S3Ep14 The Future World of Work

Danny sits down with John Dony the Senior Director of Thought Leadership for National Safety Council to discuss what safety and health might look like in the future state of our social construct.

Transcript

Danny Smith
Host
00:07
Welcome back to SafeTalk with SafeStart. I'm your host, Danny Smith. A few weeks back, I saw a very thought-provoking infographic from the National Safety Council entitled Eight Trends for the Future World of Work, and today we have with us John Dony, who is the Senior Director of Thought Leadership for the NSC, and he's here to talk a bit about this project and some of the concepts from it. John, welcome to the podcast. 

John Dony
Guest
00:33
Thank you, glad to be here. Thank you for having me. 

Danny Smith
Host
00:36
So if you would just tell us a bit about this project itself and maybe a bit of the history behind it, if you don't mind. 

John Dony
Guest
00:42
Sure, yeah. Well, it really all springs out of as many things have this past year, out of COVID-19 and our collective response to pandemic. And when we first started that work we have a program we call SAfER, which stands for Safe Actions for Employee Return. And that was a bit of a pipe dream a year ago and now we're actually a little bit closer to that being reality. But we started that with the intent to help organizations with COVID-19 resources, get them things that they could react to and use in guidelines and tools and resources and such. 

01:16
As we came at that, it was obvious after the first few weeks that people needed less of the technical guidance and needed more of the. How do we just deal with all this? There's so much else going on in the atmosphere beyond the direct physical and medical response to the virus. So those cultural pieces, fatigue, stress, well being, mental health, psychological safety these were big drivers even in the early days. If you fast forward to, we come out the other end of things in November, December and our attention starts to turn to the vaccine. Well, we've had a lot of time to reflect on how things have gone and I sat there in December maybe December 10th, 12th, 13th, something around there, and said you know, I've probably talked to hundreds, if not thousands, of folks over the past year about, you know, where things are going, where they're hoping things will go, how they've reacted in their organization, what's been accelerated, what's slowed down. And that's what led me to kind of reflect on this. I took the aggregate of all these hundreds of conversations I've had and I sort of combed them for trends and themes and we tried to understand what people are looking at. 

02:24
So the way this came about was for us to really we took a step out of the immediate term COVID response and said well, once we're through that, what's the future of work look like? I know a lot of folks are talking about the next normal or the new normal, and we said what's our perspective on that? What's the safety and health perspective on that? And that's really what bore out the they say the infographic, and it's conversant with what was going on as we saw it through COVID. But I think it's also reflective of things that were happening well before COVID that you know. None of it's none of it's something completely new. We saw a lot of these trends even in, you know, as early back as five, 10 years ago. So the interesting thing has been how COVID and our response to it has sort of changed our approach to some of those, how it's putting the lens on it, how, you know, how it's made them very real for organizations. You know, they've gone from being these concepts that people will say great, but what are we going to do with that? How do we operationalize it to realizing these are things that are right here in front of us and we've actually been dealing with them. So so it's we can. We can really engage in them and understand them better. 

Danny Smith
Host
03:26
Yeah, there are a couple of things that really caught my eye in that infographic itself and one was related to this idea of kind of the lean, distributed and kind of asynchronous work teams. That was one. But kind of related to that was also a bit of the I guess you could call it the changing of the guard, where we're seeing more and more millennials now starting to enter into more senior roles in the organizations and to me this just sounds like we're going to be seeing maybe some changes to the approaches of how we deal with projects, deal with business in general and things of that nature more team and task approaches versus, you know, we'll put in eight to five, put in your time each day, kind of approach. So how do you see the changes in team structures and maybe these generational shifts starting to affect the world of the future world of work? 

John Dony
Guest
04:18
Yeah, I think that's a really insightful connection there. I do think there's a connection between the kind of just the broad trend toward lean and asynchronous work teams that we've seen accelerated in the back of COVID and the working style of millennial and Gen Z individuals, and so, you know, I think that folks have had to come to terms with that working style, whether it's their preferred working style or not. That's kind of been our reality over the past year, especially in the early days, and I just got you know described, I think I think in the first few months the pandemic organizations were, you know, complete scramble mode, reactive mode, and we all got really used to. Well, I'm going to be talking to someone at 7pm my time, because it's 6am in India and I need to. You know, we need to get this done. We don't have a minute to spare. So people got used to working, you know, a little bit with that and might not it might have pushed them out of the comfort zone or they might find themselves in a situation where you know they've got an adult parent or a grandparent or maybe a young child they need to do caregiving type activity. They can't, you know, can't. Schools aren't reopened yet, so they can't you know, can't do much about that, or their you know their parents might need to come down and live with them for a bit. 

