Insights from Matthew Smith on Elevate EHS | Ep:1
Episode Transcript
Cary:
I want to welcome Matt Smith to Elevate EHS podcast. Matt love for you to introduce yourself. Tell us about yourself and your career, and then we’ll get digging into some of this EHS best practices. How’s that?
Matthew:
Sure, man really happy to be here and always appreciate the offer to at least come and chat with you. I’ve been doing some form of safety for almost 19 years now. Started in the Air Force, handed a piece of paper that happened to be a safety job and got to do that for the next six years and ended up loving it so much. I got my Bachelor’s and Master’s in it and then when I got out in 2010, I bounced around to a couple different industries, whether it be solar, I built giant domes all over the world for cold storage and then landed at Brasfield & Gorrie, back in 2013 and been here for 11 years. I was about to say that’s over a decade. Yeah. And so it’s been great. So I started in Birmingham, moved to Orlando and then up here in Atlanta now, but I’ve lived as crazy.
So I did the math on this I’ve actually worked and lived in 34 of the 50 States. Good gravy.
Cary:
That’s impressive.
Matthew:
Yeah. So it was one of those things that’s like my claim to fame is that’s, I don’t know if I want to add any more to that, but that’s where I’m at. So most people haven’t even traveled to 34 states.
I’m always glad I remember there’s only 50 States. I’m always going to be like, there’s 51 States, right? Oh yeah, that’s right.
Cary:
It’s all good. All right. So let’s go ahead and jump into it. So I know we had talked previously, and we’ve known each other for a while, especially with American Society of Safety Professionals.
And I know you’ve gotten involved with human and organizational performance. But in construction, things are a little bit different, they’re always a little bit different. We do things differently than most people. I want to talk specifically about craft workers.
Craft workers and construction different companies, they come and they go sometimes even the companies you hire pulling people in from the hall, from unions or just picking them up as they need them. So the craft workers are transient and then it worked directly for you, right?
Sometimes it didn’t work directly for your subcontractor. So in what ways, though, can we engage with these frontline workers? They’re the ones doing the work. They’re the ones that have the greatest risk, right? The sharp end of the stick. How are you engaging in them more in the decision making process and in the safety process?
With all of those challenges that we just talked about.
Matthew:
Yeah, it’s definitely a challenge. With the temp labor market is huge right now and the 3rd and 4th tier subs. And so I know it’s kind of cliche and I know a bunch of the human performance people say it, but we really have to change our mindset and that the workers are the problem.
I think that’s still something that is very notorious in the construction industry, hey, let’s blame the worker. Let’s focus on the worker being the problem or even saying that hey, when workers are transient to leave for a dollar more, that’s still the same thing, right?
It’s a fancier way of saying hey, the workers are at fault. How do we not make him transient? First step in the journey I think is just really truly looking at our workers whether they’re temp labor whether they’re a tiered sub these people are actually to your point doing the task.
Yeah. Let’s actually talk to them and then the two big things that I take away are one we have to get out of this mindset of pushing safety from the top down.
This is notorious. This is how it’s always been done is that people sitting at a desk and they get a bunch of directors get together and they talk about safety and how they did it 15 years ago and we’re going to create a new policy and not even ask the people that are actually doing the work. And so I think we have to break that cycle somehow.
And then I think what’s really interesting Todd Conklin talks about this and a bunch of psychologists will talk about this of that. We’ve hit an insanity moment where we’re asking the same questions we have for the last two decades and expecting different answers and different results.
I think asking better questions is that 1st step and who we ask the questions to. I think a bunch of safety directors sitting around a room talking about policy and stuff like that is fine but if we’re not engaging and asking the field force hey, what do you want to see? Where do you find this process going wrong?
Where do you find it going right? And just truly asking them not just, ‘Hey, are you okay?’ ‘Hey, how’s it going?’ But actually digging in and asking the better questions. The change in the mindset and then asking the better questions are two of the biggest things that we have to focus on as we try to move forward.
