E076_Simplifying the Business of Safety: Building a Better Safety Culture

Join us as we sit down with Gavin Coyle, CEO of Coyle Group, to explore the business of safety. With over 25 years of experience, Gavin shares how simplifying safety can boost both performance and profitability.

Learn practical tips for embedding safety into your operations, creating a proactive safety culture, and understanding why safety professionals belong in the boardroom.

Whether you’re a safety leader or business owner, this episode is packed with actionable insights for transforming safety from a compliance function to a business asset.

Thanks for listening!

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This episode was produced under Safety Collaborations Limited and now continues as part of Karin Ovari Limited. While we are not currently releasing new episodes, the entire library remains active, and the topics covered are just as relevant today as when they were first recorded.

To learn more about my current work in leadership and communication, visit karinovari.com and the leadership community, The Supervisors Hub.

Connect with us on LinkedIn:  Karin Ovari, Nuala Gage,

If you enjoyed this episode, please help us spread the word and leave a review on your preferred podcast player. 
 
 Stay Safe, Stay Well
The Safety Collaborators

Transcript

Speaker 1 0:09

Welcome to In Conversation with the Safety Collaborators. I am Karen. And I am Nuala, Whether you're a safety professional, a leader or an individual committed to making a difference we invite you to join the discussion on creating a culture of safety and care, enabling your team and leaders to design a safer and more productive and collaborative world.

Speaker 2 0:35

Welcome to this week's episode of the Safety Collaborators, and we are excited to welcome Gavin Coyle to today's episode.

Speaker 2 0:44

Gavin is a seasoned expert in the field of workplace safety, boasting over 25 years of experience and a master's degree in safety. He's the founder and CEO of Coyle Group, a leading consultancy dedicated to enhancing safety standards in the construction industry. Gavin's mission is clear to ensure that every person on a construction site returns home safely every day. He believes that safety can be simple, direct and incredibly effective. His innovative approaches have helped numerous small to mid-sized construction businesses improve their safety protocols while reducing costs. Improve their safety protocols while reducing costs. In addition to his consultancy work, gavin is also an accomplished author with his book Workplace Safety on a Budget, providing invaluable insights for business owners and managers looking to enhance safety without overspending. He's the host of a popular podcast, I'm the Gaffer, where he shares his expertise and engages with industry leaders. Join us as we dive into Gavin's journey, his insights on creating a culture of safety and practical tips that can be implemented immediately to improve workplace safety. Welcome to the show, gavin.

Speaker 3 1:56

Thank you for the intro Nuala. Very flattering. Hi Karen, how are you?

Speaker 1 2:01

I'm doing extremely well. And just in case anybody was wondering, I was doing the imaginary, here is the book image. You'll see it. We'll put links to the book in the show notes.

Speaker 3 2:13

Thank you, our things, guys. I love the show.

Speaker 1 2:17

I love yours actually, I have listened to it. It makes me laugh, yeah.

Speaker 2 2:31

Highly recommended, so yes, highly recommended, so yes. So a bit of a personal question to kick off the show. If your family and friends had to describe you in one sentence, what would they say?

Speaker 3 2:38

I think in one word. They'd probably say determined and some might say different, but I'd imagine that the overall word would probably be determined.

Speaker 3 2:48

Say more about that. I suppose from a young age school wasn't really a thing for me and I just had to find another way, rather than going the normal route of finishing school, going into college, and I'd left school early and went into the workplace at a very young age. So I suppose, like the determination to keep going and then I went back to school, then later on and obviously college and getting the master's degree and so on and so forth, I think you have to have a level of determination. I played a lot of football at a fairly significant level as well growing up and that kind of stuff. So it was always kind of like bit between the teeth type of a guy you know.

Speaker 2 3:31

What I love about that is when we kind of look at like where you've got to. So school wasn't the greatest and I think for for many people it isn't. And I mean I look at the young people that I'm between friends and family and I go. How are you supposed to know what works for you or what you fit into when you haven't even figured out who you are and now you're supposed to determine a career? And what I love is that you found your path with that determination through, even if it's a bit of like a windy, bendy route to come out to where you've landed today, doing multiple things and impacting the fact that people get to go home safely. I think that's awesome.

Speaker 3 4:12

Yeah, but I don't think anybody goes out of school or goes into life actually looking for a job in safety. Well, I haven't met them anyway. I think everybody has kind of been. You know, fell into safety in a way or sort of just got introduced to safety in a way.

Speaker 3 4:29

And I remember I'll never forget a young college graduate that we'd taken on in our sales team and he was scratching his head and he couldn't get over how lucrative the health and safety industry has become in certain sectors and certain industries and the hourly rate that some guys are on in certain industries. And he was like gavin, nobody talks to us about this. Nobody talked about health and safety in college. It was all about it and cyber and stuff like that. But like if I'd have known that of course he was just thinking about from a money perspective. But he said if I'd have known that was the type of figures that was knocking around, he said I definitely would have considered health and safety as an option. I think we could do more as an industry to promote health and safety as a very significant career from all angles, not just a monetary angle, and I think there's still things as a body of work to be done there.

Speaker 1 5:22

That's a really good point because I think you're right, there are some people who go in to study whether it's human factors or industrial safety or process safety, but just the concept of that general health and safety as a management role, as a supervisory role, as a representative role no, that's probably a little different. And then when people do fall into it, well, we know that there's challenges then with that, because they get taught from a compliance perspective, which is important. But there's more to the role than compliance and making sure everybody follows the rules, and I'd love to hear your thoughts on this. We often say it's actually a really highly influential role If you're given the space to do that and, to be fair, sometimes people are not it becomes all about those spreadsheets and numbers and that's probably not the best place for a really passionate safety person.

