Safe, Efficient, Profitable: A Worker Safety Podcast
Joe and Jen Allen of Allen Safety LLC take their combined 40+ years of worker safety, OSHA, EPA, production, sanitation, and engineering experience in Manufacturing Plants including Harvest Plants/Packers, Case Readies and Further Processing Plants, Food Production Plants, Feed Mills, Grain Elevators, Bakeries, Farms, Feed Lots, and Petro-Chemical and bring you their top methods for identifying risk, preventing injuries, conquering the workload, auditing, managing emergencies and catastrophic events, and working through OSHA citations. They're breaking down real safety opportunities, safety citations, and emergency situations from real locations, and discussing realistic solutions that can actually be implement based on their personal experiences spending 40+ weeks in the field every year since 2001. Joe and Jen are using all of that experience to provide a fresh outlook on worker safety by providing honest, (no sponsors here!) and straight forward, easy to understand safety coaching with actionable guidance to move your safety program forward in a way that provides tangible results.
Safe, Efficient, Profitable: A Worker Safety Podcast
#67 Safety Managers: Is it Time For A Job Change?
Its the holiday season, a dinner topic that may be brought up at a lot of tables centers around job and career changes. For safety managers, a driving force for contemplating a job starts with if they feel the company they work for doesn't have safety values that align with their own. Is it the company, or is it how the manager is presenting the concept of safety? Listen to this episode to learn more!
This video is intended for educational purposes. Solutions offered are not designed to take the place of an attorney, career coach, or medical professional, and should not be taken or acted upon as legal, career, or medical advice. It is recommended that viewers consult a safety consultant, career advisor, medical provider, and/ or an occupational safety legal team as applicable to help navigate their specific circumstances.
It is about to be the holidays it's obviously almost Halloween when I'm recording this, but when this episode that you're about to watch gets ready to drop, it's actually going to be closer to Thanksgiving, and the number one thing that we see around the holidays is that people discuss job changes, and that's always a hot topic at the table, right, whether it's at Christmas break or Thanksgiving break, and so that's always something that you're like I'm thinking about changing, and you have those big discussions with family and friends, and so the episode that we recorded is definitely applicable to that. If you're getting ready to make a big change or thinking about a big change in your career, your job or your career path or whatever that looks like, or maybe you're just not comfortable with how things have been going lately. This is a great episode that's getting ready to play, and so give it a listen. I think you'll enjoy it and find it helpful. It kind of deals with if you just feel like you're not sure about the direction that your company is headed in regards to safety and you're not sure that the values that you might have as a safety manager are aligning with the company's values or however that's playing out. So give it a listen, let us know what you think and have a happy holiday. What to do if you raise a concern that is safety related to the management team that you're currently working at or maybe it even includes corporate and you are kind of told go fly a kite. They're not super interested. So that's what we're going to break down today how to raise concerns to a management team and then how to navigate it if they don't seem super interested.
Speaker 1:So if this is the first time we're meeting, my name is Jen Allen. I'm one of the owners of Allen Safety LLC and I have been in the safety game and manufacturing specifically for almost 20 years now. So between all of the training and safety audits, evaluations, I was a safety manager at one time in my former life before becoming a consultant, and so this is something that we get brought to us quite a bit on the side phone calls, texts kind of offline in the evenings, on weekends, about how to navigate this weird gray area. We don't want to lose our job, but we're really concerned and feel that we're at kind of a crossroads ethically or we just feel uncomfy about it. Right, we don't feel good about it and so let's dive in, let's talk about that so real quick.
Speaker 1:First, just to be as clear for the sake of this video as we can, I kind of look at it like there's kind of two groups of companies, right, they're the companies that prefer to just pay the fine, just pay the bill. We think that's cheaper, don't really want to invest a lot in the safety culture, don't really see a value in it. It's something we have to do. Safety is the most important thing, but when you really look at the allocation of resources in terms of financials, in terms of time, in terms of managers or personnel allocated to being focused on safety as a subject, it's severely lacking in one, two. All of those categories, right. And then you have the other side of the coin, where it's very proactive. We are going to have safety teams and evaluations. We're actively going out and trying to identify and drive down risk as a company, as a facility, as a management team.
