Insights with Nicole Ivers | | Ep:2
Episode Transcript
Cary:
Welcome to the Elevate EHS Podcast, Nicole. I appreciate your time today. Tell me about yourself. Tell me about your career and we can go from there. How’s that?
Nicole:
Sure. Great. Thanks for having me. I’m Nicole Ivers. I am the Global Head of Health, Safety, and Environment for Brookfield Properties.
I specifically oversee our logistics division, so large industrial warehousing and distribution center. Type buildings. I have through hazardous waste to general contracting. I worked in the Middle East for many years, overseeing construction for the FIFA World Cup. And now I have the pleasure of working for the owner.
Cary:
Fantastic. So that’s an unusual move to go to the Middle East. That’s not the normal pathway for most DHS professionals. How did your experience in the Middle East shape? Your approach to safety, particularly in moving away from any traditional safety models.
Nicole:
Yeah, that’s a good point because I came into safety through the industrial hygiene route.
So traditional safety was not my ultimate goal or what I thought I would be doing at this point in my career. But it’s not saying no to any kind of offer like going to the Middle East is how I really plan in my career. So I was. Working for a general contractor doing industrial hygiene, got asked to start doing safety as well.
And so I was trained, like many of us, if not all of us, with that very compliance based approach. You do your audits, you do your checklist, you take pictures of those people that are doing something wrong and you run back and make your report up there was really looking back there’s really no reason for anybody to like me or trust me on those job sites.
So before I knew it, I got an offer to go to the Middle East and Qatar specifically and work on some pretty big jobs. And I got over there and started doing my traditional way of safety. Realize that some of my projects had 35,000 people on them working 24/7 There was no way that we could control the behavior of every single person working on that job site, not to mention that how many different languages we spoke different skill levels.
A lot of the labor was unskilled, had never even been on a construction site before, so it was clear that we had to do something different. And one of the examples I use is that we had a number of trucks that were falling off of
these ramps, going up to large stockpiles. So these big tipper trucks were driving up and down, dumping soil, coming back down.
And so these soil ramps got steeper and steeper, and we started having trucks fall off of them. The traditional solution would have been, how do we train every single one of those workers? How do we assess that they know how to drive up a ramp? What are the qualifications we’re going to define?
That’s impossible for thousands of different truck drivers with different trucks, different skill levels. So the obvious solution was, how can we make our ramps, safer so that trucks don’t fall off of them and that was really one of the first areas that we started targeting with this kind of approach.
Another interesting thing is that we have very few ladders in the Middle East. And, that’s still a touchy area here in the US is, don’t take away my ladders. Don’t think I ever climbed a ladder when I was in the Middle East, and now coming back to the U.S., I climb ladders more often than I would like to.
Cary:
Fix the system instead of fix the worker. That’s an interesting approach. Have you adopted some of the human and organizational performances? Because that’s some of the things that HOP promotes. Has that those HOP principles shaped your career or your approach to safety management? And especially in construction. It’s to me, I find it even more difficult. Then in some of the other industries has that influenced you at all? And have you adopted any of those principles especially later in your career?
Nicole:
Yeah. And actually when I came back from the Middle East, I started working for a general contractor and that was very specifically what my goal was to help this particular organization implement top strategies.
I look at, when I’m building a program or talking about a program,
I really look at compliance somewhat separate from compliance is OSHA regulation. It has been around for a long time. It is a basic requirement. I really should not have to go out to a contractor’s job site and identify areas where they are not in compliance with the law.
At this point we should really have that down better. So where I focus [00:05:00] is serious injury or fatality risk. So the stuff that will kill you. I’m not going to concern myself with little hand cuts. I’m going to look at things that are really high risk and that’s where HOP obviously comes into play.
Now, if you have compliance issue that is being repeated. Over and over again, and or is a high risk type area. Yes, those will come back together to learn why that’s happening and how to resolve it once and for all. But yeah, my, my approach is really looking at the high risk areas and focus on planning.
The old way of doing it was you called in the safety guy once shovels went in the ground, the safety professionals, well before you even did a job. And really, if you do that part right. You did it right, you estimate it you plan it you qualify the right subs, 90 percent of your work should be done by the time shovels go into the ground.
Cary:
Oh, absolutely. You talk about the difference between ladders and stairs. There’s no way you’re getting stairs if you don’t do that in pre qual, right? Absolutely. Absolutely. Let’s talk HOP a little bit more, right? Because, One of the underlying principles is you can either learn or you can blame, but you can’t do both.