05:31
Many varieties of reasons why that began to then bleed into our work-life balance sort of approach. And one thing we've heard a lot and I think holds true and it's been studied pretty well, is that millennials and Gen Z folks tend to have much more of a focus on work by balance when they're choosing employer, when they're deciding whether they're going to stay somewhere for work or how they're going to approach it. So I think that what we were all forced to come to terms with was you know how we can do our work effectively, whenever we can do it, and how we can best do it, and then how we can leverage technology and and what that means for our satisfaction with our, with our job, with our employment and and how we say safety, safe and healthy. So In a way, we've all sort of become millennial in work style, perhaps over the past year. So I think that the question that remains is how much of this is retaining as we go forward. 

06:22
We've heard a lot of conversation about folks. Folks are struggling right now with not wanting to interrupt the work by balance We've had or built for ourselves, but wanting to bring people back into a culture that feels, you know, unique to its organization drive, the kind of innovation and collaboration they get from an in-office experience or in work experience. And there's going to be some inherent conflict there in terms of you know how we go back to that or how we operationalize that and and it's. I'm curious to see how it plays out as to whether that's going to be easier for millennials and gent the you know, young folks in the Gen Z generation coming into the workforce, or whether that's going to be harder and whether the folks who are a little older or going to enjoy that coming back situation, or whether they've really become really used to this.

07:07
I we spent a lot of time in safety and health professionals and what feels like a past life talking about. You know the power of habit and how you reinforce behavior for a certain period of time and it becomes instinctual. And I think the Charles Duhigg book you know it suggested that it takes something like 30 to 90 days to form a habit. Well, we've had a. We've had over a year of it now. So Break in a lot of cases, so I don't have a perfect answer for you, but I think those two things are really intimately related, and I think that the next year is going to be a big shakeout for every organization in terms of understanding what's working, and we're going to have to be flexible. I mean, we were we've gotten really good at pivoting the past year, so I think we're going to need to keep on our toes as it comes to the year ahead. 

Danny Smith
Host
07:52
That makes perfect sense to me. It's interesting. You're talking about the power of habit and how our habits form, and I had a conversation with one of our co-workers at the at the office, just yesterday or today I believe it was, and as I was talking to them, one of the things that we discussed was going back and revisiting some of your habits and making sure that you hadn't let those slip, because we've built something to have its strength (Right) and it's very easy then to let it start slipping away over time, and I'm sure all of us have probably had some of those things that have happened over the past year and we've replaced, replace those habits with new habits. So may have to go back and rethink a bit of that for sure, right? 

John Dony
Guest
08:34
That's right. It's interesting from both a personal kind of cultural perspective and certainly from a safety and health perspective. So you know, it's easy to relate to the fact that you know, hey, I used to travel for work a lot. I used to have a gym four floors below me at any given time. It was really easy for me to build the habit of going to the gym. That has not been the case for the past year, so, but but by the same token, you know, we've got folks who have not been in their traditional work environment and and that will one, you know, desensitize you a little bit to the to you know your normal working style and the hazards and risk that you face, but maybe it'll also make you a little bit more tuned to it. 

09:08
So you know, you know, I think we all probably have that rememberance of safety and health professionals first day you get on the job and you're in a big complex facility somewhere. You go out to do an assessment somewhere and audit and it feels like the most dangerous place you've ever been. You're just like how are, how are people able to just rationalize with working around all this hot stuff and this theme and these big press or whatever else and you're really attuned to the risk, you get to sensitize that over time and we know that's just natural, that's human nature, so it's so there's going to be some downside of going back into the work environment and you know how, remembering how hazardous maybe our environment was if we work in the so we haven't worked in before but maybe hopefully it will be will be having that day one experience. For better or for worse again and be able to be more finely attuned about those hazards in the situation. So I'm hoping there's a little bit of a silver lining there. 

Danny Smith
Host
09:56
Absolutely. Yeah, one of the other things that I kind of going back a little bit to the multiple generations that we have in the workplace right now, one of the things that I hear a lot when I'm talking not only just a safety professionals but also to operations management folks it's just this concern that's out there about I guess a lot of people call it the brain drain. You know, we've got a lot of the baby boomers who are starting to retire. Heck, even some of the older generation X folks my generation, I'm running on cusp of those two, some of the older gen X folks are starting to retire now and there's just a large loss of experience, particularly, I think, among the trades, because there was a generation where, it seems, we didn't have a lot of emphasis on people entering the trades. 