Speaker 3 6:23

Yeah, so our recruitment division, if you like, where we outsource health and safety professionals. I've learned a lot about the different characters that are in health and safety and it's interesting to see how there's a difference in people's perception of health and safety themselves. So I've come across health and safety people who feel that they need to be strong and forceful and loud and sort of brash, if you like, and that's what they think gets results for them. In most cases it turns out that those people were just hiding behind the veil of their own lack of confidence in themselves. I've come across people who were unbelievable with other people, like really top-end people person, and they're like the characteristics of connecting with people was just off the scale, but they couldn't do the admin or the analytics or the data side of things, of things generally.

Speaker 3 7:25

In my experience I found that when you had somebody who had a primary degree in engineering and then done health and safety afterwards, they had a more measured health and safety application as a career and in the field, because they looked at things like you know, root cause. Let's go back to the practicality of what actually happened here, and I started sort of using the word. Well, we have loose safety officers over here where they're kind of a bit wobbly. They don't really have a defined sort of characteristic of how to apply health and safety. And then you'd have the engineering approach, where they're very methodical, very straight, everything is factored from the beginning to the end. Those were the guys that we kind of sort of grew a sort of division out of, where guys had the mechanical engineering, electrical engineering degree and then had the safety on top of it. And I think from the education point of view, I think that's what they should really look at is bring people into some sort of a program where if it's engineering, then there's safety.

Speaker 3 8:30

They have the opportunity then to veer over to safety or could be carpentry, and then a person has an opportunity to say well, look, if you, you know you can go, you can go the route of health and safety here.

Speaker 3 8:41

You don't have to stay at the carpenter, you don't have to qualify the carpenter. Yeah, you're qualified now, but if you do an extra year you could actually go into the health and safety field, like I think that's probably the model that I see would be far more suited, rather than the broad view of health and safety, where you go into the colleges now and basically the graduates are coming out and they have not got a clue how to apply themselves in the field, because the guy or the person that's doing the work knows more than them and if they don't ask the right questions or if they're not extracting the right information, they they have no way of applying themselves to the role, and it takes them two or three years just to catch up with whatever industry they're in, and then they might turn around and go. Well, you know what? I'm actually going to switch to manufacturing now, because there's a better job down the road. The next thing they went from construction into manufacturing. I don't think it's. I think it's a body of work to be done.

Speaker 1 9:40

I must admit I'm not sure I completely really thought about it from that perspective. I mean, we get a whole range of people, as you say. You get those that have just done an e-bosh and off they go, which could be general or construction. Then you get others who do degrees in a whole range of things that are sort of more industrial safety focused. But I think the part that's important, regardless of the role. I mean we often say you know, we talk about HSE. I mean there's health, there's safety and there's environment which one are you? And yet it gets kind of lumped into the same bucket. Yeah. And quality as well.

Speaker 1 10:21

And quality, yeah. If they're QHSE, yeah, yeah, and then adding to that the ESGs, and then we just go on with the acronyms. But yeah, I've got a friend of mine who actually really focuses on the E and of course she's trying to build a body around E-REPs so that it becomes another skill set, not just health and safety but also truly understand what being an environmental rep is. But oh my goodness, macy struggles and yet it's such a big topic climate and environment and all that side things and it's tough to get people to really see it as something beyond just this or that. But regardless of all those things, I think there's still something really important about health and safety people, or safety professionals, let me put it that way whatever they are, and that might be that, how they not just become data but also influences, like those two types that you talked about, trying to get them to be that one person and depending on what the industry is. Anyway, I'm sure we'll come back to that one.

Speaker 3 11:24

I think empathy is the big thing that I take out of it. If you find a good safety professional, you'll find that they're very empathetic people. It's the one characteristic that if you said above anything else, give me a person with empathy and everything else will follow through.

Speaker 2 11:44

I was working with a really great safety advisor offshore and we were having a conversation. I said to him how did you get into this? And we went through that and he has an engineering background and he said but when I moved into safety, he said all I did was make enemies because I thought that I had to be that command and control. He was paper smart, so he had the qualifications and he'd done all the courses and he was creating paper safety because all the boxes were ticked. But he missed the rapport and the relationships and the empathy and it was someone in quite a senior position that pulled him over and said if you want to be successful in this role, you are going to have to learn to work with people and you're going to have to get people on board.

Speaker 2 12:32

And he said for him that was probably the best career advice that he was ever given 100%, 100%, yeah.

Speaker 2 12:40

So that was his advice, and I think young people or just anyone going into this kind of a career where you want to get into whether it's safety and construction, or oil and gas or any high-risk environment, if you think of what you knew when you first came into this, you haven't even got to why you came into this, but we'll get there and what? What you know now. What advice would you give young professionals entering the field of safety today?

Speaker 3 13:10

I would definitely tell them to try and pick a industry that resonates with them, that excites them, that gives them a buzz. So don't just pick the first job that comes across your table. There there's a whole spectrum of different industries that is cross-relatable to health and safety and if you have to pick two or three just to try them out, narrow it down to two or three and then decide which one is the best industry and when you get into that industry, become the expertise in that industry for health and safety, and be clear that that's a 10-year roadmap, basically in that field, to become somewhat of an expert in that industry, and you never stop learning. So that would be my biggest advice, rather than chasing the money.

Speaker 1 13:58

As we know, if we're chasing just the money in any field, actually somewhere along the line it's not going to be working for you.

Speaker 3 14:05

No.

Speaker 1 14:06

And it's not going to be enjoyable? No, it's not going to be enjoyable, no, that's right.