So how do you navigate that tension between that discipline and accountability,
especially in construction when the workers aren’t even yours, right? And they’re coming into the hall and backing up to what you talked about earlier,
which is Instead of fixing the drivers, we fix the system.
So let’s talk about that because there’s a lot of pushback now, especially in construction to saying, Hey, if I can’t, blame the employee or hold them accountable then I’ll let them, I’m basically going to. Put my hands up and say, you can run rough shot over my program. I’d really like to talk about that and dig into that.
And I want to hear your approach to how to navigate that, how to solve for it or
how to view it differently so that it’s not a point of contention.
Nicole:
Yeah. I’m going to ruffle some feathers. Let’s ruffle them I am probably the most anti discipline safety professional on the planet. In all my years.
Of investigating incidents and learning from the things that don’t go as planned. I don’t feel that I have ever seen an incident or a circumstance where that person did something so intentionally and deliberate that they needed to be disciplined. Nor would that discipline have prevented something like that happening.
Again, there are always just issues at play that, that basically set that person up. Sure. What, what happens? There is definitely some contention there because we talk about ops we talk about anti blame, but one of the things that I am always asked is, yes, but, there still has to be a just culture.
How do we appropriately use discipline? Sure. And my response would be,
I don’t think it is appropriate to use discipline for making a mistake, a safety related mistake. Now, there are times for discipline theft, or assault, or violence of some sort. Or, maybe it’s a job performance issue. Very good.
That’s for HR to address. That’s not the role of the safety professional to decide, how to discipline somebody for making a mistake. And I feel like the people that ask me that are, okay here’s the other ruffling part. They are still looking for that path to get to blame and discipline.
They are asking. Yes. Okay. I won’t blame, but if I need to, how do I do it? What is that flow? To get to discipline. And that’s normal because that is human nature. We all know that in our minds, we don’t want to be blamed. And it feels better to know that there’s somebody else to blame. Oh, sure. And it also makes us feel like .
We fixed something and solved something.
Cary:
I think you just nailed it right there, Nicole, right? It’s the blame shame Retrain, right?
Which is the model most people go through for incident management, which is, it’s easy to wrap things up with a bow, right? And close out that incident report. Within 24 hours, if you can blame shame and then say, Hey, we’ll retrain that employee or fire the employee.
We feel like as management, right? We did what we needed to do, right? We pat ourselves on the back because we put a corrective action into place. But it did it really solve for the issue, right? So if you take that employee out and put
a brand new employee in the same situation, won’t they do the same thing?
Nicole:
And that is the litmus test is, for example, if you have a guy that doesn’t wear safety glasses or isn’t wearing the safety glasses,
send them home for the day. Is that problem resolved or is he going to show up the next day with the same scratched up uncomfortable safety glasses that fog up or aren’t prescription or don’t have readers so that he can’t do his job.
Your problem is still there.
Cary:
No, perfect. Absolutely. So
let’s talk a little bit, especially I’m interested because you’re on the owner’s side. And usually I’m on the GC side, right? What role do the owners play in influence safety, especially when the traditional contractor prequalifications.
promote or espouse incident rates predominantly. So when I go to fill out my contractor prequalification, whether I’m the GC or a sub,
the first thing you’re gonna ask me is, have you heard anybody relatively So I have to focus on those high frequency, low severity items. I have to keep my incident rates down.
I have to focus on incident rates because owners are telling me if I’m high, I won’t get the job, right? And if I have my focus on high frequency, low severity, how can I shift and put more onus on that serious injury fatality from those low frequency, high severity potentials?
So tell me how you balance that, or are you factoring that into your prequalifications within your organization when you hire subs?
Nicole:
Yeah. So
what I would say is that safety is so important at the ownership level, whether all owners are there yet or not. I’d say probably there’s varying levels of engagement on safety. Sure. I think a lot of owners just don’t typically have safety professionals in house to understand that part of the job,
they focus on the budget and the schedule.
Sure. But we, as owners have so much influence, so if we focus on the right thing, we will get different results. So we focus on safety as much as we do schedule and budget and making sure that
the job is bid properly with what we’re asking for. We’re going to get a better result throughout the project both safety and quality.
Cary:
Oh, absolutely.
Nicole:
So we have a minimum health and safety standard, which is not necessarily a repeat of OSHA. That’s again, that’s compliance, that’s already written. I shouldn’t have to repeat that. But it’s really talking more about. How to plan for the high risk activities, getting everybody into the room at different stages to walk through those high risk activities instead of just one person doing a risk assessment in a vacuum.