10:46
So you know, that loss of experience is really going to be tough and it's something that really can't be recovered. So just curious as to whether this project captured any information about how we kind of I don't know, I guess capture the information, capture the experience. How do we, how do we learn from that older generation before they do go out the door permanently? I've heard some folks talk about things like cross generational mentoring is something they're pursuing or something like that. Just curious as to what your study found with that. 

John Dony
Guest
11:16
Yeah, we've definitely seen a little bit about that. That wasn't a core aspect of the study but at the same time it's a topic that's come up a lot. Even you know, if I go back five years, we were certainly already worried about it then and this made us even more worried about it. And in the trades is a great, is a great example of a place where there's there's certainly a bigger potential gap than others. But you know, every time you see someone who has had the experience of understanding what it took to get to the level of safety and health maturity that they are as an organization or as a person and you leave someone in those shoes was not had that lived experience that you're going to be scared by that. I mean, I think, for better or for worse, you know, the younger generations are coming to organizations that matured on the back of some really bad things taking place and thankfully they don't have to experience those things to, you know, to continue to stay safe and healthy, but by the same token, they haven't had the experience of something like that happening. And so you know, I know one should have to learn that way, but it's also a way that people that gets people religion really quickly. So you worry about not just the individual talent gap but then the organizational or institutional memory behind. You know how long has it been since our last serious incident and you know we're not really even ready to reckon with it and it will just reshape the whole culture of our organization really profoundly. So you know, I think, that cross generational mentoring certainly something we've seen. 

12:41
We've seen some effort, especially in bigger organizations, as folks retire out to do a almost a last project, capturing the knowledge that they have or their unique perspective or the things they brought to the organization as a legacy component but also as a very real thing that can be transferred on to folks downstream. And I think one of the things that we've seen uniquely in the way we've been utilizing technology, even just in COVID, is it was really tough to get, you know, a senior EHS leader and operations leader to come back into an facility, to come teach a master class to a group or something like that, you know, after they left the organization. But nowadays we might be more open to be able to do that through things like just as simple as zoom right or, as we get into an AR and BR, are doing some things where we were able to leverage that unique technology. That may be years out yet, but being able to do some more. 

13:33
That real time knowledge transmitter way that is isn't cost prohibiting, is actually effective. It's not just someone listening to a video of someone you know explaining how they did something. It's not just a video. It's a video hands on sort of training and is much more effective. So we didn't study it as directly, but it has been on our radar for quite some time and it's an area where we're definitely going to dig into in the future. 

Danny Smith
Host
13:55
Excellent. Another thing that I noticed in this infographic that came from the study was it mentioned that there were new skills and new modes of leadership that are going to need to be addressed for tomorrow's worker? I guess that feeds a bit into the generational aspect as well, for sure. What do you think the new leader for lack of a better way to put it really looks like. 

John Dony
Guest
14:19
Yeah, it's a great question. This is something that on our Campbell Institute side of the house we're actually studying quite directly. We have a work group of some of our member companies who are actually studying this issue and understanding what it looks like in their organization. I'll have more to share in the days and months to come, but I would say that you're right that it crosses over with the generational aspect. It also, I think, has crossed over with the diversity, equity and inclusion aspect. We've certainly all gotten an object lesson in that over the past 12 months as well. 

14:50
But understanding that just the sense of transparency that we've built in our organization so the more we're talking about things we didn't talk about, that's reflected in the needs of a leader as well. It seems to me that, particularly in this current environment we're in and in the very near future, leaders are going to need to be not only much more agile and technology conversant, but they're going to have to be more willing to be open and honest and transparent with their teams. That's really uncomfortable for some leaders, but we've built this expectation now through our, the ways we've been dealing with social justice issues, the way we've been very transparent with COVID-19 response. Folks get updates about their COVID policies more often than any other policy update that I've ever seen from a company, ever before. The level of communication and transparency has just changed and so leaders are going to need to really capture that. We know that with millennials and Gen Z, in terms of things that have been studied, there are two or three year increments in which, if they're not satisfied well-communicated with know where they're going, know where their path is, they're going to leave your organization. So leaders are going to be responsible for all this at once. 