Challenges in Workforce Loyalty and Skills

Speaker 2 14:10

You said something very crucial there and I think it relates to not just safety. It's a 10-year roadmap. Yeah, because we want instant gratification. We want instant recognition and patience in growing into something. A lot of the coaching I was doing with some of the younger people coming into the offshore industry and it was in the offshore drilling field. They were going, oh, but in four years I'm going to be a driller. I was like no, honey, you're not. That my darling is a wish and a dream. That is going to be very disappointing with that expectation. So let's have a conversation with people who are a bit more mature in the industry about what their journey was and what their path was, although I'm going to throw a spanner in.

Speaker 1 14:55

That works. The problem is that the expectations of people coming out of a school environment this I'm going to take 10 years to become a driller are you kidding? What did I go and do all that for? And also there's a skill shortage and it's been going on for a long time. This is nothing new, but it is going to get worse. It isn't going to get better. So, unfortunately, that time for it.

Speaker 1 15:20

And I was listening to someone a little while ago. He was talking about the marine industry and oh no, it was Nip and Anand's new book about the Costa Concordia. In fact, one of the challenges is that you've got a captain out here, you've got the cadets coming in here, so this might be a 20-year timeline. This is now, and what once upon a time was okay. We do level one, level two, level three, level four, we build experience along the way, we get exposure to events and then eventually you become the 2IC and then eventually you might become the captain. But that's actually not what's happening in that industry, and we see it in the oil and gas as well. What's actually happening is you've got the skipper, oim, whoever here. You've got new guys coming in here and playing right into what you just said, nuala. They're going, oh no, but in four years' time, which is here, I want to be there, and it could be that that is exactly what happens, and then we have lots of other problems that come around that.

Speaker 3 16:21

It's like a business owner said to me recently. He said, gavin, he says I'm getting highly qualified people that are 28 years of age, coming out of college with big degrees and they haven't worked a day in their life. He says I actually, you know, and that was electrical engineering, and he's like it just takes me two years, two or three years just to get these guys up to speed with the workforce and that's on electrical engineering. That's, that's not safety so yeah as you said yourself it's.

Speaker 3 16:49

It's across all sort of careers, I think, but I think safety in particular because it's two broader subjects like risk assessment being taught about risk assessment in college and then, as soon as you meet a graduate I've yet to meet a graduate that can apply a good risk assessment having come out of college. So like there's something wrong in terms of the education in in the colleges that there isn't a foster of how to apply the principles in practicality in in in the workforce and within college. And yeah, okay, everybody needs to sort of have their apprenticeship, if you like, but with the money that's been like the average in europe when it's, but definitely in ireland and the uk it's 35 000 starting figure for someone coming out of college into health and safety. Like that's a pretty big salary for somebody that has never worked a day in their life in health and safety. It's a massive challenge. Like the salaries are gone through the roof.

Speaker 3 17:52

Like we're looking at salaries now at the moment of people that maybe five years experience are up around the 70 000 figure. Plus all the rest of the cars and expenses and all that kind of stuff, you're nearly hitting 100 grand for somebody in around a five year. I don't begrudge it to them, but what I'm finding is that there is definitely a sort of like people jumping shit for a lot. They're a lot more flaky these days than they ever were. They'll jump shit to get on the road to get an extra couple of thousand a year, more so than what they were before. Where it was kind of loyalty was you've given me a job, I'm going to give you back my time and my energy and my commitment. I think the loyalty has started to be stretched these days. I don't know how yous are seeing the same thing, or if you are.

Speaker 2 18:43

I can see you laughing there.

Speaker 1 18:45

Well, because I've just spent a two-day workshop with a variety of age groups and so, interestingly, this conversation sort of came up and look, it's challenging. And the interesting thing is one person was here and the relation a relative person was here and the relation a relative was here. At the other end of that spectrum, right, very dedicated, by the way, very dedicated, but the whole approach to recruitment and all of those elements, I mean it's changing rapidly and so for some people it's that concept or that construct of loyalty used to be. And now that I'm thinking this, I think this is where the big shift is. Loyalty is now. You know, once upon a time you said you have to earn my loyalty, sort of thing you know earn my trust right.

Speaker 1 19:39

I am the owner or the business and you work for the business and therefore you need to be loyal to me. Well, I think that's actually being flipped on its head these days yeah, 100 yeah and business owners need to flip with it yeah, 100.

Speaker 3 19:54

Yeah, and they need to. They need to be creative in in their packages for people and I I think it's interesting and it's a totally different topic, but for anybody, this is just me, but I see in the premiership in soccer, famous club Chelsea in the UK are giving their players long-term contracts but paying them less money. But they're obviously if they leave the club, they have this, this or if they're sold by the club, they have this 10-year contract that they can rely on. As opposed to, I might be sold next summer, so I'll give you less money, but I'll I'll guarantee your work as a footballer for the next 10 years. And it's a completely different model than than any of the other clubs and I think it's followed on from a model in the us in basketball or football. I think one of the major sports in the us are doing the same thing and just I think it's something that might creep in as an innovation for employers to say I'm going to guarantee you work for the next 10 years, regardless of whether we have ups or downs.

Speaker 3 21:07

For the next 10 years, I'm going to give you a contract that says I'm going to guarantee you the work and I'm going to guarantee you X, y and Z. So definitely there's challenges in the workforce. I also seen I had a really good guest on our own podcast where the guy was a teacher and left to teach an industry to join a construction company that had a specific focus on trying to get people out of other industries into construction, that had cross transferable skills, and so the transferable skills that this guy had was learning and communicating and they brought him in as a project manager and he knew nothing about construction. So don't worry about don't worry about we'll, we'll. We'll tool you up, we'll get you right. Yeah.

Speaker 3 21:53

But what we want is we want an excellent communicator with the clients, with the architects, with all the stakeholders. And, as he said himself, he said like the opportunity to go into another industry that I would never get was amazing. The teaching had become stale. It's just the whole system of an institutionalized role within the teaching was very sort of boxing him off, and then the salary was like two or three times what he would earn as a teacher. So it was interesting to see that there is employers starting to capitalize because they have to. They have to come up with some sort of a creative, inventive reason to bring people over into their business.

