Is your safety program really working, or are you just too close to it to tell?

In this episode of Clocking In, host Mike Smith sits down with Ryan Werner, Industrial Safety Consultant at Robert Dietrick Company, who came to the field the hard way. Two 100-pound steel pipes fell on him during an unloading job in his early 20s. After back surgeries and a career reset, he spent years managing health, safety, and environment inside the kinds of facilities he now audits. He knows what it looks like from both sides of the clipboard.

This episode makes the case for outside safety consultations, not as a red flag, but as standard operating procedure. You'll come away understanding why safety and productivity are not in competition, what an outside audit actually involves, and why the facilities that do this well treat it the same way they treat preventative maintenance on equipment.

Key Takeaways:

• Slowing forklifts down to reduce accidents forced one facility to innovate. They ended up faster and safer.
• Your safety team is reactive by design. Injuries, near misses, contractor questions, they all jump the queue. Floor walks get pushed. An outside consultant shows up with no queue.
• Fresh eyes catch what familiarity hides. If you've walked past something every day for two years, you've stopped seeing it.
• If an outside consultation prevents one injury, it is no longer a safety expense. It is a business decision.

Highlights:
(00:00) Meet Ryan Werner
(00:33) Why you should consider an outside safety consultation or audit
(01:42) The misconception that safety and productivity trade off against each other
(03:13) The knife sharpening machine and the finger that almost wasn't
(04:10) What race cars have to do with running a safer facility
(05:09) How slowing down forklifts made one facility faster
(07:00) The accident that sent Ryan Werner to college and into safety
(09:20) What keeps HSE managers off the floor even when they want to be there
(10:14) Whether it feels threatening when an outsider audits your program
(14:00) The four pillars of an RDC safety consultation
(15:21) Why you get a digital platform, not a spreadsheet
(17:13) The fresh eyes argument, and why walking the same floor every day works against you
(19:16) Preventative maintenance for equipment versus preventative maintenance for safety culture
(21:34) The Monday morning calendar test for knowing if you need outside help

Resources:
Robert Dietrick Company’s LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/robert-dietrick-co./
Mike’s LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/mike-smith-92728864/ 
Download RDC's free 10-category, 50-point facility assessment checklisthttps://rd-co.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/facility_checklist.html