Cary:
Let’s talk about that. I want to go down that rabbit hole just a little bit deeper, So I love it.
So you’re engaging with them, you’re asking them, ‘Hey, how can we do it better?’ Not just, ‘ hey, put on your safety glasses’ kind of thing, so these people are coming in. They haven’t, in the most part, they haven’t done any of the pre planning.
They haven’t done anything. All they do is they inherit the system that they have, right? So they have to operate within the constraints of that system. So when you talk to them, how are you influencing that going forward? So what do you do with that information? Sometimes it’s too late to change the system on that project, right?
You do what you can do to make it better for that project. Are you using that information to build on though?
Matthew:
Yeah, I think you have to, right? So I think we, Whether you look at learning teams or, safety committees or whatever you want to call it. I think there has to be some stepping stone for you to use that information past the point of that project, especially since most of our projects only 12 to 18 months long, and then that team breaks up and you go to a new team or a new location.
You start all over again and really pushing those types of things. But I think for us, it’s just a, it’s a consistency I think if you were to ask people, some of the frustrations from construction or safety, a lot of it is just consistent and I think that’s where we struggle, this new process and this new way of thinking is not something that just comes instantaneously. You can’t just take a class and be like, I’m now an expert at facilitating. I’m now an expert at asking better questions. It’s a consistent. message that you’re giving to the field of, ‘Hey, it’s okay to ask questions.’
And honestly, what we found is we actually get some of the best ideas from people that aren’t old hands in the construction industry. So it’s people that maybe come from a different industry, people that come from a different experience, they come in because it’s just a different viewpoint, right?
If you’re a carpenter for the last 20 years, you may have swung a hammer a certain way or use a tool a certain way than someone that was like, hey, have you ever thought about using the tool this way? For us, it’s how do we encourage that? Because it’s, construction still very keep your mouth shut and do the job a little bit.
And so how do you break that wall down and encouraging? It’s just, it’s a slow drip. It’s not something that comes easy. It’s a consistent message of it’s okay to share. It’s okay to question. It’s okay to bring stuff up and it’s okay to improve and actually showcase that you’re doing something with it.
Cause I think a lot of times we get some great ideas to your point. It just hey, that’s a really good idea. And then nothing ever comes of it. And then that person goes to the next job and they’re doing the exact same thing. The exact same thing. Yeah. And so that’s where I think it goes to that message of, if you’re going to go down this journey, you have to be consistent and you have to be willing to utilize the feedback that you’re given in a way that is impactful for the guys given it.
Otherwise it actually ends up having a reverse effect. It makes it actually people are more negative and less likely to share. So you run down that path in that situation.
Cary:
If you beat them over the head with it then your risk identification or risk awareness goes, just, it’s there, you’re just not aware of it as much because they’re not sharing. Let’s talk about that, right? You talked about empowering the worker a little bit, right? Getting them engaged. Trying to get information from them to make the system better. A couple of things. One, do you have some examples of what systems have you improved? And number two, and the other one is it’s not a top down approach, but I know with HOP, right? What are you seeing from leadership though? The conversations that you’re using to change that mindset of command and control. The worker’s always wrong. That black line kind of level of thinking to, ‘ hey, we know we have air in the place. We need to build a better system to make a tolerant of these errors’ So let’s talk about those two different things. Do you have any examples you can share of some systems that you’ve used to improve so that people can feel safer, right?
I think we had talked about a few in our previous discussions about that.
Matthew:
Yeah it’s just the sheer amount of ideas that come out once you open the floodgates. It’s pretty shocking. And some of them are good. Some of them are absolutely terrible,
totally good. Yeah, but you have any specific ones, even one or two that you said, hey, this is a great idea.
Let’s do it. Yes. So we had once. Up until 6 years ago we had tower cranes when we have multiple tower cranes are flying near each other.
Cary:
Sure.