Speaker 1 22:37

I think there's a big conversation around fit and that ability to, as you say, bring in the empathy to be able to ask questions. Whether you know the topic or not, nuala and I'll be the first persons to tell you that we'll go and work on an oil rig. Do we know every element of an oil rig? Of course we don't. All right no. Do we know what every single job's, absolute detail of every job is? No, our job is to make you think. Our job is to help you think about what are you doing?

Speaker 1 23:08

Where are you? So it's all about asking questions, it's about having curiosity, and that's something we say to health and safety people that we're working with. Say, yes, you need to have all of the skills around the data data, if you like, but one of your biggest skills is actually this being able to communicate, to ask questions, and what you said earlier knows not be command and control, but be more flexible, and I was going to use the word common sense, but let's just move on from that one. Um, yeah, um, there is no something no exactly right, so it's.

Speaker 1 23:46

It's. How do we get those air quotes, soft skills, to be part of that learning process? I mean, we don't even learn them in school, so no institution gives that to us no, but I, I I have have kind of a strong view on that, karen.

Speaker 3 24:03

I would rather see, I think, when you sit down with a marketing expert and they say to you, okay, if somebody's typing in health and safety, what are they going to type in? And then they go health and safety officer, health and safety advisor, safety officer, hse, hseq, la, la, la, la, la, la, la la, and so on and so forth, the titles are just all over the place in health and safety. You know, an engineer, mechanical engineer is a mechanical engineer yeah, electrical engineers.

Speaker 3 24:28

And that's going to end the story yeah why do we not go back and look at safety and say, okay, you can have a safety administrator or you can have a safety professional.

Speaker 3 24:39

Which do you want? So the difference is the safety professional will be the guy that I want to manage the job, oversee the job, interact with all the stakeholders, be front-facing, brings everybody together, so on and so forth. The safety administrator is the person that's in the back office, that pulling together all the data back to the data again. But, like I think we've done a bit of research in this as well a couple of years ago and safety officers were spending like some 60 percent of their time in the office even more uh, and then obviously so conversations are not being had in the field and we're missing stuff and we're not extracting the information or we're not just having I would call it banter, where you're kind of like how are you getting on? Somebody just might be having a bad day. Those conversations are not happening enough and I know people will tune in and say, no, they do happen. It doesn't happen enough across the board.

Speaker 1 25:37

Enough is the key word. You're right, and I think we would both agree with that.

Speaker 2 25:44

Yeah, I agree with that. Yeah, in agreement. But I also love the sentiment of we often talk about well, what does it say on the tin, what do we do? And you're right, I mean there's so many different labels for people in safety that, actually, well, what does it say on the tin? So, how do we simplify it?

Speaker 2 25:59

and yeah, I mean even some of the people that we've worked with, their most valuable time is when they are on site, when they are watching what people are doing, when they're observing, when they're having those conversations whether it's the formal or the informal conversation but they are drowning in that safety administration. Yeah, absolutely so. Yeah, and goodness help when it's like an incident or something, because then everybody just goes oh, the paperwork. Yeah, how do we avoid that?

Speaker 2 26:29

And it is a light bulb moment in many ways. Kaz, I think we're going to have to do a blog post on simplifying the labels we use around that position. And, yeah, am I a safety professional? What does that look like, and am I a safety administrator? Does that look like and am I a safety administrator? And how would it help organizations to have both have a person who's out there, who's on site, who's the people's person, and have the detail person who's doing the admin and the reporting and making that shine?

Speaker 3 26:58

but this is. This is part of the confusion for the employers, in fairness to them, is that they're saying the health and safety person looks after health and safety. No, they don't, because there's so much of this confusion knocking around that the role isn't defined correctly. So people are making up their own mind of what is health and safety and some people get it right. Some people completely have it skewed, like we've done a safety culture. We developed a safety culture program recently and we've done a pilot and it was crazy to see how people's perception of health and safety from a worker's point of view was like yeah, the safety guy looks after all the health and safety. No, you don't. Yeah, yeah, do you know what I mean?

Speaker 3 27:46

yeah, that safety person looks after all the safety, like think about that no, in this day and age work and that is a pretty mature company workers were still still felt that out of safety was being managed by the safety person that person's job.

Speaker 1 27:57

Yeah, yeah unbelievable yeah, it's a long-standing concern that one who does look after it just thought everyone looks after it, oh good. I was just checking on the answer, yeah the podcast was just going to end there.

Speaker 4 28:20

I'm actually painting. I'm actually painting Nuala's house at the moment. That's why.

Speaker 3 28:23

that's why I'm actually painting Nuala's house at the moment. That's why I'm here. I don't do health and safety at all. They were stuck for a guest, so they asked me to come in.

Speaker 1 28:36

Oh, dear, that's brilliant, I love it. Oh, what other lovely questions have we got here, Gavin?

Speaker 2 28:45

I mean, one of your big philosophies is that safety can be simple, it can be direct and it can be incredibly effective. So how do we move towards that, how do we embrace that philosophy that that can become a norm and we're not doing this confusing over complicated process that has this huge label attached to it?

Speaker 3 29:05

well, kind of plug for the book uh, workplace safety on a budget. The reason I wrote workplace safety on a budget was I felt that, um, safety was getting out of wrap, which it still does today, in terms of people saying that safety costs money and it's you know, uh, even with the accidents it costs so much money. It costs so much money for all the paperwork and people, blah blah. So I wanted to write the book with a view to, to open people's minds up that there is a business of safety, and what I mean by that is that you can, people should look, employers, business owners should look at safety as a profit center for their business and not just as a compliance center. Yes, it is a compliance center. It should be matched as a profit center. And in the book what I do is I give loads of different examples of how you can apply safety and make money from being really smart with how you do that application.

