Building a Culture Around Genuine Care

Episode Transcript:-

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Hilary Framke:  Good morning listeners. You’re back for another episode of Elevate EHS, our EHS podcast talking about all the things. I’m Hilary Framke, your host, and I’ve got Autumn Crum here today. Hi, Autumn.

Autumn Crum: Hi, Hilary. Thanks for having me.

Hilary Framke: Oh, I’m so excited about this. So let’s dig into it. Tell us about your EHS journey thus far. 

Autumn Crum: So my EHS journey thus far has really been a continual learning experience, shaped by different roles across many industries. I started out in a college university setting and transition to government work to hospital environments to oil and gas, and I’ve ended up here in a manufacturing focused setting.

Hilary Framke: Oh my gosh, you’ve done it all. 

Autumn Crum: Yes. It has been quite the journey. And I realize manufacturing is what I really like more than the others.

Hilary Framke: Do you love how dynamic it is or what is it  about manufacturing that makes that your favorite?

Autumn Crum: I’m not sure that I could pinpoint anything. I think it’s the environment that you go into every day and the people that you’re going into and you get to really help them. Being in a university or a government type setting, you’re really focused on compliance, regulatory adherence, training. You don’t really feel like you’re helping anyone. With oil and gas and with manufacturing, you really get to work with people every day and collaborate with them and make improvements that they appreciate. 

Hilary Framke: Amazing. So speaking of that, do you think that your approach to EHS has evolved over time, especially as you’ve moved industry to industry?

Autumn Crum: Yes, it really has. And I’ve noticed it changed more over the last few years where I’ve started to take a more proactive approach, less compliance, less regulatory adherence, and really take on that more holistic where you’re being proactive. You’re talking to employees. You’re engaging with them. That’s where I’ve really found the biggest benefit and also the biggest evolution.

And I’m still trying to continue that because if you’re not getting employees engaged or other people engaged in what you’re doing and getting input. Then you’re really missing the mark because you need as much input and buy in as you can get and that’s really how you get it by engaging people with what you’re doing.

Hilary Framke: So true. I found the same thing in my career. When I first started out, I was so black and white. You will be compliant or noncompliant, you will care about EHS or you don’t care about EHS, like two camps only. And then the further you get, I think the more progressive you become in leadership, you find, wow there’s a lot of gray here for some compliance programs  that don’t result in risk reduction. It literally is a rule for a rule sake. Should we care about those as much as we should care about? And then there’s rules that don’t even cover a significant risk, right? That we’ve got to go tackle and get people on board with without depending on a compliance regulation, in order to push it over the finish line. It’s so interesting to see those layers peel back as you grow. 

Autumn Crum: Oh yes. I had started to realize I really just stumbled into the employee engagement piece when I started in oil and gas and I was so green. I did not know anything about it. So I just go to a job site and watch and talk with people.

They were concerned what am I doing wrong? I’m like, what are you doing wrong? Why are you asking me this question? Yeah. But then they understood that I’m just trying to learn and they also just want to understand. That’s where I really started to see the benefit of engaging with employees. Once they get comfortable with you and talking with you, then they’re comfortable enough to ask you questions about why do we have to wear our hard hats this way?

Why do we have to wear gloves when we do this? A lot of them, you could say it’s a regulatory requirement, but that’s really not going to get you what you need. If you explain to them you need to wear your hard hat this way because otherwise it falls off if you do this task or when you’re welding, you have to be able to do this or these gloves actually help protect your hands on this. And really getting to it and talking with them, then you also get feedback on what’s working, what’s not working. If they maybe need different gloves or they don’t have the gloves in their size.

So it’s a really important conversations that I’ve learned the most in. And I don’t think at the time when I started doing it that I realized the benefit to safety it really has.

Oh, I love that. 

So Autumn and I met at a recent HSC Global Series event, the North America Summit. Shout out to Paul Clark and his team.

Awesome event. And Autumn, we haven’t met one to one, but then you were on a panel and I heard you engage in some of the conversations. So clear to me that you want to sit at the forefront of EHS and going here. So let’s shift gears a little bit because in the prep call we had talked about this idea of employee engagement enabled by genuine care. So what distinguishes leaders for you who genuinely care about EHS versus those who merely just pay a lip service?

