EHS Today - Fall 2026

THE MAGAZINE FOR ENVIRONMENT, HEALTH AND SAFETY LEADERS

FALL 2026

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THE MAGAZINE FOR ENVIRONMENT, HEALTH AND SAFETY LEADERS

FALL 2026

ehstoday.com

America’s Safest Companies of 2026 EHS Today honors 8 companies that exemplify world-class safety excellence. p. 10

p. 16 Preventing Catastrophic Safety Incidents p. 20 Bridging the Mentorship Gap p. 22 Head Protection p. 24 Environmental Monitoring p. 27 Why Ladder Safety Matters

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contents VOLUME 19, NUMBER 3 • FALL 2026

THE MAGAZINE FOR ENVIRONMENT, HEALTH AND SAFETY LEADERS

FEATURES

2026 WINNER 10

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Cover Story America’s Safest Companies of 2026

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Preventing Catastrophic Safety Incidents

20 22

Bridging the Mentorship Gap

22

BY DAVE BLANCHARD, ADRIENNE SELKO AND NICOLE STEMPAK

BY MIKE SNYDER

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The Expanding Role of Environmenal Monitoring

27

Why Ladder Safety Matters

BY BRITTANY DERAFELO AND CHRIS SKIPPER

BY MIKE VANBREE

DEPARTMENTS Healthy Attitude | BY DAVE BLA NCHA RD ..................... 4

BY TITO WARREN

News Beat ................................................................. 6

The Urgent Need to Address Rotational Motion and Traumatic Brain Injuries in Construction

Lessons in Leadership | BY A DRIENN E SELKO ............. 7 Safety Excellence | BY SHA WN M. GA LLOWAY .............. 8 New Products ......................................................... 31

BY JOE BRANDEL

Advertiser Index.................................................... 31 ON THE COVER: WEST WIND REINFORCING

A Work in Progress | BY NICOLE STEMPA K ................. 34

EHS TODAY (USPS Permit 905-040), ISSN 1945-9599 print, ISSN 2771-7267 online is published 4 times per year (Spring, Summer, Fall, Winter) by Endeavor Business Media, LLC. 201 N. Main St. 5th Floor., Fort Atkinson, WI 53538. Periodicals postage paid at Fort Atkinson, WI, and additional mailing offices. POSTMASTER: Send address changes to EHS TODAY, PO Box 3257, Northbrook, IL 60065-3257. SUBSCRIPTIONS: Publisher reserves the right to reject non-qualified subscriptions. Subscription prices: U.S. $91.00 per year; Canada/Mexico $117.00 per year; All other countries $143.00 per year. All subscriptions are payable in U.S. funds. Send subscription inquiries to EHS Today, PO Box 3257, Northbrook, IL 60065-3257. Customer service can be reached toll-free at (877) 498-4668 or at customerservice@ehstoday.com for magazine subscription assistance or questions.

Printed in the USA. Copyright 2026 Endeavor Business Media, LLC. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopies, recordings, or any information storage or retrieval system without permission from the publisher. Endeavor Business Media, LLC does not assume and hereby disclaims any liability to any person or company for any loss or damage caused by errors or omissions in the material herein, regardless of whether such errors result from negligence, accident, or any other cause whatsoever. The views and opinions in the articles herein are not to be taken as official expressions of the publishers, unless so stated. The publishers do not warrant either expressly or by implication, the factual accuracy of the articles herein, nor do they so warrant any views or opinions by the authors of said articles.

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HEALTHY ATTITUDE

Dave Blanchard Editor-in-Chief

The Tyranny of Easy Safety Metrics Safety leaders don’t always speak the same language as senior management. That needs to change.

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midst all the flurry of AI-based safety software, wearables, smart PPE and regulatory compliance solutions on the exhibition floor, the recent ASSP Safety26 show also featured a healthy, and some would say much-needed, debate on the entire premise of workplace safety. As Nicole Orr, chief operating officer of National Safety Services, noted at the show, there are a lot of outdated safety theories and practices still in play at many companies. “Is it time to move on?” she asked.

In particular, should safety professionals stop paying so much attention to metrics like Total Recordable Incident Rate (TRIR), which Orr said, isn’t very good as a predictor of fatalities? “We need to shift from reactively counting injuries to proactively managing things that have the potential to cause serious injuries and fatalities (SIFs),” she emphasized.

Quoting a study from the University of Colorado-Boulder’s Construction Safety Research Alliance (CSRA), Orr pointed out, things that hurt people are not the same as things that kill people. Zero harm, which for years has been the stated goal of many companies, is unrealistic, she said, if that means the elimination of all injuries and incidents. “The question isn’t whether we want zero harm. The question is whether counting injuries is the best way to achieve it.” If we want to eliminate SIFs, then we need to eliminate SIF conditions, Orr added.

In a separate presentation, Heather MacDougall, formerly head of health and safety at Amazon and now a consultant with MacDougall Solutions, echoed Orr by asking, “Are we measuring and monitoring the right things when it comes to SIFs?” There’s been too much emphasis on reducing minor injuries (the types of injuries that often dominate a TRIR report), and not enough on reducing SIFs. While companies often proudly point to dramatic decreases in TRIR, “reductions in TRIR do not necessarily correspond to reductions in SIFs,” MacDougall said.

SIFs arise, she noted, from different causes than minor injuries, adding that despite an overall drop in recordable injuries, fatality rates remain steady. “Effective programs must focus on controlling exposure to high-energy hazards to prevent SIFs.” One such program discussed with greater frequency than I remember at previous safety conferences is high-energy

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control assessment (HECA). HECA, a term coined and trademarked by CSRA, is “a new method of measuring and monitoring safety by assessing whether front-line employees are adequately protected against life-threatening hazards.”

Coincident with the Safety26 show, I also had the chance to participate in an executive roundtable discussion with a number of senior EHS leaders, hosted by What Works Institute and Evotix, focused on finding better ways of keeping workers safe. According to their research, published in a report titled, “Risk Recalibrated,” 80% of organizations surveyed have at least started SIF prevention, but unfortunately the safety field has no shared definition of what counts as “serious,” so meaningful metrics are hard to come by. Nearly two-thirds (63%) of safety leaders say their safety metrics only partially reflect what actually drives harm in the workplace, a pattern that the report calls “the tyranny of easy metrics.”

The roundtable discussion included the observation that metrics like TRIR and SIF aren’t considered financial metrics, and thus are rarely if ever included in boardroom discussions.

Companies tend to spend more time managing to specific KPIs than they do in addressing the core issues impacting safety.

That often results in safety professionals constantly having to make a business case for safety, whether it’s something as simple as the purchase of better PPE, or a major investment in facility upgrades to eliminate frequent hazards. But as one participant noted, “If your executive team needs you to make a business case to do the right thing, maybe you need to reexamine your corporate culture.”

It’s incumbent upon safety leaders to learn a second language—the language of the boardroom. The more eloquent safety people can become in understanding and speaking the language of business, the more they’ll be recognized for their value to the organization—and the better they’ll be able to protect their workers.

Send an e-mail with your thoughts to dblanchard@endeavorb2b.com.

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NEWS BEAT Designing Safer Construction Sites With AI, VR Virtual training is another tool in safety professionals’ toolboxes to keep construction workers safe.

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irtual reality (VR) has been included in the toolbox of construction practices for some time. So far, the best use case has been in training.

In February of 2024, it was demonstrated that it is “significantly more effective in training and education than traditional Laura McKenzie/Texas A&M University Division of Marketing and Communications methods,” according to a study published in the Journal of Safety Research. researchers monitored their behavior around live traffic.

A 2025 study from the American Society of Civil Engineers The result was that after the training, workers demonstrated (ASCE) concluded: increased vigilance, including spending more time looking “The results indicate that the VR user group achieved toward approaching vehicles and traffic while performing significantly higher post-test scores and demonstrated greater roadway maintenance tasks. This type of improved behavior intrinsic motivation across most dimensions than did the could provide a way to alert workers to become more attentive, traditional group. thus preventing accidents.

“Effect-size analyses underscore the practical significance “Now we can say it is effective in real-world behavior of these findings, suggesting that VR technology and change,” Kim said in a statement. observation methods can significantly enhance learning The findings suggest immersive simulations may provide effectiveness and motivation in challenging and hazardous a safe way to expose workers to the consequences of construction tasks.” inattentiveness before an accident occurs.

To expand training capability and address the situation Expanding his research, Kim is developing an AI-powered where construction workers become desensitized and tune augmented reality (AR) system designed to provide safety out warnings, Dr. Namgyun Kim, an assistant professor in the Department of Construction Science at Texas A&M University, training within a worker’s actual jobsite environment. In this scenario, workers photograph their work area and an AI model is studying how to apply AI to VR to improve safety. identifies potential hazards before generating site-specific In collaboration with Brian Anderson, who leads the safety scenarios through an AR interface.

Learning and Attention Lab, research is being done through For example, if the system detects an unprotected opening a series of studies involving virtual reality simulations, or another fall hazard, it can generate an augmented reality brain activity monitoring, field observations and AI-driven accident simulation directly within the worker’s real-world augmented reality systems. surroundings. Rather than relying on generic safety examples, The goal of the research is to examine whether immersive, experience-based training can help workers maintain attention to the training is tailored to the conditions workers are likely to encounter that day. hazards in both controlled environments and active work zones.

Combining VR and AI to address a myriad of safety issues To determine how training moves to real-world behavior, is a trend that construction will continue to assess.

Kim researched active highway work zones. After completing —EHS Today Staff a VR training, workers returned to their work, where

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LESSONS IN LEADERSHIP

Adrienne Selko Senior Editor

Will Viewing Employees as Industrial Athletes Reduce Injuries?

Companies adopting athletic-style programs have seen dramatic reductions in work-related injuries.

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ost people might not admit it, but being called an athlete is a compliment. It evokes a level of competency that has been earned through hard work.

So, the term industrial athlete is quite apt for people doing the hard physical labor in manufacturing as well as warehousing. The term originated when sports medicine researchers noted the similarities between workers in physically demanding jobs and athletes.

As far back as 2015, Ford Motor Company adopted the term.