Speaker 2 30:07

So Karen's got a hot hot hand moment going on here.

Speaker 3 30:12

I thought she was listening to music or something like that.

Speaker 1 30:17

Well, we were talking about this earlier. We're starting to think how do we help people actually embrace that question even. But please continue.

Speaker 3 30:26

So, like from growing up and being involved in health and safety, at an early age I was exposed to the commercial reality of running a business, probably more so than anything else, and I always felt that safety was just a department that was sort of outside of the actual overall center of the business, and that it was. It was what we need, safety. But when I got more and more exposed to commercial reality and then I started out and obviously opening up my own businesses, I understood from an empathetic point of view, but also from a commercial point of view. You know, these companies need to make money and they weren't looking at health and safety that it was something that could make them a profit. So you know, we done a gap analysis on a 50 million turnover business a couple of years ago and we applied the logic of the business of safety with them.

Speaker 3 31:23

And so how do we do that? So we went out into the field. We spoke to all of the engineers that were working for them and these guys were working in the trenches. So when I spoke to the guys, asked them about the job spec, the job role, how they felt. They loved the job, great job. Back to contracts. They were on a government framework. So basically the company um brought them all together and said we're have to win in this massive government contract. Yippee, you've got a 20-year framework in front of you guys here, but we're going to have to take it off the pole work because they're overhead line workers and you're going to have to go into the trenches and do this trench work, which was a less competency-based role than their overhead power line work.

Speaker 3 32:07

But they were going to get more money and, as the guys were telling me, family was secure, mortgages were secure, loans were secure and the job was easy, whereas I looked at that and said there's an opportunity here for the company. So I pulled the board of directors together and said here's a classic example of the business of safety. You pull those guys out of those trenches and put them to work where they should be working. And if you turn the tables here and bring an outside contractor in who specializes in that trench work, because now you've got all the knowledge of how to do the job, how many hours it takes, how much equipment it takes, all of the logistics of doing that job. So when you go to tender you'll know exactly how much that job costs to do and therefore you'll also know how to get your margin in built into that job. It took me four months to convince them to go to market because their attitude, the employer's attitude, was Gavin if we bring in somebody else to do that job, they're going to start up a relationship with our clients and they're going to become a competitor. So that was a four-month process to try and convince them. So eventually they agreed to go ahead and do it, went out to market, picked a really good contractor and that contractor had something like 20 people that worked for them, but over a period of time they went up to 200 people. Because of winning this work with this client, the guys knew exactly how much money was costing them and they knew exactly how much margin they were getting in it. And then they were able to go back to the client and say to their client now we have these overhead line workers. All that work that's in the future, bring it back in because we can actually do that overhead line work for you now, because we have the additional resources available to apply themselves to that work. So nothing changed. They got better profit for the workers that were doing and then they got increased productivity by letting the guys go back up into the overhead line work, plus the fact that these guys were highly competent.

Speaker 3 34:12

So I want people to start thinking about re-engineering the workplace from a safety perspective. That makes sense. You know there's lots of, lots of. There's lots of different topics you can. Safety has a touch point in every facet of every business. It doesn't matter whether you're in the office, whether you're in the field, whether you're a supplier, whatever that there's. There's procurement, hr, quality, environment, safety is in every is. It has, it has a hand in every one of those departments. And so get a spreadsheet and start writing down stuff of how you can put more efficiencies into your business by removing out certain elements or by re-engineering the workplace that makes it more safe. So that particular client came back to me and said Gavin, a million plus is what you made us based on that decision that we've done with yourself. And it still continues today because of doing that. And so it was kind of like a. It was a really eye-opening. I never got a chance really to sort of pull it at that scale. That was the first real heavy case study.

Speaker 3 35:24

And it was. It was a massive challenge to get people's minds to shift, because it was a legacy contract that they were working on, you know.

Speaker 2 35:33

That is a phenomenal case study and one of the things karen and I've been talking about is exactly that how do you help people see what their current way of doing things, or their current mindset, their current safety culture is actually costing them?

Speaker 2 35:47

Because it's not just the direct cost, it's not just the oh, we had an incident, it's all your indirect costs, it's your potential you try and get the word out properly today consequential losses. There's so much that goes into it that when you do shift it, when you do have a look at a different perspective, that you can go okay, wow, never thought about it like that. And the likelihood is that if you weren't having that conversation as an outsider who is not a part of the system, who's not caught up in the roller coaster of the way of working, it would never have happened. The guys who were on the overhead lines would have been in the trenches, they would have done the contract, maybe done an okay job, but it would never have been where it is now. And I think that is the value of bringing in somebody who is not in your business to help you have better conversations.

Speaker 3 36:42

Yeah, but I also think that health and safety people don't probably apply themselves as in the commercial side of things.

Speaker 3 36:53

And it's not their fault, because they are pushed out away from the conversations and it's not their fault because they are pushed out away from the conversations. You know we need to get our foot into the boardroom more, a lot more than what we have. We're outside of the key discussion that are at boardroom level. So that was a kind of light bulb moment for me was how do we, how do we get a seat at the table that can make a difference? And the only way that you're going to get an employer's attention is to tell him or her.

Speaker 3 37:24

I think we can knock 20 of the cost of safety here. But if we do make that 20 cost cut in these areas that I found through my research of working on these spreadsheets and where there's inefficiencies in safety, I want you to repurpose that money so that the lads have better PPE, that we buy better equipment, that we have better machinery, that we employ people that are better than us and not going out to market and getting the cheapest person for the job. There's loads of different touch points. Then, on the second stage of this, where you can make a difference in terms oh yeah, keep some of your profits 100 because I am part of your profit center, so take some of that from, but I want some enough for to build sustainable uh models in the business it's really sort of a bit of a light bulb, I think.

