The Safety Spotlight

Six years ago, driving out of a northern Manitoba job site in a snowstorm, Jason Ross thought he was having a heart attack. It was a panic attack, and it put him on the path to talking openly about mental health with construction crews across Canada.Jason is a health and safety manager at Bird Construction with about 25 years in the industry. He chairs Bird's mental health employee resource group (ERG) and spends half his time on job sites talking with crews about mental health. In this episode of the Safety Spotlight, he tells Marc Hurtubise what happened on that drive, what has helped him on the hard days since, and why crews respond to someone at the front of the room who looks and talks like them.He also explains how Bird's ERG works, how it helped get more than 150 people trained in Mental Health First Aid, and where to start if you want to build a group like it at your own company."It doesn't matter if I'm talking to 10 people, or if I'm talking to 200 people, if I can connect with one, two, three people in that room, then I know that that conversation is going to continue." - Jason RossIF YOU'RE STRUGGLINGThis episode includes discussion of suicide and mental health. In Canada or the US, you can call or text 988 any time, day or night. If you or someone else is in immediate danger, call 911.Jason and Marc are not mental health professionals, and this conversation is not a substitute for professional support. In Jason's words: "I'm definitely not a professional. I'm just somebody that's passionate about mental health."CONNECTJason Ross on LinkedIn:   / jason-ross-9b672063  Bird Construction: https://www.bird.caBird Construction on LinkedIn:   / bird-construction-inc  BIS Safety Software: https://www.bissafety.caABOUT THE SAFETY SPOTLIGHTThe Safety Spotlight is a podcast from BIS Safety Software. Host Marc Hurtubise sits down with safety leaders to hear what has worked for them and what they have learned along the way.

"If the people you work with don't like who you are, the message you send will never get out."Garrett Hill, Regional Safety Manager at EquipmentShare, started his safety career on high-rise demolition sites in Houston. Ten years later, he looks after safety across about 106 offices on the Gulf Coast and teaches the same OSHA 10 and 30 courses he started out with.In this episode of the Safety Spotlight podcast, Garrett and Marc talk about why the best safety professionals sell themselves before they sell the message. They also cover how Garrett went from living by the book to supporting operations teams, and why you should never go to a mentor empty-handed.In this episode:

• Why engagement comes before the message, and what changes once crews know who you are
• Being the "pair of glasses" that spots what a fill-in-the-blank JHA misses
• Keeping a new-hire safety orientation engaging for 200 to 350 people at a time
• What separates a moderate safety culture from a strong one: consistency and follow-through
• Avoiding burnout in a job that doesn't stop at five o'clock
• How to ask a mentor for help the right way, and the advice he'd give his younger self

CHAPTERS00:00 Sell yourself first00:15 Welcome, Garrett Hill of EquipmentShare01:01 From the Navy to safety: Garrett's start02:57 "36 more chapters": finding out how much there is to learn05:20 From a means to an end to a real passion07:55 Finding your niche (it wasn't behind a desk)10:02 106 offices: know who you're investing in14:45 Avoiding burnout: hobbies, the gym and a phone on silent18:49 What makes an excellent safety professional21:58 A word from BIS: the Training Matrix23:15 Why engagement changes results on the job25:15 Being the pair of glasses on site28:38 Building a safety culture takes time32:27 No magic trick: the basics, done consistently35:02 Where Garrett learns: mentors, networks and ASSP38:13 Never come empty-handed40:21 His first incident, and what it taught him45:42 Advice to his younger self47:29 Where to find GarrettABOUT THE GUESTGarrett Hill is a Regional Safety Manager at EquipmentShare, a technology company that rents construction equipment. He is a Navy veteran and an ASSP member, and he speaks at job sites across the country on topics from MEWPs to building a strong safety culture.LINKSConnect with Garrett on LinkedIn:   / garrett-hill-32900521b  EquipmentShare: https://www.equipmentshare.comBIS Safety Software: https://www.bissafety.comABOUT SAFETY SPOTLIGHTSafety Spotlight is a podcast from BIS Safety Software, hosted by Marc Hurtubise, where safety professionals share the stories and lessons behind their careers. Subscribe so you don't miss the next episode.#SafetySpotlight #SafetyCulture #ConstructionSafety #SafetyLeadership #EHS

Jacqueline Handy took a marketing job at a construction safety firm in New York City and had no idea what site safety was. Then she sat through her first board meeting, watched a room of tradesmen in Timbs and jeans start talking about projects and plans and mechanisms in words she'd never heard, and decided that was where she wanted to be.That was the front door. Almost nobody walks through the one you'd expect.She's now Manager of Environment, Health & Safety at Haugland Group, with an MBA, a master's in occupational safety and health, a stack of credentials, and a PhD in progress. In this conversation she walks through the path — the MTA subway system, the years of night classes, the certification that actually moved her career — and gets specific about the craft. Why her training room walls are covered in photographs of her own company's job sites. Why she'd rather let a tradesperson teach her their job than pull rank. What happened when she walked down to a flagger the crew had given up on and just let him talk.And the part she keeps coming back to: she speaks at career days where people tell her they had no idea safety was a career at all.Links: LinkedIn:   / jacquelinehandymba  Haugland Group: https://hauglandgroup.us/ASSP Hudson River Valley Chapter: https://hudsonrivervalley.assp.org/NAWIC: https://www.nawic.orgNontraditional Employment for Women: https://www.new-nyc.org/All episodes: https://bissafety.ca/safety-spotlight...Want to be a guest? Apply through the link above.