15:56
It's not one of those situations where you can just set in and forget it and just kind of go off on your way. I've seen various folks that I thought would have never blossomed in this environment do so really well, and folks that I thought were ready for it conversely have a real struggle with it. So I would say, as much as it's intertwined with the demographic issue, you will see folks who are in the boomer generation who get on this boat like it's like a dock to water, and I've seen folks who are millennials who struggle with it just as much as you'd expect. Someone who was a 75-year-old you know crusty leader somewhere would struggle with something like this. So I think there's a personality type aspect to it. There's also just that willingness and openness to change and that's not generation dependent. So it's been really interesting to follow. 

Danny Smith
Host
16:45
That's really great. I like what you put, that that a lot of that comes back to personality. You think it's fair to say as well that it may just come back to. You know, we're all resistant to change in some one form or fashion. But maybe just that willingness and to adapt and to accept change and move forward with the new realities of some of these two right. 

John Dony
Guest
17:04
Absolutely, and we've seen even in our own organization you know immediately who, even a year out now, has still really has not come to terms with the changes we've had and the conversations that come up are really all about returning to the exact way things were. And well, I think over the long arc, some of those things will happen. I mean, we were talking before we started the recording here about, you know, longing to get out to events again and talk in person and go sit in convention centers. So I do think that's coming back. But I do think where I've seen you know people be effective is they acknowledge reality, they're willing to change, they get on board with it. It's not easy for them to do the things that they do, but they know there's no other way but forward. So that's certainly been the case and just in the safety and health field in general, I mean management of change, openness to change. That's a core skill set, right, it's something we need to build the muscle on. 

Danny Smith
Host
17:58
Very good. Yeah, I'm also very interested in the ideas that this. I think we've seen this, certainly over the past year that safety and health really is at the core of what each organization does, and I think that's kind of a value that we're starting to see more and more and at SafeStart we often talk about safety being more than just a goal or a priority. It really has to be an organizational value and to that we really have to look at the idea of safety 24 seven and start thinking about things like mental health and well-being or, as you were talking earlier, about that life well, life-work balance. That must be honest. Some of us who are a little older have somewhat struggled with not that it's totally our generation of issue, for sure, but another way I think the state described it. Just valuing the whole person is another piece that we have to look at as well. So what are some trends that you expect to see, just related to those concepts? 

John Dony
Guest
19:04
Yeah, I think I think the one. I'm a walking example of a millennial who's struggling with work life balance. But yeah, no, I. So I think that the trend behind things like total worker health the whole person have been been in existence for a while. We've been talking about those for the better part of a decade and in some parts of the world like Europe and the UK and Canada and Australia, there's been a very advanced conversation about things like mental health and stress and fatigue, particularly in high risk occupations like firefighting. So there's a body of work out there that can help us understand this. 

19:43
But I think that we're at a really unique point in the safety game here where we've shown up and proven our value in a huge way over the past year. We are in the spotlight. We've been leading these efforts in our organization. We've been talking to folks that maybe wouldn't have given us the time of day before. We're all of a sudden, within the span of a week, every operations leader,HR, everyone in the organization was looking for safety there to lead and help us see our way through this. So I think that we have the opportunity to use that to transform our organizations and drive that mentality that you were describing that 24-7 safety mindset, the things that we've wanted to achieve and we've known and understood the value of. We've obviously long understood the value of safety and tried to express it to folks in many different ways, sometimes successful, sometimes not. We have the opportunity where we just made that case. We've retrieved that. That's been very evident. So what can we do with it? 

20:36
And what I would suggest is because at the same time, everyone's gotten to understand the very real implications of things like mental health and stress and well-being. That's going to we're going to get pulled in that direction and I think the question we need to figure out is what is the safety professionals role, safety and health professionals role in those subject areas? Where do we partner with HR? Where do we partner with our risk folks on some of those issues? Are we going to own them or are we going to influence them, or somewhere in between? So I think that's going to be a little bit of an interesting struggle. 

21:07
I was on a panel a couple of months ago where we got asked the question should mental health be under the umbrella of safety and health? And every panelist had very different answers on that question. I can imagine. I think some don't want to touch it because it's so complex and hard to deal with, and I get it. 