“We refer to our assembly line employees as ‘industrial athletes’, due to the physical nature of the job,” said Allison Stephens, technical leader for assembly ergonomics at Ford, in an article in Automotive World. “We have made data-driven decisions through ergonomics testing that has led to safer vehicle production processes and resulted in greater protection for our employees.”

Some companies have taken the concept as far as setting up what most of us would consider a gym inside their facility.

One such example is at Mitsubishi Power in Florida. Its site features a rehabilitation facility that includes a universal exercise machine, a stationary bike, an athletic training cot, and specialized therapeutic tools for deep-tissue massage.

Working with the Orlando Orthopedic Center and training employees as you would athletes, Mitsubishi achieved the following results: » OSHA recordable injuries dropped from 14 to 4 in the first year. » Over the last five years, recordable injuries have remained limited. » Mitsubishi Power has achieved nearly 2 million hours worked without a single lost-time incident.

Online retailer Amazon has adopted this mindset. In 2021, they introduced the Working Well program, which includes onsite trainers who provide services such as pre-shift stretching, injury recovery and ergonomic analysis. A pilot for this program found that it reduced musculoskeletal disorders

(MSDs) such as sprains by 32% over a year, according to a report in Retail Dive. MSDs account for 40% of Amazon’s work-related injuries.

Pharmacy chain Walgreens uses an industrial athlete program across its distribution centers. According Industrial Athlete, a company that provides services in this area, Walgreens reported a 267% reduction in workrelated injuries after treating warehouse staff with sportsmedicine frameworks.

Even NASA uses the term industrial athletes. In a paper, NASA said the following: Are you an industrial athlete? The answer is YES! Industrial athletes are people who work in manufacturing plants, light industrial facilities, and offices. As employees of Kennedy Space Center, you are part of the industrial setting. Here at KSC, your job and daily routines can be repetitive and vigorous, leading to accidents and injuries. The physical nature of your job alone can make you more susceptible to musculoskeletal injuries.

By viewing employees as industrial athletes and providing services that an athlete would receive, there is a business case to be made. A 2026 study for a warehouse using an athletic trainer to provide group stretching sessions, guided whole body exercises, light massage, ergonomic assessments, and job coaching, found that for every $1 spent on the program, the company saved an estimated $6 on medical expenses.

Armed with a strong ROI, a tested protocol and a true appreciation for the physical demands placed on employees, companies would be wise to view employees as industrial athletes and offer them the same services that traditional athletes deserve.

Send an e-mail with your thoughts to aselko@endeavorb2b.com.

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EXPERT PERSPECTIVES ON SAFETY EXCELLENCE

Stop Looking for the Next Tool, and Start Rethinking How You Think Moving from programmatic to systems thinking ensures safety efforts are sustainable and adaptable to changing conditions.

By Shawn M. Galloway he safety profession doesn’t need another program. It needs a philosophical reckoning.

Earlier this year, I wrote about why EHS leaders should think more like an octopus and less like the Tin Man— adaptive, distributed, and responsive rather than rigid, centralized, and mechanical. The metaphor resonated because it named something many leaders already feel but struggle to articulate: the growing disconnect between how safety functions are designed and how work actually unfolds.

The real issue runs deeper than metaphor. The safety profession has a pattern. Every few years, a new framework emerges. A new model, a new certification, a new acronym, and organizations adopt it with enthusiasm, implement it with discipline, and measure it with precision, only to find, a few years later, that not much has fundamentally changed. Injury rates may fluctuate, audit scores may improve, but the underlying capacity to prevent and recover from serious events remains largely unchanged.

The problem is not the tools. The problem is the thinking behind them.

What I am suggesting is not anti-program or antimethodology. There is a place for structured approaches, but when the profession’s default response to every challenge is to seek the next thing to implement, we reveal something important about ourselves: We have become addicted to activity as a substitute for strategy. Activity feels productive; strategy requires confrontation. Activity can be measured; strategy must be reasoned. Activity protects us from uncertainty; strategy demands we sit with it. That distinction matters more now than ever.

Let me define what I mean by a philosophical shift. I am not talking about swapping one belief system for another. I am talking about reexamining the foundational assumptions that drive how we design, lead and evaluate safety performance.

Assumptions like: safety is primarily a compliance function. If we follow all the rules and meet all the standards, we will be safe. This assumption is comforting. It is also incomplete.

Compliance creates a floor; it does not build capacity. In complex, dynamic environments, which describes nearly every modern workplace, the gap between compliance and excellence is where serious events live.

Safety is everyone’s responsibility.

This phrase appears on posters or is posted in virtually every facility I have visited and, in most of those facilities, it means

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almost nothing in practice. Responsibility without ownership is rhetoric. When we tell everyone they are responsible but centralize every decision, every investigation, and every standard within a single department, we create a compliance culture dressed in the language of engagement.

Shared ownership, real ownership, requires leaders to delegate authority, not just hold people accountable. These beliefs are significant. They influence budgets. They shape conversations in boardrooms. They determine how frontline supervisors respond when problems occur, and because these assumptions are rarely questioned, they remain unchallenged for years. Meanwhile, the profession keeps trying different tools and programs, searching for a solution that was never going to arise from it.

The fix must come from a different way of thinking.

What does this philosophical shift look like in practice?

First, it means moving from a prevention-only mindset to a prevention-and-recovery mindset. Most safety systems are designed as if every incident is preventable in advance. That assumption, while aspirational, ignores the reality that complex systems produce unexpected outcomes. Organizations that build recovery capacity—the ability to detect, respond to and learn from deviations before they become catastrophic—are not admitting defeat. They are building resilience. A culture that cannot recover is not resilient. It is fragile.

Second, it means elevating safety from a reporting function to a strategic discipline. Safety professionals spend enormous energy generating reports, dashboards and metrics. But reporting is not a strategy. Metrics reveal outcomes. Capacity determines them. If we want to be taken seriously at the executive level, we have to speak in terms of enterprise risk, operational continuity and value creation, not just trailing

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Philosophical shifts come with ambiguity. They require leaders to acknowledge that some of their most deeply held beliefs about safety may be incomplete. That is not a comfortable conversation, but it is the one we must have.

The profession is at a crossroads. We can continue searching for the next methodology, the next framework, the next silver bullet. Or we can pause long enough to ask whether the thinking behind our approach is still fit for the environment in which we operate.

Compliance may prevent violations. It does not create excellence. Engagement without ownership is theater, and a system that looks good on paper but cannot adapt under pressure is not a safety system. It is a performance.

The next evolution in safety will not come from a new program. It will come from professionals who are willing to think differently about the work itself. That is not a comfortable message, but I believe it is the right one. EHS

SHAWN M. GALLOWAY

indicators and near-miss counts. The moment safety becomes a line item in a governance conversation rather than a footnote in an operations review, everything changes.

Third, it means replacing programmatic thinking with systems thinking. Programs have start dates and end dates.

They have champions who eventually move on. They have rollout phases and measurement cycles. Systems, by contrast, are persistent. They are designed to adapt. They evolve with the organization rather than expiring beside it. When we think in programs, we ask: What should we implement next? When we think in systems, we ask: What capacity are we building, and will it sustain performance when conditions change?

Fourth, it means redefining leadership’s role in safety. Too many leaders treat safety as something they support rather than something they own. Support is passive. Ownership is active. A leader who owns safety does not just review incident reports. That leader asks diagnostic questions: Where are our blind spots? What signals are we missing? Where is our system most fragile? What would break first under pressure? Those questions are strategic. They create clarity, and they position safety as a leadership discipline, not a departmental obligation.

Here is the uncomfortable truth.

This shift is harder than adopting a new tool. New tools come with training guides and implementation timelines.

Shawn M. Galloway is CEO of ProAct Safety; host of the podcast, “Safety Culture Excellence”; and a past keynote speaker at EHS Today’s Safety Leadership Conference.

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2026 WINNER

America’s Safest Companies of 2026 EHS Today honors 8 companies that exemplify world-class safety excellence.

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By Dave Blanchard, Adrienne Selko and Nicole Stempak

hat does it take for a company to reach a level of safety excellence so significantly high that they are recognized as one of America’s Safest Companies? It’s not annual revenue—this year’s winners are small, medium and largesized companies, some earning less than $50 million and others well over $1 billion. It’s not the industry sectors they operate in—the 2026 class of award winners run the gamut from construction, manufacturing and telecommunications to facilities management and public utilities. So what then makes a company one of the safest in the country?

EHS Today launched the America’s Safest Companies competition back in 2002 as a way to answer that question. We set out then, and continue to this day, to identify, publicize and ultimately celebrate those companies that are standard-bearers in their pursuit of world-class safety excellence.

To be considered for the America’s Safest Companies award, organizations must demonstrate excellence in the following areas: support from leadership and management for EHS efforts; employee involvement in the EHS process; innovative solutions

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to safety challenges; injury and illness rates lower than the average for their industries; comprehensive training programs; evidence that prevention of incidents is the cornerstone of the safety process; good communication about the value of safety; and a way to substantiate the benefits of the safety process.

This year the awards will be presented during a special webinar produced by EHS Today on Tuesday, September 22: “How to Create and Sustain a World-Class Safety Culture: Insights from America’s Safest Companies of 2026.” Go to www.ehstoday.com/ webinars for all the details and to register for this free webinar.

The 2026 Class of America’s Safest Companies are: AFL Telecommunications, Cushman & Wakefield—Global Occupier Services, Douglas Machine, Enerfab Power & Industrial, Forest Electric NJ, Greenfield Global USA, Rummel Construction, and West Wind Reinforcing.

In the 25 years since EHS Today began the America’s Safest Companies awards program, we’ve handed out more than 300 awards, with some companies having won the award more than once. We hope that these safety profiles will inspire you to consider applying for the award yourself in 2027. EHS

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2026 WINNER

AFL Telecommunications LLC

Telecommunication, Wire & Cable Manufacture and Installation Duncan, SC 2,000 employees | 7 sites | 16 EHS professionals

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FL Telecommunications is looking toward the future, the distant future. The company evaluates capital projects, equipment purchases and facility designs by considering how best to keep people safe 30 years from now.