Speaker 1:It's something that is lived and breathed every day. It is ingrained and woven into the cloth of the entire company and everything they do. It's in every conversation, and so there's kind of those two categories. Now, of course, there's companies that fall everywhere on the spectrum in between, but those are kind of my two polar opposite ends and I think it's really important to figure out what end of the spectrum your company would fall in. If you're really brutally honest and you evaluate, you've got to kind of piece through all of the mantras and the corporate, speak right and really get down to do their action, support whatever that sounds like. So zero injuries, no injuries. We believe everyone goes home the same way. They came to us Okay, but is that something that the management team, from a corporate level on down to facility and site management, is that something that is being shown? And I think it's important to understand where on the spectrum your company is, because that kind of tells you where to go from there.
Speaker 1:And the next thing that I would highly encourage you to do is look at your sales pitch when you try and discuss things that are concerned. So, whether it be a safety concern or a risk or project related, you know something's coming up with repair and maintenance or engineering, or you've got a big project or big rebuild of some kind a shutdown maybe. What does that look like? How are you selling safety? Because one of the biggest shifts in mindset that I had when I got into the safety game and started growing as a manager was I recognized I changed my frame of reference of where I was coming from that these are my clients and I am trying to sell them this idea. I'm trying to market to them why this makes sense. I'm trying to show them where the return on investment yes, it's a good thing to do, but for most companies it's got to be more than just it's the right thing to do, because they are still in the business of trying to make money and we still have to put product out the door or we close the doors and no one has a job right. So there is that whole piece to it too.
Speaker 1:So if you really look at it like that, then we are all basically just advising and supporting and we're making our management team aware of the risks legally and what the injury risks could be, and our job is to basically sell that, whatever that looks like. So we want to, if it's very severe, implore them that this is very severe from a regulatory side maybe, or a fine side, or maybe there could be some kind of criminal or civil ramifications in the court system with it, depending on if you've got EPA things going on. We want to make them fully aware of the scope of what we're dealing with. We also want to make them aware of if there's an injury cost currently, if there's an equipment cost currently, how those equipment and PPE or engineering costs, how some of those repair and maintenance things how would those be affected? Do they go down? Do they go up? Is there a return on investment? How long? What does that look like? We want to really sell it right. We want to give them our best spit forward, our best sales pitch, because they still probably have bosses that they have to answer for when they're going through their budgets and their numbers as well. So we want to be really mindful of that. That they're still are as a safety manager, they're still our end user, and so we want to give them the tools to sell it. Or, if they have to explain it, give them a way to explain it that makes sense to whoever they're having to answer to as well.
Speaker 1:And then the last thing is is if you feel like you're doing all those things and you feel like you're selling it and this is very ethically sketchy and you're just really getting to the point where this feels uncomfortable, sketchy and you're just really getting to the point where this feels uncomfortable. You've just got to decide. Am I comfortable doing what I can, even if the improvements I'm making aren't coming as quickly as I would like them to? Is some better than none? And if I left, who would take my place and would things improve at this facility, or would they not?
Speaker 1:Everyone has a different threshold of what they're comfortable being okay with and going to bed and looking in the mirror and all of those things right. So you kind of just have to have that internal conversation with yourself of am I doing these folks more good if I'm here, even though I don't feel good about this? Or is it better if I leave, because I still have to have my mental health in mind and my family time and my self-care in mind and make sure that I'm okay as a human and take care of my career and my family as well. So those are all things that should be factored in, I think, when you're making those decisions at the very end, when you come to the decision fork in the road of which way do I go. I think all of those are very important things to have on your list, and there's many others, I'm sure I didn't catch them all, feel free to drop them in the comments if you've got other things that should be on the list that I missed.
Speaker 1:In terms of considering whether you stay or whether you go, I know co-workers are always a big deal and I know managers that you're directly working with are also a big deal too, so those two things themselves can go a really long way, and whether you want to stay or whether you want to go as well definitely things to consider If you want a different way to look at safety, something that's a little less trite, a little bit fresher, something that takes into consideration how do I take this regulation and make it work for my business, my facility, with what we're doing and the constraints that we have.
Speaker 1:We're breaking all of that stuff down every other week on Allen Safety LLC's YouTube channel and if it helps you, please like, share, subscribe, comment, do all the things. It really genuinely does help us and it really helps get our videos into the hands of those that need them. So we really appreciate it. We appreciate anyone that's part of our community. We want to say thank you for that and until next time I'll see you later. Stay safe, everybody. So so Thank you, you.