Matthew:
It was always, hey, we’re going to communicate better. Every time we got into it. That was always the learning from it was communicate.
Hey, we’re going to get these fancy radios that are only channeled into it and again it’s, relying on humans, which we know humans are going to air when you’re sitting. Oh, yeah. for 12 hours a day, you’re going to zone out at some point and not be paying attention. That’s just the reality of it.
And some of our guys had this really good idea of, hey, they actually make these anti collision devices and immediately everybody was like, hey, you can’t use these things. They don’t work. The typical response in construction, when you try to change anything or update anything. One of the things was that it was one guy that had a collision that was ended up not being a big deal, but was enough to pucker him a little bit, and so he actually had him installed on his tower cranes and it ended up being great.
So now all of our tower cranes, if you’re within another tower crane or a power line, you get an anti collision device put in now the tower crane. So instead of being able to go full speed into each other, when they reach a certain distance, they will automatically stop when they’re 10 feet apart, so they’ll never actually be able to touch each other.
And so it’s a very easy solution. It ended up not slowing down work at all. Guys ended up feeling more comfortable because you can’t accidentally get into something. Then we found out. Based off that as using those, we found out you can actually zone out areas on the units to where if you have a power line, you can actually keep the hook from even flying near the power line that the operator can’t actually even do it.
So just stuff like that. And that was actually figured out by one of the operators ‘Hey, you can actually even take this even further and zone out certain areas’. And so those are the stuff where, a lot of it is just people feeling comfortable sharing that stuff. I always use the one of, when someone cuts a really small piece of wood.
It’s usually either on your foot or holding it and you always end up saying, I’ll never cut into my hand. I’ll never do that. And I feel like once a year we get somebody that takes a circular saw and cuts into their hand. And so several of the guys have created their own little contraptions to hold small stakes into it.
And then that way they can cut the stake without actually cutting towards themselves with the circular saw. Seeing all the neat ways that people get the work done and then be able to do your point of just sharing that with it. So whether it be lessons learned, documents that we share out. This is what’s really interesting about engaging the craft field for us. So what we found was our craft field didn’t have access to our online learning system. You had to have an email address to log into the system. Our craft workers, if you’re a carpenter, you don’t have an email address at Brasfield & Gorrie. You don’t have the ability to log in and so what we did was we created a public website That anybody can access that shows you very basic. We call it skilled. It’s very basic videos of have you ever wondered how to change a circular blade or a grinder wheel or, very quick lessons on how to properly use a demo saw, and just stuff like that you think is pretty common knowledge.
But man, to your point of the transient lifestyle and just new workers coming in and backfilling our, our aging workforce, it’s one of those things where it’s super easy to have somebody watch an 80 second video on how to properly use a demo saw to give them idea of some do’s and don’ts that will keep them out of getting themselves into trouble. It’s an English and Spanish too, because that’s a big one for us. A lot of our workforce is Hispanic and don’t speak English. And because of that, you’re like training them in English is about as useless as you can imagine. So we did the videos in English and Spanish. So if you’re a Spanish speaking workforce or maybe you can’t read, you’re illiterate.
You at least can hear the video instead of looking at the piece of paper that talks about how to properly use a demo saw, but you can’t actually read and so that was a big thing for us. I think that was one way for us to reach our skill labor in a way that was impactful.
Cary:
Excellent. Very good. Let’s shoot to the second one. How are the conversations changing with leadership? So for not doing top down. How has their role in safety changed and what is the conversation like now, especially with the hot principles of how they respond how they view that blue line, black line, which is the difference between what they think is happening and what, an ideal utopia to what’s actually happening in the field with all the trade offs of short staffed or change in schedule or all the things that come up on a daily basis. How are you working to influence kind of their view and their part to play in building a better system?
