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‘World Arm Wrestling Champion’ is not a title you commonly see among the list of credentials of a typical safety manager. Yet his earlier arm wrestling feats are a significant part of Darrell Belyk’s approach to health and safety management.
Belyk is the corporate safety manager at Tri-Venture Group, a reclamation, decommissioning and metal recycling firm based in Airdrie, Alberta. As the first person to hold the title in the company, Belyk has taken on the challenge of building an entirely new safety program for the Tri-Venture Group, the soul of which is establishing safety culture across the organization.
To succeed in his role, communication with employees is key, says Belyk, and that is where his arm wrestling experience comes in handy.
The confidence gained from years of competing, both locally and internationally, afforded Belyk the ability to get his message across whenever he needs to.
He first recognized this ability when, after winning a world championship in Tokyo in 1999, he was asked by some of the Rotary Clubs in Calgary to speak at some of their meetings.
“People were actually listening to me and they were taking what I said (and regarding me) as being an inspirational speaker,” says Belyk, who has since been using this special ability in his chosen career as a safety professional.
Getting started
The corporate safety manager post at Tri-Venture is a new role created about a year ago by its CEO Rob Barnett, who recruited Belyk. Belyk had been in the safety field for over a decade. “They did have a safety program here…but by the looks of it, it hasn’t been updated for about eight years,” Belyk says.
The Tri-Venture Group’s business subsidiaries comprise of two metal recycling companies, an asbestos abatement firm, two demolition/decommissioning companies and an oil field valve repair company. The businesses fall under two professional safety associations in Alberta: the Manufacturers’ Health and Safety Association and the Alberta Construction Safety Association.
Belyk needed to create a corporate safety program that encompasses all six of Tri-Venture’s subsidiary firms. He then had to develop customized programs that fit the requirements and conditions of each of the business units and the appropriate professional safety association they fall under, for safety audit purposes.
Getting the safety programs across all of Tri-Venture Group’s companies audited and certified by the Alberta government was one of Belyk’s initial goals. But while it’s no small feat to accomplish, a successful audit is “not the end-all and be-all” of the company’s safety program, he says.
“I’m starting to work with all the companies in establishing safety behaviours, and to (inform them about their) accountabilities from upper management to the business unit managers and frontline supervisors,” Belyk says.
Because Tri-Venture never really had someone solely dedicated to looking after the safety of employees, one of the biggest tasks for Belyk is establishing a safety culture throughout the company.
“It doesn’t happen overnight,” he says. “You have to build up the culture, as well as get people to look out for other people.”
Training is an important component of achieving that safety culture across the organization, says Belyk. “I’ve seen in the past that if you train people, people know what is going to happen or how to do a job, so that something will just click in them and say, ‘Hey, there’s a hazard here to look out for!’ When that starts to happen, then accidents won’t be as frequent or as severe.”
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