21:25
There's no defined load bearing limit on somebody's brain. We don't have that same technical discipline. We can bring the things like that necessarily. So it's a tough one, but I think we're going to get pulled in that direction. I think it's a good direction to go and at the same time, we can also bring along whatever we know our organizations need to transform, and that might be serious and during fatality prevention, it might be HOP, it might be any of these other topics that we know we've been trying to build a case for. Well, now we have the one in the limelight. So let's make hay while the sun shines on it and let's use our stock where we have it to build these things into our organizations and help them become resilient for the future. 

Danny Smith
Host
22:04
Sure, we talk a lot about what we call our human factors framework, or one of the components of that. We talk about the individual learning loop and some of the human factors that affect all of us and we always talk about and for years it's always been the and maybe this has been the cowboy mentality that we've all been guilty of in the past. We'll leave your work at work and leave your home life at home and nare the two shall meet mentality, and even subconsciously, it's just not possible. I mean, for example, some of our listeners know a bit about this already, just from some other things that we talked about. 

22:45
I was sitting here at my desk back prior to Christmas and I was on the phone I guess I'm showing my age there. I was on a Zoom call with our CEO, Barb Tate, and I was talking with her and my wife came in and handed me a note that said simply, Macy COVID, positive, and Macy is my granddaughter, who at the time was about 13 months old, and so I talk a lot about how that impacted me, not only during that call, and obviously I was able to talk to Barb about that and just share hey, here's what's going on, and she expressed her concern and whatever she needed to do she would do to help. But certainly that affected me and affected my focus for the rest of that meeting. It affected my focus, quite honestly, for the next couple of weeks and, by the way, for everybody. She's fine, she's growing like a weed and talking and harassing her little brother or her older brother quite a bit. 

23:43
So, anyway, it was one of those. It took me back a few seconds there, right, and it took me a week or so just to kind of get over that. As I was continually thinking about that, it was in the back of my mind, right. So certainly that stress, just that concern, even if you just want to pull it down to a concern level, that has an impact on folks and how they're working and ultimately on their safety. If I were working out on a factory floor, it could lead to some inattention, some distraction, you name it right, even though we have traditionally, as I said, always focused on well, just focus on your work and leave all that behind. You Just doesn't happen, does it. 

John Dony
Guest
24:19
Yeah for sure, and I think that building the culture where it becomes OK to talk about that is rough, right. I mean that takes time, it takes attention. You need to do it every single day and I do think the experience we've all lived through like that over the past year hopefully, has opened us up a bit to that. When we get back into a traditional working environment, I certainly knew some organizations who have a really good culture already of they're at a daily toolbox talk and they just say hey, what's on your mind today? Is anything going on? Just check in with us. Are you good to go or there's something distracting you? Maybe it's you got bad news last night or you didn't sleep well or your dog's sick or whatever else it may be. But it became okay just by repetition of making sure you asked and eventually someone maybe said something and as soon as someone said something, that allowed the next person to say something. 

25:11
Going through that hard work when we get back into the traditional work environment is something we're going to have to do. But I do hope that I've become much more transparent with my team and my supervisors and my peers at my organization, even in my personal life. I mean, I talked with my friends who I've known for 30 years about things that I would have never broached with them in the past. Right, just very real fears concerns things you just learn to bottle up and keep inside. So I hope that, as much as I think that we've seen a lot of negative out of all of this the past year, being able to roll that in to how we build it in our organizations will be a real benefit for us. 

Danny Smith
Host
25:52
Well, John, thanks so much for your time today. That is kind of the wrap for the day, I suppose you could say. Folks, if you would like more information about the infographic that we've been talking about and the study behind that, you can do just a quick search for National Safety Council eight trends for the future world of work. Say that right, and you should be able to find that fairly quickly with just a quick internet search. My thanks today to John Dony, who's been our guest today. John, if our listeners would like to get in touch with you directly, what's the best way to do that? 

John Dony
Guest
26:26
Sure, absolutely. You can email me directly. Happy to get engaged and talk to y'all. My email is john-johndonie j-o-h-n-dot- doni d-o-n-y at n-s-c-dot-org and you can go ahead and shoot me a note and I'll be glad to respond. And then, if you want to look at any of the other resources we put out through the Safer Group, n-s-c-org slash Safer. It's nice and easy. 

Danny Smith
Host
26:48
Very good and, as always, folks, if you have an idea for another podcast or someone else that you would like for us to talk to, or a topic you'd like for us to cover here on the podcast, just drop me an email at Danny at safestart.com. And John, thanks again for joining us today and thanks for our audience for joining us as well. I'm Danny Smith for SafeTalk with SafeStart.

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