Speaker 1 38:16

So how do we help them understand that they need to keep reinvesting? So I'm sort of seeing this yep, we save here, but we need to put back in it to make it even more robust, so that we keep looking at that, and because we do it in other areas of the business, yeah, so you do it in this one well, my biggest pat on the back for the book was a lean specialist, for Toyota wrote a testimonial for me to say it's so refreshing to see somebody that has a lean approach to health and safety.

Speaker 3 38:48

We're not allowed to talk about cost cutting and safety in the same sense. No.

Speaker 1 38:53

Yeah no, I mean they do behind closed doors, but yeah.

Speaker 3 39:00

Yeah, and I'm not a lean expert, I don't have a Six Sigma or a Black Belt or any of that stuff.

Speaker 1 39:05

But it's just about agility you know it's common sense.

Speaker 3 39:09

Back to your word earlier. Common sense Like why the hell are we spending so much money on training with this training company when we can go and develop our own training modules, like I've done an exercise for a client recently. It's like you scratch training with this training company when we can go and develop our own training modules. Like I I done an exercise for a client recently. It's like you scratch his head. They were going crazy about the money that they were spending on training. I said what is training? So it's very specific avenue, so it's not something that we can get in the normal training institutions or academies. We have to bring this company in because they are the specialists in this area. And I said, well, is it highly competency-based? In terms of no, it's not. But he said these guys know how they told the course together and blah, blah went away.

Speaker 3 39:50

I had two ai guys working on that for two weeks and they came back with a comparable course, fully kitted out, finished within two weeks, and you might just get like where did you get the throne? So I didn't get it from anywhere. All this information is out in the internet. The guys pulled it, pulled it together from ai, put a video together, pulled the video into the the platform and then had a voiceover. So now all those guys just have to sit and listen to that course and watch that course and they get a downloadable cert. That's all right, it's an in-house company cert, but it didn't matter, did I mean?

Investing in Efficiency and Safety

Speaker 3 40:26

So, like I know that it's, sometimes we take the easy option out to to say, well, look, I can't do that, we just get somebody else in to do it, and next thing that becomes the norm and next thing you'll just send the money out the door. Like, if we're going to have a mature conversation about health and safety, we need to actually talk and we need to attach money a monetary value. And I'm not talking about oh well, if you don't have health and safety, you have an accident and that's going to cost you money. That's not the conversation I'm talking about. The conversation I'm talking about is how do we inject more profit into the business and stop leakages of money going out of the business that are related to health and safety, but that can also improve the efficiency of the company, the productivity of the company and the sale good factor of the company, so that we can start injecting money in the right areas, such as building a safety culture, building proper systems and employing better people.

Speaker 1 41:21

It's called blue money.

Speaker 2 41:24

Yeah, a proactive money.

Speaker 1 41:27

It came through various conversations but blue, green, red money. So red money, of course, is the cost of an event happening, which is usually enormous. We then have green money, the money that we oh, what is it again? What's green money? Again, the money you have to spend anyway. The money, yes, the money you have to spend anyway to make things done. But the blue money is the money that you need to invest to actually be more efficient in the green and to stop the red from happening. So the blue money then actually becomes very much a leadership tool. It becomes part of their toolkit, it's part of their KPIs. So what's the blue money that you're putting forward? What is the blue money? So, coming back to what you were doing earlier, doing the gap analysis, having a look at the systems and how do we improve it, and incrementally, then continuously, do that improvement model where we find some gaps, where we improve the systems at the same time, so that over time there shouldn't be much in the red department at all.

Speaker 3 42:28

Yeah, fair point.

Speaker 1 42:30

So it's that kind of approach.

Speaker 2 42:33

yeah, Having the right conversations along the way.

Speaker 3 42:37

Look at procurement Like there's a massive area that can be done in procurement to help efficiencies. Design Look at the amount of stuff that you know. Why are we doing it in that particular design? We can design it better. We can have it off-site manufacturing. Look at the safety people that we have.

Speaker 3 42:56

Maybe we don't need that and people might not like me for saying this, but like, maybe we don't need as many safety people that we have. Maybe we don't need that and people might not like me for saying this, but like, maybe we don't need as many safety people, but if we split it out, we have really good administrators who can do the administration side of things. Let's pay the guys that we have more money and attract other people. Like we might have to lose two to gain one, but that one person has 20 years experience and blah, blah, blah, and we don't need them to do all the admin. We just need them to focus on the people aspect and the management of the business and the strategy of the business and stuff like that.

Speaker 3 43:27

It was a massive um learning for me when I started looking into it, because it actually started getting uh, I'm passionate about it anyway, but you start getting really sort of a growl for it, because everything you look at now, you look at it from a monetary point of view. Why are we actually doing it that way? Like, does the owner know that this is actually happening and that they're spending money here? That's just like put me down the drain.

Speaker 1 43:54

I think it's. How can technology help instead of fearing AI and VR and whatever else? There is right, I mean, there's lots of technology coming that's going to help. All of this. It's not about putting people out of work. It's actually about making you more. I don't know if efficient's the right word, but it helps improve our productivity Exactly.

Speaker 3 44:17

Yeah, productivity is down since COVID. Anyone will. Yeah, so productivity is down since COVID. Anyone will tell you Productivity is down since COVID. Like, I know that people are saying that they're working more hours because they're working from home and stuff like that and the hybrid model and whatever else, but there's more work than there is people at the moment, for sure.