Bill Hart is a fifth-generation miner from West Virginia. He watched his grandfather die of black lung when he was sixteen, and later watched the same disease take his father. He now starts work at a gold mine in South Carolina alongside his son, the sixth generation in the family to go underground.In this episode, Bill makes a case that most safety programs get backwards: safety isn't a priority, it's a value. Priorities shift with the quarter. Values don't. He walks through what that means in practice, from the cultural curve that runs from safe-by-luck to safe-by-design, to the "death letter" exercise he used after a lock-out tag-out violation, to why he thinks a near miss should really be called a near hit.Connect with Bill HartLinkedIn:   / bill-hart-aa00a012  Mentioned in this episodeAllan James Moore on The Safety Spotlight:    • Party Crashing the Safety Status Quo | Saf...  Chapters00:00 Welcome and introductions01:56 Growing up in the Appalachian Mountains04:34 "I didn't find mining, mining found me"05:29 Watching black lung take his grandfather and father07:52 Why people come before production08:03 Tribal knowledge and earning a crew's trust12:37 Relaxed purposefulness, and the authority to shut a job down15:05 Safety is a value, not a priority16:28 The one habit that makes safety communication work17:06 Asking one question, then listening20:41 The Bradley curve: from safe by luck to safe by design23:02 First moves when a site is running on luck25:18 Non-complacent eyes: what new miners see that veterans miss27:36 Visible felt leadership in practice29:56 The death letter33:28 From the rehab room to prevention36:14 Near miss or near hit?37:22 Work as intended, work as normal, work as done40:41 Drones, AI cameras, and the "gotcha" problem46:34 Mentors50:48 One piece of advice for his younger self52:49 Where to find Bill

A broken door handle nobody fixed will tell you more about your safety culture than your incident numbers will.Michael Bassey has spent two decades in process safety across Nigeria, Qatar, the UAE, Argentina and North America, leading high-risk, high-consequence investigations. In 2010 he ran one that was thorough, detailed, and well received by leadership. Eight months later the same facility tripped again. Different shift, different people, same outcome. That gap is what he has been chasing ever since, and it is what led him to write Beyond Blame.In this conversation he unpacks why "human error" as a root cause stops the learning, why culture is "the soil that helps behaviors to germinate," how trust erodes over things as small as an unfixed door handle or a meeting you start fifteen minutes late, and what changed for him when a mentor sent him around every facility in the business unit for two months before he started the job.Michael Bassey, D.Eng, CSP, is an asset process safety advisor at Chevron in Houston and the author of Beyond Blame: A Human and Organizational Performance Approach to Incident Investigation, Learning, and Leadership.CHAPTERS0:00 "Trust is key and trust is fragile"0:25 Welcome to The Safety Spotlight1:34 From physics teacher to process safety at Chevron4:54 Leading across cultures: "people are people everywhere"8:53 The mindset you carry into a new country9:55 Beyond Blame: the incident that happened twice14:21 Why blame is a dead end15:36 Culture is the soil behavior grows in15:59 The broken door handle problem19:11 Why small unkept promises show up on the front line22:01 Operational discipline is for leaders too25:40 Closing the gap between the office and the field26:53 From "I Care" observations to real coaching30:44 The procedure step nobody follows32:05 What mentorship actually is34:09 The mentor who sent him around every facility37:43 Finding a mentor and building real competency39:29 Advice to his younger self42:40 Where to find Michael and Beyond BlameCONNECT WITH MICHAELLinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/drmichaelbassey/Michael's book on Amazon:Beyond Blame: A Human and Organizational Performance Approach to Incident Investigation, Learning, and Leadershiphttps://www.amazon.ca/Beyond-Blame-Organizational-Performance-Investigation/dp/B0GRBVQWYHABOUT THE SAFETY SPOTLIGHTLong-form conversations with the people doing the work in workplace safety. New episodes regularly. Subscribe so you don't miss one.The Safety Spotlight is produced by BIS Safety Software.

Ask a room full of employees whose job safety is, and plenty of hands will point at the safety department. Brian Fielkow got that answer when he bought his own trucking company, and he calls it the wrong one. 