This is a great question and quite timely. I actually had a conversation with a vice president recently who asked a similar question. For me, what I’ve noticed over the course of my career is that leaders who genuinely care about EHS or about safety, don’t say they care about safety or EHS. Thinking back to the ones that you really know or that really get it.

I don’t think I’ve ever heard that from any of them. I’ve actually typically heard the opposite I don’t know that I care about it enough, or, they don’t ever know that they’re doing enough. They never come out and say that they care about it but they demonstrate it through their commitment and through their actions, and they never show anything different that they don’t care about it.

So they’re visibly involved in safety initiatives. They prioritize safety in the decision making process in changes that are made, in their conversations. They allocate resources, whether it’s money, people, time to support a program, an initiative anything that is coming up. So it’s really not just someone that says it, because typically if you’re saying it.

I don’t know. Maybe you don’t. In my experience they typically don’t have to say it. But they also engage employees at all levels and by engaging, they have conversations. They don’t even have to be centered around safety all the time, but it’s just creating that relationship with employees where they’re comfortable talking to you. They ask you about your family. You ask them about their family or any issues that have come up recently, whether it’s personal or work related and just taking a moment. Then when something is a hazard, is a concern, is a problem. That relationship is established, and they feel comfortable talking to them about it.

The other thing with engaging the employees is also providing, they provide that positive recognition. There’s a lot more positivity that comes in their actions and the words that they say than negative. They’re thanking people for doing a good job, for working safely. Whether they’re telling them thank you or putting on an employee appreciation lunch or ice cream social or anything like that those go a long way with showing the leaders who genuinely care and that’s you know really what I’ve seen.

Hilary Framke: Oh, I love so many of the things that you say. I wish it was like transcribing here on the screen so that people can see it as a bullet list. One of the main things I love that you said, the demonstration. When leaders ask me, or when I feel this, that they don’t genuinely care. And I’m starting to hone in on that and say, your actions aren’t supporting the words that you’re saying to employees.

We have an issue here. One of the things that I’ll call out to get them to see what I see is, tell me about the presence of EHS in your business. What programs, what events, what activities, what opportunities for engagement do you have that is EHS focused? For instance, if you have a tier meeting, do you incorporate EHS?

Does it have one question? Does it have seven questions? Is it usually 30 seconds long of the tier meeting? Does it actually get a nice percentile of the total tier meeting? Or is it a placeholder? As you said, are you going out and having engagements specifically around this topic of relationship building, even asking questions like, tell me about which of the stations in your rotation you hate.

Why? Usually it’s a trending topic. Most people hate the same one. And it has ergonomic implications or quality implications or productivity. It always jams. Every time I go up here, it’s a problem, and that can tell you so much about your business, right? So it’s this, like you said, the demonstration, the prioritization of EHS as a core activity in business.

I think it’s the greatest way. As you said, you don’t even have to ask when people are doing those things and they’re demonstrating it, they’re prioritizing it, they’re showing that they care for employees, you don’t even have to ask them if they care about EHS.

Autumn Crum: Oh yeah. There are people that say they care about safety, and I genuinely think that they do, they just don’t know how to. 

Hilary Framke: Yes.

Autumn Crum: It’s another aspect that I run into where someone will ask me the question, how is this leader with safety? That’s a difficult question to to answer because, they say they care about safety, and I genuinely believe that they want to, but they don’t know how to.

And they’re the same ones that if you ask who owns the safety responsibility, they’re going to say the safety person, not everyone, not me, not everyone, not those and so that’s how you can really distinguish who cares about safety, who gets it or who doesn’t. 

Hilary Framke: Do you have any practical strategies that you’ve built out in your career to attack this genuine care engagement issue? 

Autumn Crum: Yeah, so this also comes relevant to how safety has evolved, how I have evolved. We’re actually using a new concept now called active caring safety 365 because we care 365 days a year. It is a program that has evolved, and the approach really emphasizes employee engagement, collaboration and creating trust. When I say trust, it means they tell you something, you say you’re going to do something, and then you do it. So if you don’t do anything with it, it turns into a negativity, a blame, then you’re not creating that trust, but it’s really a proactive engagement tool to care for employees being.

