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
Is Your Safety Consultant Ethical?
It seems like there are people claiming to be "experts" everywhere- so how do you spot the true experts among all the noise? This video helps you identify exactly that with some red flags and key questions to ask then next time you hire a third party for PSM or Safety audits or training.
This video is intended for educational purposes. Solutions offered are not designed to take the place of an attorney or medical professional, and should not be taken as legal advice. It is recommended that viewers consult an occupational safety legal team as applicable to help navigate their specific circumstances.
Let's talk about consultants, specifically consultants in manufacturing and ag business. So if this is the first time we're meeting, my name is Jen Allen, I'm one of the owners of Allen Safety and I am a safety consultant. And as a safety consultant, I can tell you it's something that's really easy to kind of be shy and right, I feel like a lot of times there's a lot of room for being unethical in that field, so that's why we're breaking it down today. So my first big red flag is I'm at your side as a consultant and I'm spending the entire time that you're paying me to do job A, selling you on all the other jobs that I can do here and why you should bring me back next time and trying to get future work or repeat work or whatever that looks like. How about you just do your job today and let whatever you're doing today sell me on asking for some other services? Let's not make it weird, right? Another one would be you're making me pay for a bid that you created. As a business owner, I understand it's very time consuming, but as a client I don't like that because you wouldn't get the work without that. So it's kind of like why are we paying for that. That's weird to me.
Speaker 1:Another one is is when you start seeing folks step outside of their lane of expertise. I consult for OSHA stuff. I don't consult for EPA. So if someone called me and said, hey, can you fill out my Tier 2, my TRI, can you go and do some wastewater sampling or give me some ideas on that? No, no, I can't. I am not an EPA expert. So, conversely, when I see environmental groups or teams start melding into the OSHA side, my first question is is how are you qualified to consult and give advice on the safety side if you exclusively have an environmental background and you don't have any experience dealing with the safety side? I don't love, as a paying client, paying for them to get experience doing it slower and as not an expert, and then they can become more of an expert and take it somewhere else. I don't like that idea. So if you start getting a group that's saying we can do that, we can do that, oh, over there, we can do that too Start asking questions how they're qualified and then also ask questions if their insurance that they have for their business covers all this extra add-on work. They might not even have coverage if things don't go right.
Speaker 1:The last big red flag that I would say that I have is from the auditing side. So there's this thing that if you don't go too hard on a company you'll get invited back, but if you do go too hard and you have a lot of findings sometimes you don't get invited back. Right, there is that thing that's out there. If you're getting any audit and it's one or two pages or it's a half day, so anything like a PSM compliance audit, that's not a half a day for the majority of sites, right, if I see mechanical integrity and it's not a few day audit, it's not a branded facility and it's a one page document. I have questions, right? So you are coming in as a corporate person and you see a one page document for some of these different repeat audits. So the compliance audit, mechanical integrity, the PHA audit, a safety audit, anything like that, that should be a big red flag that maybe something's a little off with that auditor.
Speaker 1:So if you want more like this, check out our Island Safety YouTube channel. Please like, share, comment, all of the things it really does. Help us. And until next time, guys, stay safe and we'll see you later. Thank you. So. So, thank you you.