Brian did not arrive in safety the usual way. He started out practising business law in Milwaukee, where meeting clients across a range of industries taught him to look for patterns. He went to work for his favourite client, a three generation recycling company, helped grow it, and sold it to Waste Management. After leaving Waste he bought his own trucking company and built it into a trucking, freight brokerage, and logistics business, and it was there that the role of safety came into focus for him, not as a compliance exercise but as the business itself. He has since written three books on the subject, most recently Making Safety Happen. 

In this episode of The Safety Spotlight, Brian makes the case that there is no safety culture sitting separate from company culture, and that the safest companies have an advantage precisely because they are not spending their time cleaning up messes. Safe outcomes, in his view, are a reflection of leadership quality. He is careful to add that the best run company can still have a bad day, and that every organization he has led or advised is a work in process. 

Ask most organizations how safety is going and they will hand you their incident numbers. Cody Woolf would rather know what happens on site when the senior leaders aren’t there.

Cody didn’t come to safety the usual way either. He went to school for law enforcement and criminal justice, then spent his early career in commercial vehicle enforcement with the Alberta government, pulling vehicles over on the highway and learning to have difficult conversations quickly. A friend moved into the safety world in 2008 and made it sound interesting enough that when a company offered to train him, he took the job with a plan to return to policing if it didn’t work out. Seventeen years later he has worked across civil and commercial construction, industrial, and now oil and gas and petrochemical, and he still says he has learned more from the workers in the field than from any course he has taken or book he has read.

In this episode of The Safety Spotlight, Cody makes the case that a clean record and a strong culture are two different things. He carries a line from his current mentor, that the absence of an incident doesn’t mean the presence of safety, and he is blunt about the alternative explanation: sometimes an organization is getting lucky. What closes that gap, in his view, is presence. Leaders in the field, conversations instead of emails, and follow-up that workers can actually see.

What can safety leaders in construction, oil and gas, and manufacturing learn from a workplace where you can't pause an emergency to fill out a hazard assessment?In this episode of Safety Spotlight, we sit down with Nicole Wetsch, Manager of Occupational Health and Safety for the Edmonton Police Service. Nicole started her career in medical microbiology and nanotechnology research before moving into policing, and she brings a scientist's discipline to one of the least prescriptive safety environments there is. She calls her team "safety unicorns," OHS professionals in a world with no ISO standard for the work in front of them.We talk about what it takes to protect people who are wired to look out for others before themselves, why functional beats thorough when a patrol officer's hazard assessment could run 200 pages, and how putting people ahead of paperwork built the credibility that shifted the culture.Topics include:Why traditional hazard assessments don't fit emergent work, and what replaces themHow EPS applied research-lab control banding to its early fentanyl and naloxone responseDesigning PPE that fits, and why building for women tends to benefit the whole teamForward-rotating shifts, sleep hygiene, and the long-term health cost of shift workMoving incident reporting from blame to root cause, and getting stronger corrective actions as a resultMaking the data-backed business case that earns leadership buy-in and resources

Ask most leaders if they have a good team and they'll say yes. Ken Larson's answer is that they have no idea what a real team is.In this episode of The Safety Spotlight, executive coach Ken Larson explains why most "teams" are really just a roster of talented people working near each other, not with each other. We get into interdependence, the misfire vs. the mishire, why you get what you tolerate, and why a leader's behavior matters more than any core value carved in bronze on the lobby wall.

What happens when a safety professional stops writing policies and starts walking the floor instead?  

In this episode of the Safety Spotlight Podcast, we sit down with Erin Heimbecker, Workplace Safety Specialist at the Saskatchewan Association for Safe Workplaces in Health (SASWH), to explore what it actually takes to build a safety culture that people believe in, not just comply with. 

Erin's path is one built on hands-on experience. Starting out in construction and manufacturing before crossing into healthcare, she has worked across provinces, adapted to different regulations, and learned firsthand that what works on one site will never work on every site. One principle has carried through every role: you cannot earn respect without giving it first. 

This conversation breaks down:  

• Why PPE compliance fails when you skip the conversation and start with the policy 

• How walking the floor changes everything about how workers receive safety guidance 

• Why safety professionals will never know it all, and why that is their greatest strength 

• How to build a professional network that actually shows up when you need it 

• Why culture change has to start at the top, or it does not start at all 

• How to communicate safety to managers in the language that makes sense to them 

• What it means to have tough skin and still be the person workers want to call 

Erin explains why safety professionals who stay in the office lose the trust of the people they are trying to protect. Real culture is built by being present, asking questions, and understanding that a procedure written without seeing the work is just paper. 

You will also hear how Erin approaches the harder, quieter parts of this work, the calls that come in after an incident, the workers who are afraid to report, and the difference between reacting with frustration and responding with empathy. 

If you are early in your safety career, managing a team that has stopped listening, or simply looking for a reminder of why this work matters, this episode delivers.