We have leaders that will go out and talk to an employee and ask a series of questions. They’re curious. Some people, when we started, confused it with behavior based safety a little bit. We could understand why, but it is very different. Your behavior based safety really focuses on monitoring and correcting.

individual behaviors. We don’t look at behaviors or the person at all. It’s focused on the task that they’re doing and then any difficulties that they may have in completing the task or hazards that they’ve identified, but it’s nothing to do with the person. It’s just you need to talk to people to get this done.

As well, behavior based safety typically. You could complete it without even talking to anyone. They’re usually checklists that you just check through.

Hilary Framke: Yeah, you do like a snapshot of behaviors that you’re seeing, right? 

Autumn Crum: Yeah. Are they lifting correctly? Do they have the proper personal protective equipment on?

Were they following this rule? With active caring safety there is not a checklist. There are no real lists. There are suggested questions to get a conversation started, but it’s really about a conversation that a leader has with an employee, and it’s meant to  foster a collaborative two way feedback environment.

Where employees are encouraged to look out for one another. Our leaders are curious, they ask questions, and they listen. Listening is that big part and being curious, so ask more questions to understand what’s happening. At the same time, the employees provide feedback and information. They have the opportunity to say what’s working, what’s not working.

Here’s some hazards that I’ve identified. But on that list of questions it can be, what’s the biggest hazard that you deal with at work? Where’s the next place that there’s the potential for an injury? What’s the most difficult part about this task that you are completing? Then you continue down that path.

And then working with the employee to come up with a solution because our employees are the experts and they know the problems. They also know the solutions nine times out of ten. They can also  tell you if something’s going to work or not work. So really working with them on that and following through on the commitment to do better.

So it really creates a culture of trust and shared responsibility, and employees need to feel that responsibility, that ownership, and they can’t do that without providing their input and feeling valued for it. 

Hilary Framke: Oh my gosh, I love this program so much. I have some questions. So tell me about who’s doing these ACS 360, 365, sorry. 

Autumn Crum: So they’re meant to be a leadership engagement. Our leaders, meaning supervisors, managers, directors, vice presidents, you name it. Anyone that is a leader that goes out on the floor. And when I say the floor, I’m referring to manufacturing, but we have a lot of service workers as well. It works everywhere.

Anytime someone’s visiting a location. So they don’t just have to report there. It can be a visitor coming in and doing an engagement. So something else that we’ve started doing, or some of our teams have started doing, are lessons learned, a one page PowerPoint slide on an engagement that they had recently and what they learned from it, because there’s so much carryover in operations that someone else at another site could learn from what they learned.

And it’s also not just finding things that are not going right. It’s finding things that are going well. 

Hilary Framke: Yeah. 

Autumn Crum: What can we learn from those? Why is it going well? Why is this person operating in the correct fashion? Why are they using the correct tool?

Why are they wearing their safety glasses? And how do we get other people to do that? So really taking those learnings and not just focusing on negatives, but also positive.

Hilary Framke: Yeah using it as a recognition tool as well for calling out people that are doing things the way that we expect and getting a good result.

That’s amazing. Okay. So leaders are doing this. Now, is it actually a KPI that you’re tracking and have assigned to do so many by leader or by location? 

Autumn Crum: Yes. So we are rolling that out actually right now. The KPI, the program came first. The KPI comes second and it’s meant for each leader to do at least one per month and document it.

So it’s one thing to do it. It’s another to document it and review it, but the metric behind it is the number of engagements done times 

200, 000 divided by hours worked. 

Yeah like a injury rate. Yeah. 

So we use it to keep the rates somewhat consistent, we try and keep a lot of our rates that way as well.

Hilary Framke: Oh, no, that’s great because then you’re not assigning too many if there happens to be like a bigger leadership presence at a site versus, employees that they can go talk to. We know that sometimes happens. 

Autumn Crum: Yes. And sites can reallocate their numbers if they want to do more a site leader could say, I want everyone to do 4 or director or, VP and say, I want my sites to do our leaders to do this many. So we’ll look at all. 

Hilary Framke: That’s amazing. So they documented the actions assigned. Are they responsible for owning those actions or does it go to whoever makes sense, facilities, maintenance?

How are you doing that corrective action tracking process? 

Autumn Crum: Yeah, so they are responsible for putting it in and for tracking it, but it can be assigned out. It can basically be forwarded to the person where it makes sense, but it’s up to the person that put it in that did the engagement to also follow up with the employee and let them know what’s happening because they all know that there’s usually not a quick fix and usually something doesn’t happen overnight or in one week.