To help turn that future into a reality, the company develops a multi-year safety strategy that aligns with business growth, operational excellence and workforce wellbeing by connecting lagging indicators with leading indicators. AFL uses leading indicators as the primary measure of safety effectiveness and culture.

Lagging metrics, meanwhile, are used to validate long-term trends but are not considered a reliable measure of performance.

“This approach confirms that controls are in place and effective—not that we were simply fortunate,” says Larry Pearlman, vice president of environmental, health, safety and security.

Cushman & Wakefield - Global Occupier Services

Integrated Facilities Management Chicago, IL 6,700 employees | 300 sites | 39 EHS professionals

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ushman & Wakefield – Global Occupier Services takes a holistic approach to safety across its operations. The results speak for themselves. The company hasn’t had any OSHA violations since June 2016 and, in 2025, boasted a lost time incident rate and total recordable incident rate that was over 80% lower than industry average.

“Our commitment to EHS excellence is based on the simple proposition that meeting or exceeding objectives is an essential requirement for achieving success in complex business environments,” says Kenyon Brenish, senior managing director of global EHS. Cushman & Wakefield, which was named one of America’s Safest Companies of 2020, believes that a positive safety culture begins with visible leadership ownership. The company encourages managers and leaders to observe work being performed at all steps of the process by conducting walk throughs (CWALKs) to increase employee hazard awareness,

AFL’s safety program is deliberately centered around the idea that the absence of injuries does not mean an absence of risk. The company is proactive in its efforts to mitigate risk, strengthen culture and improve reliability.

Leaders are expected to actively engage in hazard identification, verify that controls are in place and model safe behaviors. What’s more, participation, risk identification and corrective action follow‑through are treated as indicators of leadership effectiveness.

Employees are encouraged to participate in safety alongside supervisors and EHS leadership. Nearly three-quarters (73%) of manufacturing associates are actively engaged in formal safety activities, such as safety committee involvement, nearmiss reporting and hazard identification.

The company’s participation target for this year is 95%.

“Together, these approaches foster broad involvement, reinforce psychological safety, and signal that every employee has a voice and responsibility in managing workplace risk,” Pearlman says.

The message is clear in all that AFL does: protecting people is nonnegotiable. —NS

improve management safety skills and promote employee commitment to safety. All positive and constructive outcomes are recorded, and any issues that cannot be immediately resolved are noted for follow-up. The company tracks CWALKS as a leading indicator and reports them monthly.

Cushman & Wakefield also uses a risk assessment tool, internally called Take5s, help employees to identify hazards, such as before starting a task for the first time or beginning a task that has been recently altered; they may also be used for tasks not covered by a formal Job Hazard Analysis (JHA).

All on-site account team members participate in the company’s proprietary training that emphasizes ownership, proactive behaviors, accountability and addresses experience gaps in real-time.

To help safety keep improving, the company holds an annual EHS summit, and the entire team attends ASSP’s national conference each year. The team also meets regularly to discuss EHS metrics, programs and projects; regulatory updates; EHS management reviews; training requirements; and strategies for improvements.

“We are proud to operate an industry-leading EHS management system that encompasses both our corporate offices and managed site portfolios,” Brenish says. —NS

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2026 WINNER

Douglas Machine

Packaging Machine Manufacturing Alexandria, MN 750 employees | 1 site | 2 EHS professionals

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ne of the hallmarks of an America’s Safest Companies award winner is the way they look at safety, taking a proactive rather than a reactive approach to not just protecting workers but preventing them getting hurt in the first place. That kind of forward-looking vision, by necessity, requires a high level of training and engagement to ensure that the entire workforce is participating in maintaining a culture of safety excellence.

At Douglas Machine, a 100% employeeowned manufacturer of packaging equipment, employee engagement is the driving force behind their culture, says Craig Mast, EHS director. “Safety is not just a policy—it is a mindset, a way of operating, and a reflection of how deeply we value the people who bring our company to life every day,” adds Joe Salo, the company’s president.

To that end, the company maintains a full library of training materials, which any employee can access via a learning

Enerfab Power & Industrial LLC

Industrial Fabrication, Construction and Maintenance Cincinnati, OH 1,500 employees | 45 sites | 60 EHS professionals

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ow’s this for a corporate strategy: “We believe that no job is so important that we cannot take the time to perform it safely.” That’s the mindset at Enerfab Power & Industrial, a fabrication, construction and maintenance company celebrating its 125th anniversary this year. On its corporate website, the company proudly notes that it has won 145 safety awards since 2001; that number is now 146, as Enerfab joins the ranks of America’s Safest Companies winners.

“Our organization’s success in safety is rooted in something deeper than policies or procedures—it comes from a culture built on presence, ownership, and genuine care for people,” observes Calvin Clark, Enerfab’s vice president, safety, health and quality.

To illustrate his point, Clark cites a specific safety practice involving corporate leaders. “Any corporate team member traveling to one of our jobsites is required to complete a Management Safety Observation. During this visit, the

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management system dubbed Douglas University. Some topics, Mast says, are automatically assigned, while others can be accessed by workers or assigned by the supervisor. At an in-house training center, workers can learn their tasks in a hands-on classroom environment, which includes essential safety topics like lockout/tagout, machine guarding and electrical safety.

All new leaders who join the company or are promoted to leadership roles are expected to adopt a servant leadership mindset. “At Douglas, we believe that great servant leadership is essential to our ongoing success,” Salo explains. A leader’s role, he notes, is not just to manage but to serve—by equipping their teams, removing obstacles, setting a clear vision, and living out the company’s values every day. No leadership role is more important, Salo says, than creating and sustaining a culture of safety.

Douglas Machine has more than 20 safety teams, with 18% of the workforce involved with one of the teams. With the support of the safety department, each of the safety teams sets their own goals and objectives, which allows workers to contribute directly to the safety initiatives at the facility, Mast says. —DB

individual selects a craft employee and engages them in a brief, structured conversation about the work they are performing that day. The purpose of these questions is to create a meaningful interaction—showing that leadership took the time to be present, listen and understand the employee’s tasks, hazards and needs. It reinforces that safety is personal, and that every employee’s voice matters.”

When it comes to safety equipment, Enerfab doesn’t skimp on the quality. “We invest heavily in the tools and systems that support safe work,” Clark says. “From leading‑edge fall protection that exceeds OSHA requirements to Level 4 cut‑resistant, impact‑rated gloves, we consistently choose the higher standard.”

Enerfab is quite prolific when it comes to making a business case for safety. Clark cites several specific ways that the company leverages its safety culture as a significant contributor to the bottom line: » “We tie safety directly to productivity and quality. » “We use data to show the financial impact. » “We highlight customer expectations and market advantage.

“We emphasize risk reduction and business continuity. » “We connect safety to culture and retention. » “We show leadership presence as a cost saver.” —DB

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2609EH

SAP EHS & Product Compliance Infodays 2026 Sept 29-30, Oct 01 | Virtual

SAP’s annual EHS & Product Compliance Infodays is a virtual event designed to help you stay informed on the latest innovations, strategies, and developments across SAP’s Environment, Health & Safety and Product Compliance portfolio.

Hear from SAP experts, customers, and partners share insights into current challenges, upcoming innovations, and practical approaches to managing compliance, sustainability, and operational risk in today’s evolving regulatory landscape.

Day 1: EHS & Product Compliance - Strategy, roadmaps, and the bigger picture Tuesday, Sept 29 | 2pm CEST

Day 2: Product Compliance focus Wednesday, Sept 30 | 2pm CEST

Day 3: Environment, Health & Saftey focus Thursday, Oct 01 | 2pm CEST

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2026 WINNER

Forest Electric Corp. New Jersey Edison, NJ Electrical 634 employees | 27 sites | 8 EHS professionals

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here’s no limit on safety at Forest Electric Corp. New Jersey (FECNJ). The electrical company funds safety gear, specialized tooling and labor costs associated with self-imposed safety standdowns through a centralized corporate overhead budget—not against an individual project manager’s job cost profit margin.

The company’s president, Harry Sassaman, makes it clear that no expense is too expensive when it comes to keeping workers safe. For example, while not required, the company has mandated Type 2 safety helmets with chin straps buckled all the time, and working on energized systems without explicit, signed authorization from Sassaman is a zero tolerance, immediate termination offense.

These PPE purchases and safety procedures are not oneoffs; rather, they help set expectations for employees.

“Executive leadership operates with the strategic understanding that doing a job correctly and safely the first

Greenfield Global USA Inc.

Chemical Packaging Brookfield, CT 199 employees | 2 sites | 3 EHS professionals

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ost companies would be very concerned if annual reporting on safety issues rose from 80 events to 132. But that’s what happened at Greenfield Global between 2024 and 2025.

“This rise in reporting is not a cause for concern but rather celebration,” points out Christa Morphew, corporate EH&S director of the company, which produces high-purity alcohols, specialty solvents and sustainable biofuels. “It demonstrates that employees feel genuinely safe, trusted and empowered to speak up, which is the hallmark of a thriving safety culture. These results reflect the power of intentional leadership, employee engagement and unwavering commitment to continuous improvement.”

The company is so committed to transparency that it has a Whistleblower Policy. Formalized in 2024, it “strengthens our culture of transparency and accountability by ensuring employees can report actual or potential misconduct confidentially and without fear of reprisal,” explains Morphew.

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time is the ultimate driver of project predictability, quality and long-term cost savings,” says Safety Director Philip Chodroff.

FECNJ utilizes prevention through design during the initial bidding and engineering phases to eliminate hazards well before any field construction begins. For example, FECNJ found that by unpacking lighting fixtures off-site and kitting them into specialized mobile carts tailored to specific installation areas, it can eliminate the risk of cardboard fire hazards, traumatic hand injuries due to lacerations from knives, and reduces material handling clutter on the jobsite.

This forward planning has earned FECNJ a litany of awards over the past decade, including being named one of America’s Safest Companies of 2020.

Over time, some field teams and leaders became focused on protecting the statistical record above all else. Sassaman and the EHS team intervened to shift focus back onto workforce well-being, execution quality and risk mitigation.