Oh, yeah, the G.C. The erectors, the crane operators, we get all of them in the same group to talk through
that process and figure out where the greater risk is. There’s multiple ways to do things and if we can identify that ahead of time of where we have options, sure, and okay we can do it this way. This might be a little bit faster, but we can also do it this way might not impact that much. And it’s going to be a lot of risk reduction. Those are the things that we talk through Again, if we can plan out that work well in advance, excavations is another one that I talk to contractors a lot about because I want them to make sure that they are bidding and getting contractors that have bid the work properly.
So if there is a need for shoring or trench boxes, I want to have that discussion well in advance because we all know what will happen. We hire a GC, they hire a sub. That sub hires another sub. These guys show up on the job, assuming that they can slope and there isn’t room,
so they’re going to slope to the room that they have.
Right, 100%. And then I show up and say, why don’t we have trench boxes? And they tell me we didn’t budget for that. So I’m trying to get way ahead of that, because that is, HOP principle. This is predictable, right? Oh, yes. So if I can have that discussion well in advance, we already know if we have the room to slope,
we already know whether or not we will need trench boxes, and then I know that is recognized and did throughout the rest of the project.
That’s the approach from the owner side that I’m using to help influence the performance in the field. We also look at the design very closely, so we have the opportunity to change. The design of our building to make it safer, not only for construction, but also for our tenants use. For example, fixed ladders, they’re allowed by OSHA, of course.
But are they the safest way to access 40 feet up to a roof? No, of course not. We’ve changed our design to create a stair tower access, which is much safer for the people that use our building. And we’re also looking at where we can increase the height of our parapets.
Cary:
Oh, absolutely. That was always a fight.
It was interesting in the field, right? We’d be doing parapets, right? And we’d have guardrails up. And then when we poured, right? The guardrails would be too low. So we’d have an issue. And then when we left, we took our guardrails with us. So now you’re leaving a building with low parapets for the owner when they have to go up and do roof maintenance.
So it never made much sense to me. Absolutely. I love it.
Nicole:
I am trying to bridge that gap. But getting back to your part of your original question, which was how do we pre qualify or evaluate the performance of a contractor? So yes, we ask for that kind of information. We do ask for incident rate. I also ask for SIP rate.
So I don’t get a lot of content there but it’s part of the discussion. I asked for a citation history because I can cross check that on the OSHA website. Certainly. So this just gives us an opportunity to discuss. If I see an incident rate that is. abnormally high. It gives me an opportunity to talk with the contractor and understand what’s going on, where are they at with their program and sometimes they will come back to me and say, yes, we did have incidents, at this point and this is what we’ve done to change that and this is how we’re improving our program.
And then I might get other answers, which is yes, of course, our EMR is high. We have had a lot of injuries. Or to fix that. We’ve been very focused on preventing people from gonna getting medical care.
Yeah, some of them are not gonna be the answers that I want, but that tells me a lot more than anything.
Cary:
Oh, absolutely. Absolutely. So interesting. Let’s, I wanna back up and clarify. You said you asked for the SIF rates. I assume that’s. injuries that have had a threshold for, serious impact or significant injury, fatality, life impacting. Is that what I’m hearing? Yeah. And that is a gray area as far as defining what a SIF potential incident is.
That was my next question to you is, are you asking for the actuals or are you asking for the SIF potentials as well?
Nicole:
Yes, it’s more of a SIF potential excellent. I love it We need to understand that. How frequently are you having a high potential incident? I love it. Perfect. Maybe it didn’t hurt anybody, but that helps me to understand.
Also, how are they? learning from incidents. If they do have a recognition of what it perfect potential is,
Cary:
I love it. So let’s talk about this has been a fantastic conversation. I love it. But let’s talk about you’re a very engaged and to me it’s not what we typically see from an owner.
What about the owners out there that aren’t as Let’s say proactive is you and your organization. What would you say to a GC who doesn’t have that level of engagement to do the planning ahead? What can they do to get better and protect themselves? If you don’t have it as engaged an owner who is aware of the, the it’s an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure kind of thing.
What can they do and where can they go to, to start to improve their outlook and their let’s say pre planning efforts.
Nicole:
First of all, I would say, don’t be afraid to push back on the owner. I think that a lot of GCs are afraid to say anything to the owner. I’m going to need this building a month earlier than I told you, a lot of GCs will just say, Oh, okay.