Sometimes we have to order things. Sometimes they’re back ordered. Sometimes you need a group involved, but making sure you keep that communication so that the person doesn’t think you’re just not  doing anything about it. 

Hilary Framke: Awesome. And then finally, have you had some pushback on what about behaviors? Are we not going to tackle unsafe behaviors? What do we do if we see one when we’re doing an ACS? Are we supposed to ignore, have you run into any issues with that? 

Autumn Crum: No. So the focus of it is not looking at behaviors or things. that are not going correctly. But if you do see them, you do have an obligation to say something. But in the training and the rollout of the program, we’ve also coached our leaders on how to positively have that conversation. When you identified that they’re not wearing safety glasses. Not just saying do this or I’m going to write you up or the next time I see it, you’re getting written up or put those on.

Come on. Those are not really positive conversations and don’t really drive change.  So we’ve coached the leaders on talking with the employee.

I see you’re not wearing your safety glasses right now. Can you explain to me why, what we can do to get you to wear them more frequently or when you’re supposed to and come to that understanding.

We actually had one presented today in a meeting I was sitting in and we had a supervisor that did an engagement and found an employee not wearing their safety glasses. And in talking with the person, they were still wearing a mask for personal reasons, and it was fogging up their safety glasses. So they worked through better safety glasses for them to wear, better mask for them to wear to help prevent that, and the person now over the last couple weeks has started consistently wearing their safety glasses because they fixed this problem.

But you’re never going to know the problem if you don’t ask, and you don’t take the time to listen. So that’s where it’s really beneficial and it’s not necessarily a bad thing to identify or point out that someone’s not doing something they’re supposed to. It’s just how you say it, how you have the conversation.

Hilary Framke: I think we too often assume they know that they’re breaking the rules and they’re trying to get away with something. Not the case for the majority.

Autumn Crum: Most people want to do well, want to do the right thing. Just sometimes they’re set up for failure.

Hilary Framke: Right it may be the safety glasses are uncomfortable. Like you said, they’re fogging up. Maybe there aren’t any in the area that they have access to. We need to change the supply points. There can be so many reasons.

I love that this program that you’ve built out is so based on listening and engaging and in a lot of ways like investigating to find the root cause for the nonconformance, and less focused on the behavior and you did something wrong that needs to be addressed and more on, there’s a systemic failure here. And we understand why that’s happening. 

Autumn Crum: Yeah and this really ties back to our previous conversations on supervisors that genuinely care and are able to show it and those supervisors that want to care, but maybe don’t know how to or don’t have the tools yet. This is one tool that is easy to provide them because it’s free and it just takes 5, 10 minute engagement to talk to employees and you’ll find these things out and come up with solutions.

So it’s a pretty nice approach that tackles the safety culture, tackles leadership engagement all of these things, and it’s not something you go out and pay thousands of dollars for to do. 

Hilary Framke: To transform your business, absolutely. And I think there are so many listeners, unfortunately, who are still working for employers with this blame culture.

Blaming employees, going down the disciplinary pathways, constant negative interactions around EHS. What advice can you offer them on how to help them shift from fault finding to moving into addressing systemic issues and showing this genuine care? How do they move the needle?

Autumn Crum: It won’t happen overnight. Don’t get discouraged easily, and don’t wait for everyone to be on board to start. So shifting from a blame culture to one that addresses systemic issues and creates that culture of care takes time and really requires a strategy and sustained effort. So often people get started and then they get discouraged because in a week they don’t see results.

That’s like working out at 8am in the morning and weighing yourself at 5 o’clock and being disappointed that you didn’t lose 10 pounds yet. Doesn’t work like that. Life just doesn’t work like that. So my recommendation is that you start small. You’re never going to force someone to do something or to change or to care if they don’t want to.

They have to want to all on their own. The first thing you want to do is you’ll find your champion. Find that one person, hopefully a leader you can find, but find someone who is either already doing the things that you’re looking for, whereas on that right path exhibits those positive interactions, those not blaming employees on incidents or things that are not going well and help them be your advocate.