“Rather than allowing an artificial metric to create psychological friction or suppress incident visibility, our leadership transparently dismantled the pressure of the streak to safeguard absolute trust, open communication, and the long-term psychological safety of our workforce,” Chodroff says. —NS

This transparency extends to suppliers and customers.

When incidents occur, the company issues Early Information Alerts to all global locations immediately. Once a formal root cause analysis is completed, it is shared with customers and suppliers. “This level of transparency reflects our belief that safety is an industry-wide responsibility, not a competitive advantage,” says Morphew.

As an employee, knowing that your opinion matters is part of an overall philosophy of being inclusive and psychologically safe.

As proof of inclusion, the company notes that its employee engagement score has grown from 45 in 2024 to 54 in 2025, with an 88% participation rate, consistently ranking 76% above the industry benchmark. “This shows people genuinely feel connected and valued,” notes Morphew.

Engagement takes a variety of forms, including participating in EHS committees, risk assessments, procedure development, audits and selfassessments. Daily toolbox talks and EHS moments foster open safety dialogue at every level, from the frontline through to senior leadership and the board of directors.

“At Greenfield, we will never be satisfied with good enough, because our people deserve better than good enough,” says Morphew. —AS

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2026 WINNER

Rummel Construction Inc.

Construction Scottsdale, AZ 750 employees | 75 sites | 11 EHS professionals

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liminating time at sites where potential safety incidents could occur is an effective safety management strategy.

For Rummel Construction, a general contractor specializing in mass earthworks and paving, preventing safety problems is the best use case of current technologies.

For instance, the company employs drones to eliminate the need for a crew to survey work areas. “Thousands of man-hours of crews slogging through work sites have been eliminated by one man and a drone working from a tightly controlled location,” explains Matthew Crosby, safety director.

In the harsh conditions of the American Southwest desert, heat-related illness is a formidable risk. Wearable technology can help mitigate this risk. To continue advancing this technology, the company is partnering with Arizona State University to study the effectiveness of two devices: one that monitors heat stress, and another that monitors hydration levels.

West Wind Reinforcing LLC

Construction Hubbard, OR 250 employees | 2 sites | 3 EHS professionals

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t’s not often that safety strategies are viewed as talent development, but construction company West Wind Reinforcing understands this correlation. “We believe that every employee has the right to derive personal satisfaction from their job, and the prevention of occupational injury or illness shall be given the highest priority in all of our operations,” explains Joel McGrath, corporate safety director.

To achieve that goal, the company starts with a collective view of safety. “Each individual, from top management to the field employee, is responsible for the safety of those persons in their charge and co-workers around them,” McGrath says. “By accepting mutual responsibility to operate safely, we will contribute to the well-being of our workforce.”

Not only will do co-workers watch out for each other, but they will also serve as mentors. “By pairing each new employee with an experienced colleague, the program fosters a two-way exchange of knowledge, reinforces company culture, and promotes safety on the jobsite,” explains McGrath.

“Rather than a general Heat Illness Prevention Plan (HIPP) where everyone is treated the same, we are hopeful that these tools will help us meet individual needs,” says Crosby.

Another prevention technology—telematics—is used to address driver safety. It enables supervisors to support safe driving habits. Prior to this technology, drivers were largely unsupervised while out on the road.

Technology can also assist in addressing inclusion. The safety team was involved in piloting translation earphones with several Spanish-speaking apprentices to improve communication and accessibility in the field.

These technologies are the practical implementation of a core safety value culture, which is embodied in Rummel’s Five Core Safety Accountabilities. They include: executive commitment, management accountability, safety integration, training and employee recognition.

Technology, culture and belonging create a strong safety culture. “I consider the safety and health of our employees to be of prime importance and stand firm in my belief that no job is so important and no service so urgent that we can’t take the time to work safely,” says Rod W. Rummel, president. —AS

Elements of the mentor program include: » Providing new hires with a dependable point of contact for questions. » Building confidence, job satisfaction and trust. » Improving retention by creating a sense of belonging. » Reducing stress during the new-hire adjustment period. » Accelerating learning of company policies, procedures and safety culture. » Providing constructive feedback in a peer-to-peer format, which is often more approachable than from supervisors.

A unique aspect of how the company views mentorship is that it believes the program can serve as a psychosocial risk control by reducing stress, supporting mental well-being, and promoting psychological safety during onboarding and high-risk work.

As part of its drive for safety excellence, the company remains focused on improving employee development, strengthening operational consistency, and enhancing overall workforce engagement. “We believe that protecting employees is the foundation of long-term success and that continuous investment in safety benefits our employees, customers and the communities in which we work,” says McGrath. —AS

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SAFETY METRICS

Preventing Catastrophic Safety Incidents

KALI9/E+/GETTY IMAGES

Traditional safety metrics often fail to reveal vulnerabilities in systems designed to prevent catastrophic events, creating a false sense of security.

By Mike Snyder

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otal Recordable Incident Rate (TRIR) is low. Audits are complete. Culture surveys are strong. The dashboards look good, the numbers are trending in the right direction, and by all appearances, safety is under control.

And yet, major incidents or significant near-misses continue to surprise the team. Not in failing organizations, but in ones that believed they were performing well. Sites with strong safety cultures, engaged leadership and years of positive metrics still find themselves at the center of high-consequence events that “shouldn’t have happened.”

So the question is hard, but unavoidable: Are we actually monitoring and measuring what prevents catastrophic events?

Across the industry, the pattern is becoming difficult to ignore. The indicators we celebrate most often tell us very little about whether the systems designed to prevent rare, highconsequence events are intact, functioning and effective where it matters most. We are not lacking effort, investment or intent.

What we may be lacking is visibility into the conditions that truly determine risk.

The uncomfortable reality is that many organizations have become exceptionally good at measuring safety activity while remaining uncertain about whether their highest-consequence risks are actually under control.

GOOD SAFETY METRICS VS. CATASTROPHIC RISK

Most organizations operate within two very different safety realities, often without fully recognizing the distinction.

The first is personal safety: high-frequency, lowerconsequence events such as slips, trips and minor injuries.

These are visible, measurable and respond well to traditional safety management systems. The second is catastrophic risk: low-frequency, high-consequence events where failures in systems, controls, or decision-making can lead to significant harm to people, assets, and communities.

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The problem is not that organizations are managing personal safety poorly. In many cases, they are doing it exceptionally well. The problem is that strong performance in one domain is often assumed to reflect strength in the other. It does not.

Organizations with low injury rates, strong audit results and positive cultural indicators can still be exposed to significant, unmanaged catastrophic risk. The metrics most commonly used to demonstrate safety performance can overlook how necessary, critical safeguards are functioning as intended, and if they are effective under real operating conditions. In this context, absence of injuries is not evidence of control of major risks.

History (and the U.S. Chemical Safety Board’s investigation reports) repeatedly demonstrate this pattern. Organizations involved in major accidents often reported strong traditional safety performance before the event occurred. The lesson is not that those metrics are unimportant, but rather that they were never designed to measure catastrophic risk exposure.

This disconnect creates a dangerous form of false confidence. A site may report excellent safety performance while key safeguards are degraded, bypassed or misunderstood. The indicators look good, but the conditions that actually determine risk are moving in the wrong direction.

FROM OUTCOMES TO BARRIER HEALTH

If traditional safety metrics don’t reliably indicate exposure to catastrophic risk, then the question becomes: What should leaders be looking at instead? The answer is not another layer of metrics; it is a shift in perspective.

High-consequence events do not simply occur because indicators turn red. They occur when the controls designed to prevent them are absent, degraded or ineffective under real conditions. Those failures are often developing long before any incident occurs, but they remain largely invisible if the organization is focused primarily on outcomes rather than conditions.

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This requires a different lens— moving from “How are we performing?” to “How healthy are the barriers that prevent catastrophic events?”

Barrier health is observable in the field through how critical safeguards perform under real operating conditions and how consistently they can be relied upon when needed most.

For leaders, this represents a subtle but important shift. It moves the conversation away from reported performance and toward understanding whether the conditions required for failure are quietly accumulating. It requires asking different questions— ones that test assumptions, validate controls where work occurs and expose vulnerabilities before they escalate.

5 QUESTIONS LEADERS SHOULD ASK

If catastrophic risk is not reliably visible through traditional metrics, then leaders

need a different set of questions— ones that test understanding, validate assumptions and expose what is actually happening where work occurs.

These are not technical audit questions. They are leadership questions that drive clarity, alignment and focus on the conditions that determine risk.

1. Do we clearly understand our highest-consequence hazards?

At the foundation of catastrophic risk management is clarity. Not everything is equally consequential, and organizations that fail to distinguish their highestconsequence hazards often dilute focus across too many priorities.

Leaders should be able to articulate, in simple terms, what hazards have the potential to cause severe outcomes—and where they exist in the operation. This understanding should be consistent across functions, not confined to technical specialists.

What to look for: » Clear, prioritized identification of major hazards. » Alignment between operations, engineering and safety teams. » A shared understanding of what “catastrophic” means in context.

What often goes wrong: Over time, hazard lists expand, priorities blur and “everything” becomes critical. When that happens, real risk fades into the background.

2. Are our critical controls defined and risk-ranked?

Identifying hazards is only the first step. The real question is whether the organization has clearly defined the controls that prevent those hazards from leading to severe outcomes and understands which of those controls matter most.

Critical controls should be explicitly identified, linked to major accident

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SAFETY METRICS hazards and prioritized based on their role in preventing catastrophic outcomes.

What to look for: » Clear linkage between hazards and specific controls. » Understanding of which controls are truly “critical.” » Defined expectations for control performance.

What often goes wrong: Controls are implied rather than defined. Organizations rely on layered systems without clarity on which safeguards are essential and which are simply supportive.

3. Do we know if those controls are working where the work occurs?

A control that exists on paper is not the same as a control that is functioning under the conditions where it is relied upon.

This is where many organizations lose visibility. Audits, procedures and system checks may indicate that controls are in place, but they do not always confirm that those controls perform as intended in real operating conditions. Avoiding a bias for being “safe on paper” is key as operational conditions are reviewed in real time to detect issues.

