COS: Many of your workers work around machinery. We all know that machine safety and safeguarding equipment is only as good as the people using them. How do you get past the human factor issue?

SG: I was quoted – and actually got in trouble with Kimberly Clark on this – in a magazine saying, “my job is as a safety professional is to force the decisions of my employees.” And really what that was all about was actually removing variability from the workplace. And really I do look at workers coming into a manufacturing site, they don’t want to get hurt. The last thing that they want to happen to them is to get hurt. Now, saying that there are different levels of risk that they are willing to take. Some of them will strap into a seatbelt coming to work, some of them will not.

I think as a safety professional our job is to create barriers that would drive a bad decision. And quite honestly, the behavioural-based safety products that are being pushed they literally are being pushed without the very basic fundamentals of protection. So really, if you act right it makes no difference now how dangerous that machine is. That may work one time, it may work a thousand times in your decision-making. But what happens if it’s two o’clock in the morning and you had a really bad night and an argument with your spouse and the machine guards are off? What’s going to drive a decision? I don’t know. And clearly I don’t think either of us do know. So it’s that one time that we’re trying to prevent.

So, I believe it is driving expectations of how you want your employees to act. I think it’s behavioural modification. It’s teaching them some very basic aspects of giving feedback, when they observe behaviour on the floor, which I think is one of the hardest things that we did.

The last one which I think is big is what we call the physical environment and it is machine protection – it’s guarding, it’s electronic control, it’s lighting, it’s how cold the environment is, it’s how hot it is, it’s how luminated it is. So it’s removing bearability. It’s making it harder for them to make a bad decision and really forces them to make the right decision or the decision that you desire and that is really what we work on.

COS: You mentioned that one of the challenges that a safety leader in an organization faces is being able to talk to senior managers, speak their language. How can safety leaders rise above that challenge?

SG: Job safety has become paramount for corporations like Kimberly Clark. When we look at personal medical cases in Kimberly Clark, most of our employees now get hurt outside of work. And they are generating millions and millions of dollars of cost to the corporation. At the end of the day the CEO certainly cares about safety but he also cares about the economic impact, so how do we embrace an employee 24 hours, 7 days a week? How do we make that person a risk manager?

What is starting to be set in place is that as we do things like off-the-job safety with our employees, we start losing less of them. We protect them at home, and we protect their kids, who are also on our insurance policies and their spouses. So we’re actually seeing an understanding of not only the value of our Kimberly Clark’s safety at work but also at home and it’s working for us.

So kind of seeing that and money and the economic impact to the corporation is huge. CEOs understand that and senior leaders understand that. They see real-life circumstances happening, the Imperial Sugar explosion that happened in Georgia in August this year killed 14 folks. It’s not hard to look over the fence and understand that the CEO is being brought up on criminal charges.