Speaker 1 44:35

Yeah. That the global industry is really suffering Everybody, yeah, at the moment and the global yeah, that the global industry is really suffering everybody between yeah. So invest, then, in the right tools and the right people at the same time, to to help, at least within your own organization, whoever's listening. Uh, consider those elements and not just think it's that person's fault or that company's fault, which is often what happens. Yeah. It's their fault that this isn't working.

Speaker 3 45:04

Yeah, I definitely like. There's a lot of work to be done here. The smarter people that get on board with this now are going to be the winners in the next couple of years. Because it's not just forget about ai.

Speaker 3 45:20

That's only an element, a small element of it absolutely, there's a whole body of work to be done here to become the best, and it will reap the rewards because you, you're going to be the one that's going to have the capacity, in inverted brackets, to deliver these jobs, because you're going to have all these efficiency models built into your business, and all you need to do then is just like hit the go button. Right, this thing is on fire, let's go. And you're going to try. You're going to attract the best because you're paying the best, you've got the best standards, you've got the best processes, and safety can be a very integral part of that, but only if you can get access into that boardroom totally listen to.

Speaker 3 46:01

If you listen to this, yes, think about that for the next couple of years, next couple of months, next couple of days. How do I get myself into the boardroom to make an impact in this business from a safety perspective?

Speaker 2 46:15

and if you're sitting at that boardroom table and you don't have safety sitting at the table, what are you doing to invite them, Invite safety in, invite them into the conversation where it might not be what you want to hear, but it may well be a necessary conversation that you're making more difficult by not having safety in the room and viewing things from a different perspective 100% and viewing things from a different perspective 100%. So one of our favorite questions and it's a coaching question, but as well as a thinking broader question is if you were granted one miracle that could change safety culture in the industry, what would that miracle be?

Speaker 3 46:55

Do we need a miracle? Do we really need a miracle? Good question.

Building a Unique Safety Culture

Speaker 3 47:00

It's a very good question as well, though. One miracle that would change safety culture. Well, what is safety culture? That's an interesting question, I think, from a safety culture perspective. Everybody has their own version of a safety culture and, rather than having a miracle, I would actually prefer if everybody just built their own culture based on their own circumstances and who they are and what their identity is, and that in itself is a miracle, because you can't buy a safety culture, and I think there's a philosophy out there that you have to bring in an expert to design, uh, to implement, their version of a safe culture. Um, passionate about this area as well, like, let's just start having the conversation about a safety culture and what that looks like, but it could be five, ten years before you actually get to the point of where you've actually defined your own safety culture. But once that's done, that's it for life. Then you have it. You have it done and. But I see you know this smash and grab route of bringing in a manufactured version of the safety culture and it doesn't work.

Speaker 3 48:14

I don't care, I don't stand with anybody and go toe-to-toe with them. I talk differently and how I I apply myself in the business circles. Employers talk differently in how they apply themselves and managers talk differently. So what's the commonality amongst everybody's characteristics within the business? Let's get together and have an honest conversation of how we want to be perceived as a brand. What does our brand stand for and is it pulling the sky still for earth? Is it like it does what it says in the tin and safety culture should be? It does what it says in the tin safety.

Speaker 1 48:49

Yeah, we use the term safety culture, but we're talking about organizational culture. We're talking about how anybody does anything on any given day in any department, and, coming looping back to what you said earlier, it should, it's in every department, it should be in every aspect of the business, so does it that? Is it, then, that really it's about the quality of the conversations and the quality of the relationships, which then determine the quality of your culture, regardless. So we approach it from how do we improve the quality of the conversations, whether it's a leader, a team safety person, the accountant, the boardroom table?

Speaker 2 49:38

I remember a project that we were on and part of it that came out was that there wasn't a defined kind of view of what the organization was about, how we do things around here, and the response from the board of directors was well, can't we just get a vision or a safety culture vision or a safety vision, you know? Just get one of those off the internet. It was like absolutely not. We just all threw up, yeah, completely. But they were like, oh, come on, it can't be so hard. And it took two days of conversation and really digging into what is it that makes you you as an organization? What are the things that inspire people to join your organization? What inspires customers to actually want to bring you on as their provider of choice? And at the end of it they came up with something that was completely their organization, it was them, it was something that they were proud of, it was something that nobody had to remember because it was just what they were about and there's so much value in that.

Speaker 2 50:52

It's hard, but there's value in that. And then you can start saying what does it look like? How do we build it? Yeah, and then you can start saying what does it? Look like how do we build it?

Speaker 3 50:59

Yeah, and you should like in the initial steps it shouldn't have to be written down, it should be conversations. So we've done a white paper on this and we pulled together our own version of a safety culture. So we used the UK model, which was obviously initially brought into the oil and gas industry, and then we used the SCAP, which was obviously initially brought into the oil and gas industry, and then we used the SCAT model in the United States and we merged the two. We brought in a data scientist and a researcher to research both models and then understand where we needed to fit a hybrid version for a client. And we done the initial pilot with the client of the assessment with 35 questions. The engagement is in it communication, behaviors, resources, all the good stuff, the five pillars of what you're trying to achieve.

Speaker 3 51:53

And when we've done the initial pilot out of the 35 questions I think it was what we done then was we plotted what everybody agreed to, an answer that you know without question. Everybody in in the pilot agreed, said agreed to that question, and then, whatever they disagreed, everything we wanted to know what was the commonality where everybody disagreed with that question. And so, rather than having the, the percentages of what was engagement, what was trust, what was communication, what was resource, etc. The. The value actually became where we separated out the commonalities. But it wasn't so much the commonalities, it was more where people had a varied response to an answer to a question. So not not everybody was aligned to those questions. Then you start looking at the questions going you all had a different, you had a different.