What to look for: » Field-level verification of control effectiveness. » Evidence that controls function under normal and stressed conditions. » Direct observation of how work is performed.

What often goes wrong: There is an overreliance on documentation and audit completion.

The assumption becomes that if a control is defined, it is working—without direct validation of exposure control.

4. Where are people exposed when controls fail?

No control is perfect. The question is not whether failure is possible; it is where and how exposure occurs when it does.

Understanding exposure requires looking beyond static risk assessments and examining how work actually

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unfolds: the tasks, the deviations, the interfaces, and the moments where safeguards are bypassed or degraded.

What to look for: » Identification of high-exposure tasks and conditions. » Understanding of how deviations occur in practice. » Visibility into simultaneous operations and system interactions. » Reliance on behavioral perfection without allowance for human performance error. » Missing fail-safes or redundant systems.

What often goes wrong: Risk is treated as static. Exposure is assumed to be controlled because the system is designed that way, without examining how people and processes interact under real conditions.

5. Can our leadership team, and our board, distinguish between strong safety performance and good catastrophic risk management?

This is ultimately a leadership clarity question. At the executive and board level, major decisions are made based on how safety performance is framed, reported and understood. If the distinction between personal safety outcomes and catastrophic risk exposure is not clear at that level, the organization is vulnerable—regardless of how strong its overall safety metrics appear.

What to look for: » Clear differentiation in reporting between personal safety metrics and catastrophic risk indicators. » Executive-level visibility into the status and reliability of critical controls. » Discussions that focus on potential exposure and barrier health, not just performance outcomes. » Candor in reporting leading metrics highlight emerging gap errors rather than a bias toward “green or vanity metrics” as illusionary control.

What often goes wrong: Leadership discussions center on lagging indicators and positive trends,

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reinforcing confidence without testing underlying assumptions. Over time, this creates a gap between what leaders believe is under control and what is actually happening in the field.

The challenge is rarely a lack of commitment from leadership. Boards and executive teams generally want to understand catastrophic risk and ensure appropriate resources are directed toward prevention. The difficulty is that many organizations do not routinely provide leaders with information that clearly distinguishes between strong safety performance and effective control of major hazards. When that distinction is absent, strategic decisions may be based more on false confidence without evidence of barrier health and control effectiveness.

Effective governance of catastrophic risk requires more than reviewing injury rates, audit completion statistics and cultural indicators. It requires visibility into the status, reliability and verification of the critical controls that stand between normal operations and a highconsequence event.

WHY ORGANIZATIONS MISS THESE SIGNALS

If these questions are so fundamental, then why are they so often overlooked?

The answer is not a lack of capability or intention; it’s the reality of how organizations operate under pressure.

Production demands, cost constraints and operational complexity continuously compete for attention. Over time, the focus shifts toward what is easiest to measure, report and manage day-to-day.

Catastrophic risk, by its nature, does not demand attention in the same way— until it does.

Another factor is organizational drift.

Small deviations and workarounds often emerge gradually in response to operational pressures. Over time, they can erode safety margins and weaken critical controls without attracting attention, increasing risk exposures while confidence remains high.

Structural factors also play a role.

Information related to hazards, controls,

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maintenance and operations is often fragmented across functions. No single view clearly reflects whether critical safeguards are intact and effective. As a result, leadership decisions are made based on partial visibility, even when data exists somewhere within the organization. Without declarative statements clearly announcing emerging or acute risk elevation, action sometimes is delayed or does not occur to close serious gaps.

There is also a more subtle dynamic at work. Reporting systems tend to reinforce positive performance, and organizations naturally become more comfortable sharing what is going well than what may be degrading beneath the surface. Over time, this creates a gap between reported performance and actual conditions. Organizations are wise to engage in human machine interface evaluation to understand how pSIF and catastrophic risk within critical tasks are truly being managed. A focus on maturing a psychologically safe culture to speak up on failures, sharing bad news, or presenting contrary opinions on risk perspectives is essential for high reliability performance.

A BETTER QUESTION FOR THE NEXT INCIDENT

When a major incident occurs, the question that inevitably follows is: “Why didn’t we see this coming?”

Investigations work to reconstruct the sequence of events, identify contributing factors and assign lessons learned.

Organizations do not need to wait for the next incident, or the final investigation report, to begin asking these questions.

A more useful question—one that leaders can ask today—is simpler: “What signals might we be overlooking right now?”

Catastrophic events rarely occur without warning. The indicators are almost always present in some form: degraded safeguards, increasing exposure or assumptions that have gone untested. The challenge is not the absence of information, but whether the organization is focused on the conditions that truly matter.

This is ultimately a leadership choice. Organizations can continue to rely on performance indicators that provide comfort, or they can shift attention toward the health of the systems that prevent high-consequence events. The difference is not in effort, but in where that effort is directed.

Leaders do not prevent catastrophic events by asking whether performance is improving. They prevent them by asking whether the barriers that matter most are healthy, verified and capable of performing when needed. Catastrophic events are rare. The warning signs of eroding rigor rarely are. EHS Mike Snyder is vice president of operational risk management at DEKRA North America, a provider of comprehensive testing, inspection, certification and consulting services.

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MENTORSHIP

Bridging the Mentorship Gap Retiring baby boomers take with them invaluable safety knowledge that is difficult to replace through formal training alone.

By Tito Warren

WHY EXPERIENCE MATTERS MORE THAN EVER

Safety programs today are more robust than ever, but they have their own set of limitations because there are aspects of safety that can’t be fully captured in a manual; think subtle cues and judgment calls that workers learn from years in the field.

For instance, experienced workers can identify potential hazards based on environmental conditions, mechanical functioning and workflow disruptions that aren’t typically documented in the way a task should be completed on paper.

In practice, this can take the form of a written procedure for safely operating a piece of equipment, without accounting for early warning signs of mechanical fatigue or how a surface condition can change throughout the day. Those insights are learned over time and shared informally among workers.

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336174446 © NESTERENKORUSLAN | DREAMSTIME.COM

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he construction market is projected to reach $1.27 trillion in 2026; however, most of that demand for labor is expected to be met by replacing retiring baby boomers rather than by creating new positions. This has created a mentorship gap that has significant safety implications. An example is that 44% of workers’ compensation claims come from first-year workers.

For safety leaders, this is not simply a matter of workforce dynamics but a daily workplace issue. As experienced workforce members retire from the industry, they take with them knowledge that cannot be replicated through written resources.

By working with crews on jobsites, we have repeatedly seen seasoned workforce members identify out of the ordinary issues long before they become incidents. They understand how workflow, equipment and site conditions operate daily in ways that cannot be replicated through formal training. When these workers leave without passing this knowledge on to the next generation of members, companies risk creating teams that still don’t fully know how to apply their training in realworld situations, increasing the risk of preventable incidents.

WHAT THE MENTORSHIP GAP MEANS FOR JOBSITE SAFETY

Traditionally, mentorship on jobsites has been informal. New employees have learned from their experienced co-workers by asking questions and observing their decisions as they continue to build their on-the-job skills.

However, due to rapid workforce turnover, this mentorship model is breaking down. With fewer experienced employees to mentor new hires, there are fewer opportunities for on-the-job training. Often, crews have mostly new employees and lack the same opportunities for real-time mentorship.

Safety leaders have reported that one reason new employees do not speak up about safety is a lack of confidence and pressure to keep moving. This uncertainty creates safety hazards.

Construction remains one of the most dangerous industries in America, as evidenced by the over 1,000 fatalities reported in 2024. These stats make it clear that the lack of mentorship between experienced and new employees creates real safety hazards, rather than just operational challenges.

Without mentorship: » New workers may hesitate to speak up or ask questions in critical moments. » Hazards may go unrecognized until they escalate into incidents.

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» Shortcuts can become normalized without proper context or understanding of the risks. » Safety becomes a checklist activity, rather than a mindset embedded in daily decision-making.

STANDARD SAFETY TRAINING PROGRAMS ALONE ARE NOT ENOUGH

Many companies provide employees with safety training programs as part of ongoing learning to enhance their safety skills. Unfortunately, safety training programs alone are not sufficient.

Safety training is structured, standardized, and time-limited, helping workers understand the rules, regulations, and procedures governing safe work practices. However, workplace safety conditions are dynamic, so they may not always match what is shown in the safety training program. This is where the importance of having a mentor comes into play.

Mentoring allows new employees the opportunity to see the multiple ways that they can make a safety decision in real time, such as how to stop working when something doesn’t feel right, how to adapt to changing conditions, and how to weigh the efficiency of completing a task with the risk of injury to themselves or to others.

Having mentors also helps new employees build confidence through guidance as well as reinforces the knowledge and skills gained from their safety program and training.

ADDRESSING THE GAP BETWEEN MENTORING AND SAFETY

To effectively address this mentoring gap, companies need to integrate mentoring into their safety programs as a formalized component of their overall safety strategy.

In general, companies making the most progress in closing this gap are those that view knowledge transfer as a function of safety. Fortunately, there are some quick steps companies can take:

1. Start mentoring on the first day of employment. New hires should be matched with experienced mentors immediately upon being hired. The sooner they are exposed to experienced employees, the better their understanding of safety expectations will be and the sooner they will gain confidence.

2. Define good mentoring.

Experienced employees do not necessarily make good mentors.

Companies can increase mentoring consistency and improve their overall impact by guiding how to mentor employees (e.g., coaching, communicating safety and reinforcing safe behaviors).

3. Support your mentors.

Mentoring employees requires significant time and effort. Companies that endorse and recognize these contributions send a clear message to their workforce that knowledge transfer is a priority, not just an afterthought.

4. Capture knowledge before it walks out the door. As employees approach retirement, companies should proactively document helpful information, insights, lessons learned and best practices to support the transition process. Examples of documenting knowledge transfer techniques include formal interviews, workplace shadowing and peer-topeer mentoring.

5. Build real-time learning opportunities. For mentoring to be successful, both parties need time to ask questions, talk and observe. If time and engagement are built into the work process, it will be difficult for work production to undermine the success of the mentoring process.