Matthew:
We have really well intentioned leaders that want to do. They want to help in some way. I think sometimes they don’t know how to position themselves in a way that is beneficial to, if you’re having a team event or a team call. They want to participate not realizing that maybe their voice has a larger impact than they realize. When they say something to trigger point whether it be, ‘Hey, I can’t believe this is a recordable’ or ‘I can’t believe you got ibuprofen at the clinic’ or antibiotics or whatever the case may be.
And so a lot of it is just coaching them beforehand, right? And giving them questions, maybe that, hey, here’s some questions that I would like you to ask in the call to try to facilitate a conversation. That’s been a really big thing, especially our younger leaders that are coming up. They’re really eager.
They have a lot of energy. They want to participate. They’ve got 15, 000 other things they’re worried about. A safety call may not be on the highest priority right now and so we have found that our best calls are typically when we help that leadership person actually engage in the call or engage with the team in a way that is impactful and it’s beneficial to both parties, right?
We don’t expect our leaders to be experts in safety. We expect them to be expert leaders and participate in the construction process and safety process. But that is one spot where I think safety professionals missed the boat a little bit is spending some time coaching your leadership team and hey, here’s how I want you to participate and sometimes it’s good cop or bad cop, right?
Sometimes I do need leadership to take a stronger stance on something whether it be like ‘hey we’re missing some basic fundamentals here’ and then sometimes I need them just to maybe ask a question or throw something out there or challenge the team in a way that if I said it, maybe it doesn’t get a lot of headway.
But if the regional president comes in and is hey, why aren’t we doing that? Next thing all the projects are moving forward with something that I’ve been pushing for the last year. So there’s a lot of opportunities in those, learning teams, learning events that whether it’s be how they respond or what they respond with is critical to get right.
But it’s a coaching thing. I think it’s something that we just don’t spend a lot of time in doing. You’ve been doing this probably longer than I have, and I remember when I started you were the OSHA expert and you were tasked with knowing how tall guardrails were, how. Oh yeah.
How deep your excavation go before you gotta get your trench box or slope. And that was, and now it’s crazy is you can like, we have AFMs that ask Siri, how tall does a guard rail need to be? And it tells ’em, right? And then I think our job and our profession is shifting a little bit to maybe not be this safety resource, but maybe more of a safety guidance person or something like that, where you’re helping people get it right and sharing a message and, facilitators, a good word, whatever you want to call it.
Cary:
Facilitator is an excellent word. And when you think about it, it’s, the conversation, especially with leadership, was this is how many injuries were having, right? And we want to reduce our number of injuries. Of course, like you said, good intention. I want to be involved, but it’s I want to have fewer injuries, right?
But there wasn’t anything tangible for me to do as a leader, right? It was either luck or skill but more often or not, I didn’t have to do anything to get no injuries .Here what you’re talking about that facilitating is you’re giving them a role to play, right? And that’s cultural influence.
It’s saying, ‘Hey, if you ask it this way, or if you ask this question, then we’re going to get a better response’. People aren’t going to feel attacked. People aren’t going to feel like you’re blaming. People are going to feel like they’re part of an organization, part of something bigger, part of something better.
So I think facilitator is an excellent word.
Matthew:
Even the good intentions can go wrong, right? Hey, I bought everybody a hat that says we’ve gone 2 million man hours without a recordable, right? You think that’s really good intentions. You’re celebrating something. But in reality, What you’re celebrating is let’s not like whoever that team is that breaks that streak will forever be the team that broke that streak, right?
It’s not saying that you can’t do that. But it’s this honest, like good intention mistake that can cause people not to want to report stuff or cause people to go down this path. It’s a really interesting dynamic when you start thinking about that. It’s the old bloody pocket syndrome, right?
Where you don’t ever want to be that employee that dropped something on your toe and fractured your toe and now you broke the streak that the company had going or, nobody gets a Harley jacket because, you dropped a brick on your toe.
Cary:
And so come on, Matt, they used to give away charts.