I don’t say like hype person in a meeting or in discussions of someone starts negatively talking about. The changes that you know you’re wanting to make or that you see but someone that can help advocate for you in those situations and starting small again, starting with one person and not trying to force everyone to change all at once. Start by sharing best practices, by wins that you’ve seen someone that took the right systematic approach, human based approach, not falling into those traps and blaming employees for what’s going wrong. 

Hilary Framke: I was thinking they could be sneaky too and invite a speaker or do a training session around fault finding and blame culture or HOP, right? And try and plant some seeds.

Autumn Crum: You’re starting small, even a lunch and learn or a toolbox talk on that or Hey, I saw this article. I think it’s really useful or throwing those in, in an incident investigation, hopefully your teams are getting together.

When I say teams, your site leaders, supervisors, managers, and yourself are getting involved in incident investigations. As you’re sitting there talking about root causes, you start throwing those out, okay, so you’re saying it’s because the employee didn’t perform a good habit, or did something that they shouldn’t have done.

Then you ask the question, why didn’t they do what they were supposed to? Obviously it’s going to be different every scenario, but you start initiate those changes by asking the questions and getting them to try and knock those down and backing it up with facts. Also benchmarking, what other organizations, companies, it can either be other sites in your organization that are doing it.

It can be other sites or organizations that are competitors to you that may be are vocal about having that type of approach that, they don’t do a blame culture, don’t have a blame culture. It’s a what, not a who and how that’s working. One thing that I’ve seen a lot in meetings that I’ve been in are when a site leader talks about an incident investigation and they really drill down to the true root cause and how that’s worked well and what’s worked well for them, there’s other leaders see that working for them, see that approach working, seeing that lesson working for them. And they’re more likely to get involved when they see someone of similar organization being successful and seeing that when sharing it does a lot for buy in. Other things are promoting open communication, encouraging employees to speak up about safety concerns.

And if they’re concerned about retribution or retaliation for submitting a concern. See about creating an anonymous reporting mechanism. So electronic means sometimes you can submit anonymously or sometimes it’s just paper and pencil, regardless of the type of environment.

It’s really good for anonymous reporting. We’ve put them up throughout sites or made them available online and also focusing on systems not individuals, even as trying to be forward thinking and having that systems approach. It’s. It’s sometimes hard not to go down the path of blaming an employee.

Catching yourself and remembering this is a who, not a what, this is not something I can fix. You’re not going to fix a person. 

Hilary Framke: Yeah. And to be able to eradicate it, I think is a piece of feedback. So even if it was the most significant contributing factor that they were distracted and tired and that is really why we feel like this happened.

Are they the last person that works for us that ever is not going to be distracted or tired? Will this retraining them or having a conversation with them about distraction do for the future of our business? 

Autumn Crum: Yes. I just listened to an investigation here recently where an employee had gloves on and wiped at their face and got a cut in their eye. Basically the root cause was that, they practice poor hygiene because they left their gloves on to wipe their brow. I’m like why did they need to wipe their brow? Why were there sharp things in their gloves?

Hilary Framke: Yes it’s the easiest answer and it’s the most comforting answer because we feel like it’s isolated.

I can fix this quickly and I can get back to work. I think there’s a lot more discomfort with we have a systemic problem that will require time and energy and potentially money to solve which is going to take our eye off the productivity ball. That’s not our first choice. This is just talk about being human. Least resistance is always going to be our first option. But it’s not the most effective option. I love all the things that you said. Thank you for all of your feedback on that. There are such good avenues to go pursue, to start to move and change this needle. I think the most important thing that you said, role modeling.

Even if it starts with just you and one other person, you can start to set that tone. You can show why that’s  effective. You can get feedback from employees who saw this new approach that was so much better. Make them fill out an anonymous survey and say, this was so much easier and more comforting to go through than our old way of doing things, right? Start to collect and make yourself a majority in that camp and you’ll see that change. So Autumn, it has been an incredible honor to have you. I love this podcast so much. It’s employee focused. It’s been about genuine care, leadership involvement. Thank you for sharing your project around ACS 365, a huge fan of it.

I think continue to do it. Can’t wait to hear more. Years from now after you’ve had it really embedded in your business, how much it’s transformed your culture. Thank you for all that you do. 

Autumn Crum: Oh, thank you for having me. I really appreciate it. This was a great opportunity. Great discussion. 

Hilary Framke: And listeners. We’ll see you next time. Bye for now.