6. Reinforce safety accountability. By actively promoting open dialogue and encouraging peer-to-peer training, companies can create an environment of trust that will translate into safe behaviors becoming part of everyday work.

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INTEGRATING MENTORSHIP INTO YOUR SAFETY CULTURE

When pursuing mentorship programs, be sure to weave them into your safety culture by using the following safety processes: » Toolbox talks and daily briefings; » Job hazard analyses; » Incident review and near-miss discussions; » Continued training and certification programs.

By incorporating mentorship into these processes, you demonstrate that it is part of your organization’s day-to-day operations and make knowledge sharing an expected activity at work.

When safety leaders and supervisors support mentorship by providing time to mentor, establishing expectations, and modeling behavior, we will see greater consistency in safety performance between teams.

FROM KNOWLEDGE LOSS TO KNOWLEDGE TRANSFER

The industry has long focused on closing the skilled labor gap. But the mentorship gap may be just as critical, especially when it comes to safety.

Organizations that address it proactively will be better positioned to protect their workforce, maintain productivity and sustain a strong safety culture. On the other hand, those that don’t may face a quieter, but more significant risk: employees who understand the rules but do not know how to apply them in their day-to-day duties.

In today’s safety management climate, we need to do more than minimize incidents. The industry needs to do a better job of retaining the knowledge of experienced workers who understand the measures needed to keep jobsites safe. Safety managers have an opportunity to take proactive steps to ensure this knowledge is passed on to future generations. EHS Tito Warren is president of global industrial at Red Wing Shoes, a provider of work footwear and PPE to protect workers in demanding industrial environments.

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HEAD PROTECTION

The Urgent Need to Address Rotational Motion and Traumatic Brain Injuries in Construction IMAGES COURTESY OF MIPS

As new knowledge and technologies emerge, it’s time to reconsider how best to protect workers’ heads.

By Joe Brandel

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he construction industry remains one of the most dangerous professions in the United States. It consistently leads all industries in the number of workplace fatalities, with falls being the most common cause. Despite better tools and training, there is still a critical gap in how the industry approaches personal protective equipment (PPE).

And the consequences can be devastating, especially when head injuries are involved. In 2022, construction workers accounted for nearly half of all fatal workplace-related slips, trips and falls, according to the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health (NIOSH). These incidents are not only dangerous, they’re also among the leading causes of traumatic brain injuries (TBIs), which can have severe implications on health, lost work time or even loss of life. There were over 69,000 TBI-related fatalities in 2021—more than 190 lost lives per day, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).

Beyond the individual injury, these serious incidents can disrupt team morale, slow production schedules, and increase insurance and staffing costs.

Often invisible, TBIs don’t always show obvious signs or symptoms, and many don’t stem from what we typically think of as “major impacts.” Rather, they

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can be the result of a less visible—but equally dangerous—risk that is often overlooked: rotational motion.

WHAT ROTATIONAL MOTION IS AND WHY IT MATTERS

In most cases, accidents (e.g., a fall or getting struck by an object) don’t happen in a straight line but instead at an angle.

When a worker slips, trips, or falls, the head often impacts an object or the ground at an angle. This can cause the head to rotate suddenly upon impact. In turn, this may lead to the brain rotating within the skull.

The human brain is sensitive to this kind of motion. This angular torque effect can lead to shearing of brain tissue, which can damage neurons and blood vessels, increasing the likelihood of concussions (also called mild TBIs), cognitive impairment and more. Even low-energy impacts can be dangerous when rotational motion is a factor.

In fact, concussions from rotational motion typically occur at lower levels

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of energy than those caused by linear motion alone.

The cause of this heightened risk lies in the brain’s structure. With properties similar to water or gel, brain tissue is especially susceptible when adjacent regions move relative to one another.

These injuries often lack physical signs, making them difficult to recognize and easy to underestimate in severity.

The effects of TBIs can include early symptoms (e.g., headaches, dizziness and blurred vision) as well as delayed effects (e.g., difficulty concentrating, memory loss or mood changes). On a construction site, where attention to detail and clear-decision making are vital, even subtle impairments can pose a risk to your workers.

TRADITIONAL HELMETS OFTEN OVERLOOK RISK OF ROTATIONAL MOTION

Despite this clear risk, the majority of hard hats on jobsites today are not designed to address rotational motion.

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IMAGES COURTESY OF MIPS

Traditional Type I helmets are engineered to mainly protect workers against direct linear impacts to the top of the head. These designs are essentially no different from when they were first introduced in the early 1900s. The problem is that the construction industry has changed—and so have the risks. Not all PPE, however, has kept up with the times.

Many serious head injuries result from a worker slipping, tripping or falling themselves and not from an object falling on them from above, even though such accidents also happen.

These can be particularly dangerous— and difficult—to protect against; many traditional hard hats are not built to address rotational motion.

In contrast, Type II helmets are built to protect impacts to the front, back, and sides of the head; many even incorporate rotational motion mitigating systems.

One system, for example, incorporates an inner layer inside the helmet that moves relative to the worker’s head during an impact. This intends to help redirect the rotational motion away from the head, therefore lowering the risk of injuries, such as concussions and more severe TBIs. In addition, Type II helmets often include chin straps that help keep the helmet in place in the event of a fall.

WHY CONSTRUCTION MUST ADDRESS ROTATIONAL MOTION NOW

Besides the implications on worker health and safety, injuries are also an expensive and unnecessary cost for employers. The National Safety Council (NSC) estimates that in 2023, work injury costs amounted to $176.5 billion, with an estimated cost of $1.46 million per work-related death and $43,000 per medically consulted injury. What’s more, an estimated 103 million days were lost in 2023 due to work-related injuries.

The construction industry is also paying the price for failing to adapt to evolving safety needs. Using data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics, researchers estimated the total annual cost of all construction-related injuries in the U.S. was more than $11.5 billion in 2002. Of that, $4 billion accounts for fatalities, while $7 billion accounts for nonfatal injuries, mostly driven by cases with time away from work.

Yet despite the cost, awareness remains low. Mips commissioned a survey in 2022 that found nearly 70% of American and German helmet buyers didn’t know about rotational motion, nor did they consider the helmet’s ability to mitigate rotational motion when making their selection. Not knowing what to protect against—and why—can put you at risk of assuming rather than ensuring that you have adequate protection.

Workers and employers may assume a hard hat protects against all impacts, but many traditional helmets do not address rotational motion at all. This lack of knowledge creates a dangerous gap in workplace safety that can have lifealtering consequences for workers and liability for employers.

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Workers need to know about head injuries—their risk factors, symptoms, effects and repercussions—in order to reduce and prevent the number of incidents in the workplace. Head injuries pose serious risks to workers, their families and their communities.

Raising awareness about the long-term and quality of life risks associated with rotational motion during impacts to the head should be a critical focus for safety professionals.

Managers, safety officers and workers alike need to understand not only the difference in protection between a Type I and Type II helmet, but also the difference between a helmet that addresses rotational motion and one that does not. By promoting a culture of safety through clear communication, targeted training and education, and updated PPE guidelines, the construction industry can empower its workforce to make informed decisions that can help reduce the risk of TBIs on the job.

IMAGES COURTESY OF MIPS

EDUCATING ON HEAD INJURIES AND HEAD PROTECTION

A SMARTER APPROACH TO HEAD SAFETY

The construction industry will always have inherent risks. But that doesn’t mean we can’t be smarter about how we protect workers. It’s time to look toward modern head protection that reflects real-world jobsite hazards.

For industry professionals, it’s time to make head protection a central part of the overall safety strategy. That means educating the workforce, using up-to-date PPE, and being open to innovation. EHS Joe Brandel is the business development manager for North America industrial safety market at Mips, a helmet safety technology company. He has been in the construction and industrial safety business for more than 20 years.

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ENVIRONMENTAL RISKS

The Expanding Role of Environmental Monitoring As environmental risks become measurable and predictable, organizations are shifting from reactive to proactive safety practices.

By Brittany DeRafelo and Chris Skipper

THE HAZARD NO ONE WAS MEASURING

For the last several years, the safety conversation has centered on human risk factors: falls, struck-by events, musculoskeletal injuries from lifting and repetitive motion, and more. These are the hazards that drive injuries. They’re historically where programs get built and budgets get allocated.

There’s a second category of risk that has largely flown under the radar: environmental conditions. It turns out those conditions are doing greater damage, both financially and to worker safety, than most organizations initially accounted for.

Think about what happens when a refrigeration door is left open in a food distribution facility. The immediate consequence looks operational: temperature integrity is lost, product spoilage risk spikes, and you’re looking at a six or seven-figure inventory loss. If this occurs in a pharmaceutical facility, the cost of the loss is exponentially higher.

But follow the chain further and the safety story emerges.

Condensation builds up on the floor and now you have a slip

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sk most EHS professionals to describe an average industrial environment, and the mental image is pretty consistent: a warehouse, a manufacturing floor, a construction site. Heavy machinery.

Forklifts. Workers lifting, climbing, operating equipment. The hazards are physical, the injuries are predictable, and the safety playbook (i.e. engineering controls, PPE, behavior-based programs) has been refined over decades.

That picture isn’t wrong. But it’s getting smaller.

A quiet but significant shift is underway in how organizations define workplace safety risk.

Two forces are pushing the boundaries outward at the same time: a broader category of hazards being pulled into the safety ecosystem, and a much wider range of environments now being recognized as industrial sites. Together, they’re redefining what it means to manage risk at work and expanding the addressable problem considerably.

hazard. The HVAC system overcompensates to recover the temperature set point. That’s accelerated equipment wear, higher energy costs and eventually unplanned downtime. When workers are called in to respond to an emergency, they’re rushing, skipping steps and compensating for lost time. That’s unfortunately where injuries happen.

The open door didn’t cause an injury directly. But it created the conditions for one.

This cause-and-effect chain repeats across environments.

In pharmaceutical distribution, a temperature excursion isn’t just a compliance problem; it’s a potential downstream patient safety issue if medications are compromised. In any facility where HVAC systems are working overtime to compensate for chronic environmental seepage, the cumulative effect on energy consumption, maintenance cycles, and equipment lifespan is significant and measurable.