Well we don’t know how we’ll do it, but we’ll get it done. And then that message just gets sent out. Builder down to, the guys that are doing the work and what that means to them is for longer hours and faster and all the safety is out there.
Cary:
Oh, absolutely. You have contractors working on top of contractors where you’re introducing risks that weren’t even there before, because now you’re just short in the schedule.
Nicole:
So sequencing that can’t be set up. Know, you can only dry concrete so fast, . Absolutely. There are situations where you just, it’s not physically possible to go any faster, so we know that is gonna be a prime time for incidents too. I would say that the contractors need to educate the owners, in some cases, love it, and help them to understand.
Why they can’t make up time or what this cost reduction would could mean for certain resources or for certain equipment that they need on the site. If they weren’t sure around and say, okay if you want me to cut this budget, that means I’m going to lose stair collar. We’re not losing my stair collar.
It allows us to have a conversation to understand where that money is coming from. So it, and same thing, like when an owner comes onto a job site and they’re not wearing the appropriate PPE or clothing. Push back on that owner. We don’t want them to get hurt either, but sometimes they just don’t understand what the expectation is or how important it is to just specifically show that on the site.
It’s very dangerous.
Cary:
Absolutely. It’s certainly going to influence the culture when you see that, right? Absolutely.
Nicole:
The other part of that would be that you, your safety professionals and your team, they have to educate, you themselves. So this is one of the biggest challenges I think in our safety profession right now.
It’s how do we convert from that old way that we have been taught. And at least incorporate HOP and start adding opportunities. Even if you don’t just go, a 180 to, okay, everything compliance is out the window. We’re now only going to focus on this. You look for opportunities to bring in certain HOP type principles, like where can we reduce ladders You know, we’re not going to get rid of all the ladders, but where is our highest risk?
Maybe we focus on those particular areas and bring in sear towers. Sure. So those are hot principles where are people likely to take shortcuts? Where are we seeing the most non compliances? And maybe that’s an area that we focus on. So you don’t have to do everything all at once. Just look for where you get the biggest bang for your buck, but safety professionals need to be able to educate their employers in the right way to focus on the right methods.
A lot of us just don’t do continuing education the way we should or speak it out. Which is a great segue into the Georgia safety conference or any other safety related conference that you have access to.
Cary:
The Georgia safety Conference it’s a good segue to go.
Nicole:
So the Georgia safety conference during our 29th year, wow.
I’m in my last year as the president of that organization. And it’s held every single year in Savannah, Georgia very affordable conference. To get your CEUs but really just really good education. And we try to make it very relevant to the things affecting our discipline. This year our biggest focuses are going to be on health and also mental health.
Two of, I think, the most important topics. To us right now. You can get completely caught up on from introduction to actually how to implement it and learning team. You can get that from this conference. We have a lot of speakers talking on mental health and how to really bring that into the field of safety.
Because the reality is we have a lot more people that are being hurt. stress and medical conditions and substance abuse. Then we have of people being hurt or killed on the job.
Cary:
Oh, that’s interesting, especially we send a, we tend to focus on acute injuries, right? And we tend to ignore either long term illnesses and mental health and that suffering. Is a big piece of that, right? So when we espouse this zero harm, which I’m not a huge fan of, right? And we don’t take that into account. It’s very disingenuous. Perfect. Georgia Safety Conference we’ll put it when we do the podcast,
but if you have any information do you have the website or where they can go to get information? Yes You can find us on LinkedIn It’s probably the best place to get all of your updates. So it’s under the Georgia safety conference.
Excellent. Nicole such a pleasure. So many great insights. I appreciate you for sharing. Do you have any advice you want to give the listeners working in safety roles or in construction?
Nicole:
I think the most important Thing that I can come back and reiterate is blame. I think that blame is the biggest obstacle to everything else in our field. If we continue to blame people for making mistakes, especially when they did not intend to make them in the first place, we’re never going to get trust and transparency within our workforce, on our job sites.
which prevents us from truly recognizing the risks associated with the work. So I think that blame and getting rid of the discipline for making mistakes is the first step and if we can get on board with that everything else is going to be a lot easier.
Cary:
Sure, absolutely. A fundamental shift from how do you fix the worker to how do you fix the system to support that human error is a huge path forward I think for all safety professionals.
Nicole, thank you so much for your time and your insight and your wisdom and sharing some tremendous nuggets from your illustrious career. Thank you so much. Thank you, Cary.
