In this episode, Bjørn is guested by Philip Rawlinson, Head of HSEQ at Emrill.

Listen to the episode to gain new inspiring insights!

In this episode, Bjørn is guested by Shaun Carvalho, Vice President - Safety, Shawmut Design and Construction.

Shaun shares his perspectives on the importance of continued learning and how he believes that solving why people get hurt is one of the ultimate puzzles to solve in general. Moreover, he comments on the fact that OSHA came about 50 years ago in the States and for the first 25 to 30 years showed some significant improvements in the workplace, but since the turn of the century, we've simply seen a relative plateau and roughly the same number of people are getting hurt every year. And we should not accept that the same number of workplace hazards, incidents, and - worst - fatalities occur.

As Shaun nicely puts it: learning how to positively impact and help people is an amazing opportunity, and we should strive and work to get ahead of the next bad accident every single day. He believes that we need more HSE professionals that don’t wear an HSE hat, and instead, we need field leadership and crew leaders to feel responsible for the individuals that work for them. If we can get HSE professionals really bought into the individuals on site’s safety we can start to turn the titles a bit more, and this will have a tremendous effect! People should feel confident, safe, secure and supported to make the right decisions when they walk into work, as it’s so very important for us to feel “the right way” in order to perform our best. The job site simply has to be welcoming. Wise words from Shaun!

Furthermore, from Shaun’s perspective, the challenge for many HSE professionals currently is whether they can get good data out of people. You can have the best and most robust safety software that exists, but if the individuals on the work site don’t know how to interact with it or it’s too complex for them, then it’s simply not worth it! We should instead work to find the approach or software that works for the individual organisation and to make sure that it isn’t disruptive for the workers.

Lastly, Shaun emphasizes the importance of creating a nice and strong foundation of learning and skill sets. Then we’ll, as HSE professionals, after some years of training be able to have instant recall instead of having to go back to the books. Simply because we learned it the right way. That will make us better and more skilled HSE professionals, and we’ll be able to react and truly come across as that subject matter expert. This will also make people look towards us - instead of fearing us - for support and expertise.

Listen to the episode to have these quotes elaborated on or gain other new inspiring insights!

“All accidents can be related to a lack of leadership, a lack ofcommunication, and a lack of mental focus.”

In this episode Bjørn is guested by Roger New, EHS & Facilities Manager and newly facilitated HSE Mental Focus Specialist. You can hear him elaborate on the above statement or listen to other great insights in this new episode of “The Human Factor in HSE”. Once again, thank you so much for sharing your great story and insightful approaches, Roger!

Roger has a long and impressive career and according to his experience, focusing on the task at hand is crucial. However, it’s not only important to be aware of the importance of mental focus: the important thing is to actually do something about the problems we face. To put it as simply as Roger does: “whether you're a police officer, whether you're a manufacturing production worker - if your mind is not in the game if your mind is not on what you're doing, you’re adding to your own risk.”

Through his work and his approach to HSE, Roger demonstrates an impressive ability to stay curious and to stay close to the operation itself even when advancing to the top of the organisation. I am sure that we could all learn from this attitude! He has experienced troubles along the way with both managers and the constant problem with management buy-in when he wanted to implement more safety training and attention to mental focus training but has luckily been persistent enough to get his suggestions through. This approach has granted him the great pleasure of seeing the incident numbers go down. He believes that we in the future need to make the top of organisations more aware of what a good safety system is or what a safety person should be looking at and in general, learn more from our current mistakes.

Listen to this podcast to gain more fantastic insights from Roger New's great HSE career!

In this episode Bjørn is guested by Michael Zalle, founder and CEO at The Yellow Bird Project.

In this episode Michael shows us how  each and every HSE professional has something unique and valuable to contribute to the field, and how this is the reason for the diversity of perspectives and skills that makes the HSE community so strong and effective in promoting safety and environmental responsibility.

In the podcast, Michael elaborates on The Yellow Bird Project and how it utilises this strong communitie’s potential and establishes the opportunity to use skills of HSE professionals to make a difference in their daily work and to help others while potentially earning extra income. The project is revolutionizing the way we approach HSE work, saving HSE professionals and organizations money and reducing travel time for a more sustainable future.

“When an old person dies, it is like losing a library"

Yet another strong quote from the podcast. Here Michael truly highlights the importance of leveraging the wealth of knowledge and experience within the HSE community. In order to stay safe, individuals must be able to draw upon their knowledge and experience to make informed decisions. If they are stressed or lack mental focus, they may make dangerous mistakes. 

Listen to this podcast to learn from Michael's wisdom and to see how the future might be for HSE!

In this episode Bjørn is guested by Jeremy Heath, HSE Mental Focus Specialist, Senior Risk Consultant, HUB International.

In this episode Jeremy shares his powerful story and covers a broad range of interesting and inspiring topics! 