Matthew:
Oh, yeah. No. I heard that over the weekend. You don’t want to be the guy, that guy that will forever be shamed because no one wins a truck because you cut your hand accidentally, and so it’s a different approach. And I think back to that consistency and little drips is just it’s, trying to change some of the old school guys may not be the best model, but trying to get some of the younger leaders that are up and coming bought into this process and they see the process and they see it actually work and they see the benefits of it. So when they step into a leadership position, they’re already bought in. So it’s really hard sometimes when you’re like, this is not a year goal. This is not a 2025 goal. This is hey, by 2030, I want all the leaders we have in our divisions to be bought into this process because they’re going to be their senior project managers.
Let’s get to those guys now and start going through that process.
Cary:
Excellent points and I think the interesting thing that some people don’t understand when it comes to HOP, these are just operating principles, right? So all the things you do for safety, right? You’re still doing. You’re still doing inspections.
You’re still doing incident investigations or incident reporting. You’re still doing all the block and tackling of, right? I still got to shore, still got to do trench boxes, still have to do fall protection. I’m still doing all of that. It just, within the organization, how we discuss it and how do we try to move forward right and learn.
That’s really where this comes into play. So I think this can go whether it’s safety or quality or production or schedule. These conversations better facilitating of conversations period is only going to make the organization better and you can apply the same principles to quality or to anything else.
I’ve seen learning teams for things much more than just safety. So perfect. Let’s talk about somebody gets hurt or you have an incident, right? We typically record what happened. But we don’t always look at what could have happened, right? So a good example is guy falls off a ladder, right?
Six foot ladder. He could get up and walk away and I won’t even know about it. He could get up and say, hey, I bruised myself and report it is something minor first aid or somewhere down there, right? Or I could fall and hurt myself or fall and get seriously injured, right? So it’s you run the full spectrum.
Are you guys doing more on your incident reporting to look more of that potential of serious injury fatality to look at? Hey, we had a minor outcome, but this could have been serious and we really need to look at our controls better. Are you guys starting to look down that path and what resources are you using to get to that?
How do you do it consistently?
Matthew:
Yeah, we are. It’s definitely been an interesting journey. What we found is that categorizing incidents, is very similar to risk in that it’s a sliding scale based off your life experiences, right? Oh, absolutely. And some people like. Ah! That’s not really, risky.
And you’re like, no, it’s really risky. I think what we found is very similar in categorizing incidents. We use sticky or stuff that can kill you. Very similar to some of the other companies that are out there doing it. I think we always go back to the potential versus outcome.
I think some companies have gone back and forth on it. We’re very much a potential versus outcome. To us, the outcome is not as interesting as the potential to what could have happened and we always go back to the, if a tree falls in the forest and no one’s around, was it really sticky?
Or if we like, to us it is, right? If a tree falls doesn’t hit anybody, that doesn’t make it not sticky. To us, it’s a really big thing. If I think that switch of that mindset of, you more interested in the bee sting or the hammer that fell 30 stories. If you’re focused on recordability, you’re interested in the bee sting.
If you’re focused on actual potential, to harm somebody, then you’re focused on the hammer that fell 30 stories and didn’t hit anybody. So we break all of our incidents down into sticky or not sticky, and that’s the kind of like the first categorization we do. Yeah. And then we also have.
Over the last two years, we’ve been doing good versus lucky. And so good for us means that known controls were in place and then lucky is that, hey, we’re missing a known control. We use the word known to be very specific because it’s unfair to hold a team accountable for something that, that they weren’t aware of, right?