The reason these risks have been underestimated isn’t that they’re hard to understand; it’s that they were historically difficult to observe. Environmental conditions like ambient temperature in connection to door status, air exchange and behavioral patterns, so they weren’t generating the incident

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data that would put them on the safety radar. In the traditional model, a risk had to produce a recordable outcome before it got managed.

That’s the definition of a lagging indicator, and for environmental risk, it’s been the only kind available until recently.

FROM LAGGING TO LEADING

What’s changed is the ability to observe environmental conditions continuously and in real-time. Sensors, connected monitoring systems and computer vision AI (CVAI) have made it possible to track the physical state of a facility the way we’ve always wanted to track human behavior: proactively, with enough lead time to intervene. Where sensors detect a condition, computer vision can put it in context, correlating an open door with worker proximity, traffic patterns and response time in ways that static monitoring alone cannot.

The shift matters because environmental risks are not random.

They’re observable, repeatable and patterned. An open dock door during peak receiving hours is a predictable event in a predictable location. A refrigeration unit that cycles out of compliance at the same time every day is a solvable problem—if you can see it.

The framework that’s emerging in leading organizations treats environmental conditions as system-level signals, not

isolated operational nuisances. A temperature excursion is a data point. An HVAC system running above baseline is a data point. Taken together, these signals map the conditions that create risk, rather than the incidents that result from it.

For EHS professionals, this represents a meaningful expansion of the workplace safety discipline. The question is no longer, “How do we protect workers from each other and from equipment?” It’s now, “How do we manage the physical environment itself as a risk variable?” That requires new measurement frameworks, new data sources, and, in many cases, new cross-functional relationships, particularly with operations and facilities teams who have traditionally owned environmental monitoring.

WHERE ‘INDUSTRIAL’ NOW BEGINS

The second major shift is geographic.

The traditional boundaries of industrial safety have always been tied to manufacturing, warehousing and construction.

These were the environments with the machinery, the physical hazards and the injury rates that drew regulatory attention. Data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics reflects that injury and illness rates in transportation and warehousing, manufacturing and construction consistently outpace other sectors.

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ENVIRONMENTAL RISKS

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But those boundaries are becoming harder to defend.

Retail, the largest private sector employer in the United States, supporting more than 52 million jobs, operates in physical environments where the same fundamental risks exist. Slip-and-fall incidents don’t care whether they happen in a fulfillment center or a grocery store. Ergonomic injuries from repetitive stocking, lifting and scanning tasks don’t differentiate between a warehouse associate and a retail stocker. Environmental hazards such as wet floors, temperature fluctuations in grocery and pharmacy sections, and congestion in high-traffic areas are present across the retail landscape.

The omnichannel model has accelerated this convergence.

Distribution functions have moved into store back rooms.

A MORE HONEST ACCOUNTING OF RISK

What both of these shifts have in common is that they require organizations to take a more complete view of risk that captures not just the incidents that have already occurred, but the conditions that are generating them.

Total Cost of Risk frameworks are gaining traction in part because they force this kind of accounting. When you include not just workers’ comp claims and OSHA recordables, but also product loss, energy inefficiency, labor disruption, and the downstream effects of environmental conditions, the picture changes. Risks that looked minor on a traditional safety dashboard become significant when their full financial and operational impact is visible.

That shift in framing also changes the conversation about investment. Safety programs that can demonstrate measurable reductions across environmental, operational and human risk categories aren’t just preventing injuries; they’re improving throughput, reducing waste and protecting product integrity. That’s a different kind of business case, and it tends to get a different kind of attention.

WHAT THIS MEANS IN PRACTICE

Same-day fulfillment has added picking and packing tasks to store-level operations. Workers who were once primarily customer-facing are now doing work that looks a lot like light industrial with the attendant physical demands and injury exposure.

Pharmaceutical supply chains, grocery distribution and large-format retail stores are already being managed with the same risk frameworks that heavy industrial environments have used for years.

This matters for EHS professionals in two ways. First, if you work in an environment that doesn’t fit the traditional industrial mold, the assumption that your workforce faces lower risk may not be accurate. The injury data increasingly suggests otherwise. Second, the tools and methodologies developed for heavy industrial settings are now being adapted for these broader environments; in some cases, the results are striking. CVAI in particular has proven well-suited to retail and grocery environments precisely because the cameras are already there. The AI layer turns a passive recording system into active environmental and behavioral intelligence.

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None of this means discarding what works. The fundamentals of industrial hygiene, ergonomics and behavior-based safety programs remain essential.

Slip hazards are still slip hazards. Lifting injuries don’t become less painful because we’ve started measuring ambient temperature.

But the ecosystem around those fundamentals is expanding. Environmental conditions are now a legitimate domain of EHS practice, not a facilities afterthought. And the range of environments where that practice applies is wider than it has ever been.

For EHS professionals, the practical implications are worth sitting with. Are environmental conditions in your facilities being monitored with the same rigor as behavioral risk factors and are you using tools, like CVAI, that can observe both simultaneously, within the same physical space? Are you working across functional silos to connect operational data to safety outcomes? And, if you’re operating in a retail or customer-facing environment, are you applying the same analytical frameworks that heavy industrial sites have used for decades?

The definition of an industrial site is expanding. Our definition of risk should expand with it. EHS Brittany DeRafelo and Chris Skipper, CSP, CFPS, work at Voxel, a provider of video-based AI site visibility platforms. Brittany is director of customer solutions and has over a decade of EHS experience. Chris is head of customer solutions and has over 20 years of safety and risk management experience.

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LADDER SAFETY

Why Ladder Safety Matters Safe climbing requires ongoing vigilance. Here are five things to pay attention to before, during and after using a ladder.

By Mike VanBree

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iscussions about ladder safety can feel like a case of déjà vu—and that creates the potential for disaster.

Ladders are familiar, widely available and used so frequently that they are rarely treated as the serious access equipment they truly are. Many workers believe that if they can see a ladder and climb it, no further discussion is needed. Safety professionals know otherwise.

Ladders themselves are not inherently dangerous. Rather, misuse, poor setup and lack of awareness create the risk.

Effective ladder safety begins long before workers step onto the first rung and continues through the selection process, initial safety inspection, proper setup, safe usage, and finally transport and storage.

Each stage builds on the last, and skipping any one of them can undermine all the others.

Ladder safety must be practiced every day, and it requires complete buy-in to reduce the risk of falls.

SELECTION

Choosing the right ladder begins with an assessment of the environment where work will be done. Before choosing a ladder style or size, it is essential to understand what surface the ladder will be placed on, the elevation to be reached, and how the ladder will be used to access the work area.

If the goal is to access an upper elevation or transition to another surface, a leaning ladder is often preferred because self-supporting ladders are not designed to handle significant side loading. Leaning the ladder into a structure allows workers to transfer as intended, particularly when the ladder is extended approximately 3 feet above the upper contact and it is secured by tying it off or having someone else hold it at ground level during use.

The firmness and levelness of the ground play a major role in ladder selection. On uneven or sloped surfaces, a leaning ladder equipped with ladder levelers may be the best choice rather than attempting to stabilize a self-supporting ladder. You

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LADDER SAFETY should never attempt to level a self-supporting stepladder or an extension ladder with blocks or other unstable materials.

Different ladder types serve different purposes. Choosing the correct one is a fundamental safety decision: » Self-supporting stepladders are appropriate when the work can be performed generally in front of the user and the ladder can be placed on a firm, level surface and supported on all four feet. » Leaning ladders, including extension ladders, single ladders, and articulated extendable ladders, can be better suited for accessing work at higher levels, or transferring to roofs and other elevated surfaces.

The working height determines the ladder size workers need to select. It needs to be tall enough so workers can comfortably reach the work without standing on the top three rungs of an extension ladder or the top step and top cap of a stepladder.

Standing too high does not permit workers to support themselves into the ladder and maintain balance.

Duty rating, sometimes called load capacity, is also important.

The ladder must support not only a worker’s weight but also the weight of clothing, tools and materials used while on the ladder.

The material used to make the ladder also matters: » Fiberglass ladders are always a good choice and are required when working around electricity because the rails are non-conductive. » Aluminum ladders can be lightweight and durable but should never be used near energized equipment. » Wood ladders are also considered non-conductive. While once a common material, wood ladders are no longer manufactured in the U.S. Existing wood ladders require special attention during inspection because they can degrade over time from environmental exposure. Some concerns to watch out for are broken parts, splits and dry rot that could compromise safety.

SAFETY INSPECTION

After choosing a ladder, it is NOT time to pop it open and get to work. Now is the time to perform an initial safety inspection. This is a critical step, and it is one of the most

frequently overlooked aspects of ladder safety. A proper inspection involves examining every component of the ladder, starting at one end and working systematically through the entire structure. The goal is to ensure that all parts are present, functioning properly, and free from damage or corrosion.

It is important to understand that ladders do not have an expiration date. A properly maintained ladder can be passed on through generations. The reverse is also true: An abused ladder may need to be removed from service after only a few uses.

This is why ladder inspection can never be ignored.

Side rails and rungs are the primary load-bearing components.

Any cracks, bends or deformations on these components are signs that the ladder should be removed from service. For stepladders, make sure spreaders move freely and lock securely to hold the ladder fully open. For extension ladders, rung locks should engage properly and move smoothly without sticking.

Pay particular attention to the ladder’s feet, especially on leaning ladders. The feet are the primary slip-resistant component and play a major role in preventing slide-out. Just like the tires on your car, check the tread. Pads should be firmly attached and not excessively worn.

Inspections aren’t a onetime event, either. They are part of an ongoing process that continues while setting up the ladder and even while it is being used. Workers should always be aware of the ladder’s condition and confirm that it remains properly positioned and stable throughout the task. It is this ongoing awareness that can help prevent small issues from turning into serious problems.

SETUP

During set up, the design of the ladder as well as the skill and attention of the workers come together.

To properly set up a step ladder, fully open it with the spreaders locked and all four feet firmly supported on firm, level ground. Even slight unevenness can cause instability, so workers must pay careful attention to foot placement when opening and setting up the ladder. Stepladders should never be leaned against a wall or used in a partially open position.