For example, why don't we s HSE professionals not necessarily always see the good that we do? And why is it important to remind ourselves of the good changes and impacts we have on the field and people's lives in general. Jeremy here uses a personal story to frame how somebody he worked together with years ago still remembers some of the knowledge he shared with them 10 years ago.

Moreover, Jeremy shares how understanding the importance of  having a strong communication with both the workers/employees and the management team is the key element in order to succeed. 

Regarding the management team, his mentor specifically told him that you need to make a seat at the table! The important question to ask is then: How can we communicate to the management team in a way where safety becomes important to them?

Regarding the workers/employees: What do you do when you are facing an accident or an incident simply because people are not paying attention? Do you just ask them to pay more attention? 

This is one of the most inspiring guest speakers we have had on our podcast so far. Listen to the episode and I promise you, you won't be disapointed!

In this episode Bjørn is guested by Aparajithan Vetriselvan, HSE Mental Focus Specialist, Divisional HSE Manager, Serco, United Arab Emirates.

In this episode, Aparajithan explains his journey from starting in HSE in India to now being a Divisional HSE Manager in Dubai and how he believes that sector has skyrocketed to being more advanced in the span of the last 10 years.

From his point of view listening to the employees of the company is key for success. Simply listening like you have never listened before, will ensure that the trust comes naturally. It may sound very simple, but it has tremendous effects!

In the episode, Aparajithan, moreover, shares what he believes to be the biggest change in the field: the change from documenting just for the sake of documentation to behaviour tranings of employees. When Aparajithan started in the field, he felt that HSE was basically just about ISO certifications. Today he believes that the sector is evolving and including much more specific traning. He firmly believes that this is the most different aspect today as well as the most engaging and interesting part. At the moment, virtual reality trainings are also starting to come across, which could offer new ways of increasing safety measures. For Aparajithan training sessions with this new VR have been mind-blowing! He believes that training people in e.g., fire safety and first aid safety situations could prove to be very beneficial, as you then have a chance to know how things will unfold and to train staff before such dangerous situations might occur in real life.

Starting to engage more with employees as he moved his career to Dubai, he also found himself starting to develop himself more. Especially regarding the engagement part and the communication part. He’s been part of initiating meeting between employees without supervisors which has proven to be very helpful in the process of opening engagement initiatives between the teams, where they’ve come up with safety observations on the side and they’ve created more engagement with near miss issues. Their first HSE committee meeting was simply a floodgate for them!

Listen to this episode to learn much more about Aparajithan’s fascinating HSE career and insights!

In this episode Bjørn is guested by Tash Baksh, Senior Manager Quality, Health, Safety, Security, Environmental and Operational Excellence at Kiwa, Houston, Texas.

Tash shares his journey through HSE and his perspective on the current problem of companies not pivoting away from the “checklist-approach”.

Tash takes us through his experience of how, back in the days, HSE was much more about inspection type activities, where he would check to verify things were done and use checklists all the time. This was the core of HSE and most of the job was making sure that people were trained to accomplish the task that they needed to do. He views the field and a part of the present HSE community as focusing more on training the employees, so that they are aware of why they need to do the task and, and that even if they miss doing it there's some built in contingency in the process so it doesn't result in someone getting hurt.

He firmly believes that we need to pause and look at the process. That it is utterly important that we take a moment to stop and think, whether we are currently in the right frame of mind to do the task before us, and if not if we need to reset. 

From Tash’s perspective, the biggest challenge for HSE currently is that not all organisations have pivoted from the checklist approach. They're still on the “is it done or not done?”-task. He describes this tendency as the companies not yet pivoting to a behavior based model with the psychological safety type aspects of providing the skills, the resources, and the ability for the individual to pivot and be able to recognize when they're facing danger or when they're not in the right mindset to be able to perform a task. 

Listen to this episode to learn more about the current tendency of HSE with companies not pivoting away from the checklist approach and gain insight to approaches on how we might deal with and solve this problem in the future!

In this episode Bjørn is guested by Kazimierz Kempa, Environment Health Safety Lead and HSE Mental Focus Specialist.
 
The episode covers Kazimierz’s passion for helping people and HSE, how he went from being a graduate from University of Technology to go into the field being brand new in the HSE community, and how he enjoys to always challenge himself to make sure he's developing!
 
 Kazimierz also shares his perspective on how the all-time issue is Top Management and how important it is to make them understand HSE, as HSE professionals aren't able to do their job if the Top Management do not care. The two criteria for success in HSE are Top Management and the behaviour of the people that are causing the problems, but without engagement from above it's difficult to do anything. So, how do we change the mindset of the Top Management?
 
 Kazimierz also believes that the HSE community is changing at the moment. We not only focus and documenting problems but more and more focus on the root causes and on changing the behaviour of our employees to avoid future accidents! But how do we ensure this development?
 
 Listen to this episode to learn about new perspectives on the debate of top management, learn from Kazimierz's great experience and skills, and deepen your insight on the current development within the HSE community!