Like we didn’t have a process in place. We didn’t have a control in place. That’s not on the project team. That’s on us. As a department and leadership to establish a new control and move forward. That’s how we categorize our incidents. And then we also to your point of, we were tired of recordability a little bit and some of the conversations in the manipulation that can go on and just some of the stuff that goes along with it. It’s not a very good, accurate measure of harm to our employees. So we’re thinking about what we want to measure as a company and as a leadership team. It’s not necessarily recordability. It’s ‘hey, what harm is actually coming to our employees’ and to us it was, are they taking these injuries home with them? If you break your baby toe and you go to the doctor and it’s a fractured baby toe, that it’s not a life alternating change, right? They may or may not tape it to the other toe and put some cotton in between and tell you that, hey, stay off of it for the next couple days or do some light duty. Your life is not forever changed from an injury. If you break your femur. It could be considered the same recordability, right? Those two may end up being the same thing and you’re like, those are two very different. If you break your femur, if you’ve known anybody that’s ever broken their femur, that’s a very life changing situation where you may never walk the same, your gait may be off.
You can be gone, you can be out for the next nine months trying to recover. And for us, it was hey, and so we modeled the SIF model or we call it SEER, like a lot of other people do and there’s 13 classifications that fall into this where it’s very black and white. It’s very easy for us to explain to people.
There’s no manipulation. There’s no, I can’t go to the doctor at the urgent care and be like, ‘hey, Man we’re going to buy him a bottle of Advil. Don’t worry about giving him ibuprofen’. There’s no way to manipulate the situation at all in a way that is beneficial to the company. It’s either, ‘hey, it was a sear injury or it wasn’t a sear injury’.
So for us, that’s helped clear up some of those gray ones. Now, what’s really interesting is we’ve also found that You can have a sear injury from a very non sticky event. For example, if somebody is walking on maybe some uneven ground. Yeah. And trips and falls and breaks their leg tripping and falling, not falling from a different level, but just.
Oh, I get it. Absolutely. That’s technically falls in the sear category, but you’re also like. There’s not a lot to learn from that other than Hey, yeah, we should probably get some flatter words. It’s not a special control you’re going to put into place. Exactly. And so we’ve also recognize that the sear is better than the recordable.
But it’s still very similar in the essence of it doesn’t really capture what we want. And so I think what’s really interesting is, and you’ve seen this is that, we’ve hammered into leadership recordability, right? So whether it be owners, leaders, that’s what we’ve tracked. That’s what shows you if you’re a good company or not, if you’ve got safety culture is how low your recordability.
Now that we’ve shifted a little bit. Yeah. I think the hard part is I think all measurements we do is are going to be an outcome based, right? I think that’s what stinks about it, right? Is unless you do something that is leading, but even then, if you talk to most people are leading KPIs, they’re always outcome based or lagging.
Absolutely. And so I think what’s really interesting is trying to find a way to measure the way the company’s enacting, controls or building capacity into the system. And I don’t think anybody’s there yet. I don’t think anybody has a good KPI for that. And what’s even interesting is, we’ve show the good, lucky and the sticky to our leadership teams and a lot of them are actually would rather not have a KPI and just figure out what we’re getting good. And are we better than we were?
Cary:
I love that. To me, it’s always been, in retrospect, Matt, of course, I’ve done the same thing you’ve done. Always outcome, always looking for a metric, always looking for things.
And of course, once I have a love, hate relationship because once it’s a metric, right. Then you get into the gaming, you get into, what’s important and I can, do all kinds of stuff. So again, love, hate relationship. But to me, I think looking back and to see what’s working and to hear what you’re saying is to me, it’s the journey, not the destination.
So I love the idea of short term, right? Metrics of, ‘hey, we’re having an issue with this. We identified it. Let’s see if these controls work better’ and you can work through that project. And those kind of metrics to say, ‘Hey, we have a better control. We’re putting in our contracts. We’re, doing it this way, blah, blah, blah’. And that you can see the beginning, the middle and the end. But it should have a shelf life right now. Let’s go on. What’s our next project. What’s our next thing. And it’s, as long as you’re facilitating those conversations, then I think you’re always going to be on that journey to improve.
And to me, that should be the metric. Are we going in the right direction? What’s our and I think that’s good enough as opposed to that. But I’m gonna have one more question. I know we got a little over our time, but I want to ask you by not focusing on the injury rates, are you still having an issue though, with the owners saying, Hey, you have to have your injury rates here in order to come work for us, has that become an issue yet?