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Recent innovation has resulted in stepladders that are also designed for leaning use by the manufacturer.

Extension ladders must be set at the correct angle to optimize strength and stability. Most ladders are designed to be set at approximately a 75-degree angle, and the ladder’s labeling often provides specific guidance for achieving this angle.

One commonly taught method for achieving the proper angle is the anthropometric or “firefighter” method. Workers place their toes at the base of the ladder’s side rail and extends their arms straight out at shoulder height. The palms should rest comfortably on the side rails while grasping. If only the fingertips reach the ladder rails, the angle is too shallow. If the wrists or forearms contact the ladder, the angle is too steep.

A shallow angle increases the risk of the ladder sliding out at the base. It also places bending stress on the side rails beyond what the ladder was designed to handle. Achieving the correct angle improves resistance to slide out and helps ensure the ladder can safely carry its intended load without compromising the built-in safety factor.

Make sure extension ladders extend at least 3 feet above the top support point when transitioning on and off the ladder to the elevated surface. This extension provides something for workers to hold onto, especially when descending.

Many accidents occur when workers attempt to climb down and realize too late that there is nothing to grab, leading to awkward movements that can compromise footing.

Attempting to adjust or extend a ladder from above is particularly dangerous. Pulling the ladder upward can unlock its rung locks, change the ladder angle, or dislodge the feet, creating a sudden “elevator ride” downward. Extension ladders should only ever be extended or adjusted from the ground.

USE

Climbing a ladder safely means always maintaining control and stability. Workers should never stand on the top three rungs of an extension ladder or the top step and top cap of a stepladder. When standing at excessive heights, the ladder provides too little support and the user becomes top-heavy, relying almost entirely on balance rather than contact support with the ladder. The proper highest standing level is identified by the labels on the ladder. If labels are missing, contact the manufacturer for replacement labels and guidance.

With proper positioning, the climber’s legs will brace against the ladder and provide stability. On extension ladders, standing too high causes the climber to be too close to the wall or structure, which limits the ability to adjust body position to maintain balance.

Maintaining three points of contact while climbing is a wellknown rule and a fundamental OSHA requirement. Simply put, either two feet and one hand or two hands and one foot should always be in contact with the ladder when ascending and descending. By definition, this disallows carrying tools or materials while climbing. Items such as shingles, tools or

equipment should never be carried by hand while climbing.

Instead, tool belts, ropes or taglines should be used to raise materials once workers are in position.

Other common causes of ladder instability include overreaching and applying excessive force. Tasks such as drilling, pushing, pulling or wrestling with large materials can create sudden shifts in balance. Unwieldy items, such as plywood, should never be handled on a ladder, especially with another person pulling from the opposite side, as this creates unpredictable forces that compromise stability.

Many ladder-related incidents occur because workers have become comfortable with improper practices and have “gotten away with it” in the past. Setting extension ladders at shallow angles may feel more comfortable and resemble stairs, but this comfort comes at the expense of safety. Proper climbing technique with a ladder positioned at a 75-degree angle involves controlled stepping upward while keeping the body close to the ladder.

Even short falls can be fatal. Many workers have been seriously injured or killed falling from stepladders only 6 feet high because they landed in a way that caused head or spinal injuries. Safety professionals play a crucial role in shaping behavior and managing work practices so that comfort does not override correct technique.

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LADDER SAFETY TRANSPORT AND STORAGE

How to transport and store ladders is often an afterthought, but it has a direct impact on ladder safety. Ladders transported on vehicle racks should be properly tied down or strapped to prevent movement.

Failing to properly secure ladders can allow them to chatter, bounce, or slide, which can introduce wear and impact stresses that crack fiberglass or weaken aluminum rails. Over time, this damage compromises the ladder’s loadbearing capacity. Support points on vehicle racks should be designed to distribute weight evenly, and part of the inspection process should include checking for rail damage at those contact points. Ladders should never be allowed to overhang excessively into roadways or create hazards for other vehicles.

Improper storage can also damage ladders and create additional hazards. Stacking materials on top of ladders can crush rails and cause cracks that are not immediately visible.

When ladders are stored vertically, they must be secured to prevent tipping or sliding out. Retail environments provide a useful example, where ladders are stored in vertical bays with racking that prevents them from falling into aisles. Similar principles should be applied on jobsites and in storage areas.

Ladders should never be left in aisleways or high-traffic areas where they can be struck, run over or damaged by equipment.

CONCLUSION

Safe ladder usage requires consistency, training and attention to detail. Safety professionals are in the best position to make a difference by reinforcing these principles with regular and specific training and instruction. Workers must think of ladders as tools that are designed to be used in specific ways. Highlighting the significance of these five steps will prevent ladder accidents.

The American Ladder Institute maintains a host of safety resources, training and curriculum that EHS professionals can incorporate into their own safety initiatives all year long, but especially during the organization’s Ladder Safety Month campaign every March.

Ladder safety is not a one-time lesson or a set-it-andforget-it topic. It’s important to select the right ladder for the job—every single time. It’s equally important to follow best practices for inspection, use, storage and transportation.

Ensuring ladder safety is an ongoing effort to manage behavior, maintain equipment, and ensure that every climb begins and ends safely. EHS Mike VanBree is director of product safety and engineering at Louisville Ladder, Inc. and current president of the American Ladder Institute (ALI), a nonprofit trade association dedicated to promoting ladder safety.

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NEW PRODUCTS Portable Covering

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Industrial Eye Protection

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Safety glasses cover multiple laser wavelengths for applications involving laser cutting, drilling, welding, cleaning, and marking in materials such as metals, plastics, and ceramics. The YG4 filter covers multiple near IR and IR lasers, including 1050-1090nm fiber lasers, cutting and marking and material processing lasers, Nd:YAG 1064nm lasers, diode lasers and CO2 lasers. The safety glasses are available in several filters, such as the F43.

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THE MAGAZINE FOR ENVIRONMENT, HEALTH AND SAFETY LEADERS EDITORIAL STAFF

Dave Blanchard

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E HS Today

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A WORK IN PROGRESS

Nicole Stempak Managing Editor

Not If but When Stop pretending incidents won’t happen. Start focusing on what happens next, instead.

I

once met someone whose job was, among other tasks, to stress test the touch screens at a local science museum. I asked how that can be a real thing. He said something to the effect that children behave in ways you can’t possibly imagine or anticipate, so you need to design the software to handle whatever comes at them. The same is true for adults, too.

The safety profession is focused on preventing and reducing risks. EHS professionals are tasked with tracking lagging indicators. They’re increasingly being asked to track leading indicators, too.

I think some folks are now realizing that no matter how much you plan, you just can’t prepare for every scenario.

What’s more, it’s futile to try. Over the past few months, in conversations with safety professionals and while editing contributed articles, I’m detecting a subtle shift in mindset.

For example, Brooks Ross writes in an article about emergency management that: “It is impossible to anticipate all outcomes. Instead, the goal is to become proactive about reducing common risks and preplanning responses to probable incidents.”

I’m not a safety practitioner; I’m an outside observer. I can’t speak to being, as Teddy Roosevelt once described it, in the arena. But it seems to me that by acknowledging it’s a matter of when—not if—a safety incident will happen, you’re allowing yourself to be more prepared for what comes next.

I recently spoke with the American Society of Safety Professional’s current and past presidents Monique Parker, Linda Tapp and Pam Walaski for an episode of the Talking EHS podcast.

Something Pam said has stuck with me, because it reminded me why these conversations—and the profession—are so critical: “We have flipped the script and have really learned to see the worker as the solution—not the problem. We’ve begun to appreciate that people are human, and they make mistakes. We have to create, as Monique described, that environment where those mistakes don’t necessarily lead to their downfall.”

I appreciate the work that has been done to make American workplaces as safe as they are today, but tackling some of those persistently high and frustratingly stubborn safety metrics demands an altogether different approach. It requires a fundamental reset in how we view both work and workers.

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In an article about operator error and performance metrics, TJ Ryals writes: “Even the most experienced operators cannot maintain peak alertness for every moment of every shift. Expecting them to do so is like asking drivers to keep their eyes on every mirror, every gauge and every inch of the road ahead without blinking for hours at a time. If safety systems are designed with the assumption of perfect human performance, they will fail in the real world.”

Risk elimination is a noble goal, and I agree that workplace safety incidents can be prevented. Still, I think it might be a more effective strategy to eliminate the expectation of perfection.

The fact of the matter is, humans are not perfect. We can’t sustainably operate at perfect, let alone peak, performance.

Even though some wear it as a badge of honor, perfectionist tendencies can negatively affect people’s health and wellbeing. A clinical diagnosis of perfectionism is frequently accompanied by depression, anxiety, obsessive-compulsive disorder, eating disorders and suicidal impulses.

What, then, is a safer—and more realistic—path forward?

It’s to first acknowledge the way the work is already being done before designing something better. By talking about what could happen. By creating a space where workers feel safe to voice their concerns. By reinforcing the message that workers are more important than any injury-free records or minutes saved to boost production. By encouraging them to take training more seriously, so they know how to keep themselves, and their colleagues, safe.

Removing the pretense of perfection allows workers to see the possible outcomes as something to be vigilant against. In the process, it normalizes prevention as any other workplace safety protocol, not some bogeyman to fear or hide from. The question then shifts from if to when to what next.

M R K

Send an e-mail with your thoughts to nstempak@endeavorb2b.com.

E HS Today

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Manage Human Factors Risk With a Swiss Army Knife Approach The most valuable human factors training programs should feel like a Swiss Army knife: portable, versatile, easy to use, and always within reach.

But instead of a corkscrew and nail file, workers carry practical techniques to deal with distraction, rushing and other states that increase errors and risk every day.

Good human factors management skills are portable and versatile enough to provide a range of reliable outcomes across every department—from quality to culture and off-the-job safety too.

If you haven't put a safety multi-tool in every employee's pocket, there's room to improve safety and site-wide performance. Find out what a stronger approach looks like—and the key elements required to manage human factors.

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