s what I need from you.

Here are your responsibilities that I need you to fulfill. I need you to be locked in to training, getting people to training as assigned. I need you to be doing hazard identification on a regular basis, getting your inspections. I need you to be doing incident investigations. We don’t need to go through everything. But lay out the responsibilities that you have for that operational leader and how they’re locked in.

And then ask the question, how can I help you? What do you need from me to be successful in these areas? How often would you like to connect? Do you need a report from me on a weekly basis with all your corrective actions that are open? Do you need a report from me or, reminders from me when incident investigations are still pending?

That’s right. And ask them that question first and then say, okay, great. Here’s what we agree to. You’re going to do this. I’m going to do this. We’ll let this ride for a month or so, right? First, 30, 60 days. And then we’ll see if that’s serving us. Are we hitting our goals, right?

Do we have all of our inspections done? Do we have all of our incidents closed? How are we doing on corrective actions? What’s our closure rate? And if all of the metrics are green, I would say that’s a winning formula. 

Emily Huegel: That’s right. Absolutely. 

Hilary Framke: If they’re not, then you can go back and say we agreed to this. It’s not performing well. 

Emily Huegel: That’s right. Yeah. 

Hilary Framke: What can we do differently? 

Emily Huegel: That’s right. The evaluating your status, right? Going back, doing the full loop of continuous improvement, right? And you’ve got to be able to do so in whatever way that your target needs, but also you’ve got to remember your needs too.

So I think that’s a good point that you started alluding to, right? Are you in the green? Just because one avenue might work for your target audience, it might not be meeting what you agreed upon from the start. 

Hilary Framke: Yep. Don’t just assume the ops leader knows how they should be locked in. Take the time to agree on, take that first meeting. Let’s say the ops person is new or you’re new, or maybe you both have been there for 15 years, but the relationship is not good. This can always be restarted. Sit down, have that strategic meeting, agree on the things that you’re going to participate in together, the different responsibilities, and be prepared for them to say, this is what I need from you.

Emily Huegel: Absolutely, yeah. 

Hilary Framke: This isn’t just a one way street. You’re obviously going to need a specific activity from you. I need you to run this meeting. I need you to run this project. I need you to have an EHS rep in every incident investigation because we’re terrible at root cause analysis and we bumble all over ourselves, right?

Be prepared to respond to that and I think if you can find it as an EHS person to be partnering. You’ll find that your customer is far more open to be partnered. 

Emily Huegel: Absolutely. 

Hilary Framke: There you go. Emily thank you so much for everything that you contributed today.

I love what you’re doing. I love the way you’re doing it. And I feel like you gave our listeners some excellent nuggets today that they can pick up and run with tomorrow that would really make a difference in culture and trust building and engagement.

So thank you for everything and for being a guest on my podcast today. 

Emily Huegel: Absolutely. Thank you for having me. I’ve really had a great time. 

Hilary Framke: Fantastic. Good luck to you in your EHS journey.