And do you have a different conversation with the owners in having that conversation to say, It’s not important. And here’s why.
Matthew:
You ever see the movie. What about Bob? Yes. Bill Murray. This is how I equate it to the owners are still obsessed with portability because there’s nothing else for them to look at.
There’s no other, like I can say how great of a company we’ll check out. Sticky, the company doesn’t want to hear about it. The company wants to know they want something hard, but. I was equating about what about Bob where it’s all about baby steps, right? Like I’m going to baby step into this owner’s office and just teach them what sticky is.
And then the next project, they’re going to be like, Hey, we really liked learning teams. And what we found is that if we’re taking these baby steps with these owners, the owners have really leaned into, especially some of this data center work and some of the Southern company and George power, they’re hungry for something else.
And it was really fascinating is. A lot of our subs have been eating it up, too. So we’ve actually talked to several of our subcontractors. Like the safety director will let will bring me in to talk to the leadership team about Hey, what’s the process looks like for sticky? How do we roll it out?
What is it? Like, how do we get to this point?’ In Seeing subcontractors ask those questions to us. I think it’s up to your point. It’s us moving in the right direction and same with the owners. We do these learning events after an incident. The owner liked it so much. They thought it was so cool that they now implement it on their side of the house, right?
So when they have an event, they now do a learning event. where they get together, huddle up and have an after action report and go through the steps. And so they’ve now utilized that in enforcing other sub, other general contractors to do the same thing that are working on their other projects.
And so I think it’s just that baby step model where it’s just, this is not something that’s going to change overnight. We’ve spent decades hammering something into somebody, into these owners. And, I think, It’s still something that we have to be mindful of. So if BNT’s irritability rate was like 4.7, we wouldn’t even be talking about sticky, right? We’d be like, I would be on a podcast with you talking about sticky and some of the stuff we’re doing. It’d be like, hey man, I got to go meet with this doctor, this urgent care that we’re trying to filter out. I think. I think there’s some processes to your point about blocking and tackling.
There’s some requirements that we still have as a profession that we’re still required to do to make sure we’re not missing some of these smaller ones. But it’s really just trying to shift that model. You’ve seen OSHA do it with some of the stuff about, man, they did, they had that form to get rid, ‘hey, how can we move past reportability?’
And they’re looking at different, when OSHA starts talking about different KPIs and stuff like that’s when you know, It’s starting to shift that the change is shifting right because you’re like the regulation, the regulators are now saying, Hey, maybe the reportability isn’t that great. You’re like, okay, we’re not now we’re moving in the right direction but I think it’s just that the baby step model man I’m gonna try to trademark that and you heard it here folks.
Yeah. First, the sticky baby step model of just taking small little wins. I had a good mentor. I talked about it. You have some companies that are on the bottom rung and some companies on the top rung of a ladder. You’re not trying to reach the top rung that day. You’re just trying to go up one wrong at a time.
That’s it. And every 18 inches you go up, you get a little bit better and a little bit better each time. That’s all you’re trying to do. You’re not trying to be perfect. God knows we still make plenty of mistakes that we’re still trying. We’ve been on the sticky journey for almost six or seven years now.
We’re still trying to figure it out. And I, it’s actually great. When I go explain it to another company, sometimes it’d be like, ‘that doesn’t make any sense at all’. I’m like, ‘you know what? You’re right. It doesn’t make any sense’. Now I need to go back and look at our sticky process and make sure that we’re not.
Rolling stuff out that doesn’t make sense. So it’s definitely a journey.
Cary:
Oh, absolutely. Matt, thank you for your time. I’d love to talk more, but we only have so many hours in the day. So thank you so much. And last thing I’ll share some of these links to some of the things you’re doing.
So if you have any good resources or links. That you can share with things that have helped you on your journey. I’d appreciate it. And we’ll put it in the comments when we publish. Awesome. Thanks, Matt.