Speaker 3 52:52

Uh, agree, disagree answers to that question and that actually became more of the value of the conversation. So now we're having conversations about why the hell do we all disagree or agree with that particular question. Now you start getting into workshops and starting to understand the heartbeat of the company, because these type of prompted questions allows us to have the conversations. And that's the first step, I believe, in terms of getting things moving on this and as simple as just a small little survey. But what you do with that survey is more important than the actual survey itself totally exactly.

Speaker 2 53:31

It's just. It's just a time that you have a choice to then go and actually create something amazing for in conversation yeah, what people are doing.

Speaker 3 53:42

A lot of people are doing this. They're just doing the survey. Whether it's survey, monkey or whatever else, I'm saying, oh yeah, we scored high on trust and we scored high on engagement and that, yeah, but you did, but have you actually gone deep down into the, the actual data, and understand why you have disparities of people's opinions to these questions? Because what we found is and you guys will understand this as well is that it's usually when there's a fatality or a catastrophic event that then we start pulling back from that and saying, okay, what's going on here? The next thing, people are being interviewed and they're saying, oh sure, look, he doesn't give it, doesn't give a crap anyway, or that accident was always going to happen, or not.

Speaker 3 54:23

Many people like this place. Next thing all of these conversations that should be, should have been had months and years ago, are cropping up only when there's a catastrophic event. Why are we not? Why are people not being bringing this to the table? Uh, well, before that. So we can at least have honesty on the table and at least we can all say we're not carrying the table at least we know there is an issue here, but we're working on it.

Speaker 3 54:48

We're not. We're not the best company yet. We'll never probably get there, but we are trying to solve this particular issue and because these guys have an open dialogue here, the the door is always open. You can always bring up whatever you want. It's a massive area in itself, as these guys are well aware of.

Speaker 2 55:08

That's a massive area and that's almost an entire podcast discussion just on its own. Yeah.

Speaker 1 55:14

And I'm getting loathing. I'm itching to verbalize something, but like we could be here for another two hours when I do so, let's just.

Speaker 4 55:24

I'm just going to put it there. I'm going to leave it.

Speaker 3 55:29

Don't leave a hanger. Don't leave a hanger there. Karen, how do you get this?

Speaker 1 55:32

open. So I think part of the problem is what clients are expecting. So, particularly around this, measuring statistics et cetera right, not just conversations, but until the sales process changes. So people are buying based on LTIs and LRTIs and PLIs or whatever all those numbers are right, all that stuff, right, right and they're just like.

Speaker 1 56:00

But until that doesn't become the primary reason why somebody or why a client will pick that supplier over that supplier, this continues to be challenged. So I think there's two things. So you can, as a company, inside, have these conversations, but on the external, how do we help them to be visible around? Because, well, in fact, the LTI thing probably goes away, as I'm saying that, because they're having open conversations inside the organisation, so they know what the questions are, don't know. There was a thought there.

Speaker 2 56:38

We can move on there it wasn't, that's okay, and there it wasn't yeah it's writing yeah, all righty.

Speaker 1 56:54

Wow, that was awesome. We could talk for another hour easily, but we won't because we've got to be mindful of who's listening.

Speaker 2 57:05

Yes, that too exactly.

Speaker 1 57:09

So is there any? Is there something that you would, that you'd really like to get out there and say that we haven't kind of covered, and then we'll close off?

Speaker 3 57:22

we've covered a lot in that, in fairness and like you know, I think um. The summary from my side of things will be let's try and attract more people into the industry. Let's do better to bring in really good health and safety people for the future. I think the statistics are overwhelmingly bad in terms of how health and safety is going to be delivered in the future because of a lack of resources. So it's one thing that, as a safety industry, we need to do better. We need to, we need to, we really need to pull up our socks and have a model that every country is trying to build up resources for health and safety because it's looking bad for the workforce and the workplace and that we're going to have a lack of resources in the future. Yeah.

Speaker 1 58:22

I guess that leaves us in that position of we'll be working for a while. Yeah. One way to look at it.

Speaker 2 58:33

But we're also in the position where we really get to influence that and to influence what's coming into the industry Exactly. So let's take advantage of that and you know, as we're doing with this podcast and gavin you're doing with yours, it's around sharing wisdom and knowledge, and the further we can spread that wisdom and knowledge amongst the tribe of those of us who are passionate about making safety more than just a numbers game, making it that it's something that improves your business.

Speaker 2 59:03

It gets people to go home, it's simple, it's effective. The the greater we can. We can see that influence starting to roll over and hopefully in a couple of years we'll be celebrating. I'll be coming to visit you in ireland again. We can have a, have a celebration lunch and go. Look at that difference we made. I'll drag karen with me this time. I was going to say I'm a lot closer, yeah well listen guys.

Speaker 3 59:31

Thanks very much for having me on the show yeah, brilliant having you here.

Speaker 1 59:36

Uh, glad we finally made this come together, this conversation, so fantastic. I think it's been a year in the making thereabouts yeah a bit over.

Speaker 2 59:47

Actually, I checked our messages.

Speaker 1 59:49

Yeah, right it's life, us too. All right, thank. Thank you so so much.

Speaker 2 59:58

Thank you for joining us today. It is always lovely to have conversations that matter To learn more about creating a culture of safety and care. Please visit our website safetycollaborationscom to access our show notes, resources and guides. Leave us a message via the message us section on the show notes page and we'll get back to you.

Speaker 1 1:00:21

You can also join our community on social media by following us on our LinkedIn pages Safety Collaborations Karen Avary and Noorla Gage and on our new Safety Collaborations social channels YouTube, facebook and Instagram. Our handle Safety Collaborations is much the same Sharing is caring. Follow us on your favourite podcast platform. Leave us a five-star review. It would be awesome. Doing these things helps us to grow and share our collective conversations. Till next time stay safe and stay well.