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- [00:03]
A
Welcome to episode six of the Construction Leaders Podcast, marking the official halfway point through season three. Today we're going to discuss arguably the most important topic in the industry, and that's safety. We all know that construction is a hazardous industry, and as much as construction professionals want to deliver projects on time, under budget and to the owner's satisfaction, it's even more important that everyone comes home safely to their families at the end of the workday. And as we've discussed on some past episodes, this not only pertains to workers physical safety and well being, but their psychological safety as well. On today's episode, we're joined by Justin Ganchau with Caterpillar Safety Services. Justin is a frequent speaker and writer on the impact of culture, leadership and human biology on workplace safety. With over 15 years of experience in environmental education, public health and private industry, he has led improvement initiatives as a consultant to various industries. Justin is a certified safety professional and a Certified Hazardous Materials Manager with degrees in environmental science and biology. And he brings all of that experience to his current role as Business Development Manager with Caterpillar Safety Services. So I want to welcome you to the podcast today, Justin.
- [01:23]
B
Thanks so much for having me.
- [01:25]
A
Is there anything else you would like to add to that to introduce yourself to our listeners?
- [01:29]
B
I really like kayaking, spending time outside and talking about safety. So very nice. If I had to put, yeah, if we could only pick one to do right now, I guess we could be inside and we could talk about safety.
- [01:42]
A
Okay, great. So as I mentioned, we're going to be talking about psychological safety. So can you start off in explain what is psychological safety and how does it impact workplace culture?
- [01:54]
B
Yeah, some people get scared when they hear that term psychological safety. What it's really about is creating an environment where people feel safe, sharing their concerns, sharing their shortcomings, the mistakes that they've made, or challenging the status quo without fear of retaliation or retribution, or being looked down upon by their peers or somebody that they report to. And it's really important in terms of physical safety as well.
- [02:28]
C
Justin, you've been around the block with CMA a couple times now. We've talked to you. How do you on some webinars. We've had you as a keynote speaker during COVID times and safety is obviously one we'd like to talk about. We've done a new definition of safety type of presentation here before. On the podcast with the Suicide Prevention Group, you do a whole presentation on demonstrating commitment and taking safety from the office to the front line. We in the construction management Industry see a lot of resistance to safety because of the liability factor. So why should somebody take safety from the office to the front line with their teams?
- [03:03]
B
Safety just makes good business sense when you think about it. And construction oftentimes to even be considered for a bid, the owner of that project is going to look at the contractors or the designers or whoever it is, it's going to work under them. They're going to look at their experience modification rate, which is a measure of workers comp claims. Those are typically more significant injuries. And so if you don't even get a seat at the table because of an absence of safety protocols, a strong safety culture, accountability on your job sites, it might keep you from even competing. And that's where it's gotta start, is with the people in the office. Because we know that safety and leadership are inextricably linked. People do first and foremost what they think the boss wants them to do. Does that make sense?
- [03:53]
A
Yeah, that makes perfect sense. So in addition to psychological safety, why should that also be something that's proactively fostered within companies?
- [04:03]
B
So psychological safety is linked to physical safety. Because just about every company we talk to, when he asks them, do you have a speak up culture where you tell people if they see something unsafe to speak up and say something about it? Almost all of them say yes. And then if the next question is, do people actually speak up when they see something unsafe? The answer is sometimes. So why is that? Why don't people speak up all the time? And sometimes it's because either they fear their supervisor. If they speak up and say this is an unsafe practice and that's going to stop productivity, they fear that supervisor is going to come down on them. Because now we have thrown off the schedule, for example. So there's a perception from above in the organization that if we stop, we're going to get in trouble. So that's why some people don't speak up. Other times they've spoke up in the past and they had a negative outcome either from the person they spoke up to or from leadership because of the reasons previously mentioned. So fostering that environment where people feel safe, raising their hand, stopping work, asking questions is really important in terms of creating a physical safety on the job site as well.
- [05:17]
A
And Justin, since you've worked for multiple industries, you've been a consultant for various industries, do you see it as more of an issue in the construction industry?
- [05:27]
B
Great question. This concept of psychological safety has been around since the 1950s. And in terms of industrial safety, it really sparked after I Probably shouldn't use the word sparked, but after Three Mile island, that incident, it became more mainstream in the nuclear industry, in chemical manufacturing, in oil and gas. But I've just started hearing about it in construction and in manufacturing really in the last three years. So we're thinking about safety more holistically now than we have in the past. Physical safety still absolutely has to be managed. You still have to have all your policies and procedures and protocols to identify and mitigate risk. But when we start thinking about the whole person in terms of how people think, how they work, how they respond, how they react to leadership, leadership, that's what it really takes to build that resilient safety culture.
- [06:25]
C
So how does psychological safety influence human and organizational performance? And I want to expand on this question, so I want to take it to a two parter for you because I want to know how it influences a human in the organization. But I want to use the example of the Baltimore Key Bridge. And now that people have passed away that were on that bridge in the construction industry, how does it affect the teams that they've worked with or anyone else working on that kind of project, even to rebuild it from the people who were on it at the time or worked with those people that were on at the time?
- [06:56]
B
Yeah, obviously a huge tragedy. And I'm sure we're going to learn a lot more about what went wrong that caused that to happen. And that's the first principle of human organizational performance. If your listeners aren't aware, that is another way of thinking about safety and managing safety. There's five principles. The first one is that people make mistakes. And so that as we as safety managers, as operations leaders, as we think about the systems that our people work within, have we designed them with an understanding that people are going to make mistakes? Because we're human, we're fallible. And the longer we've been doing a task in terms of time on the job, and that could be in the day, the week, the month, the year. I've done this job for 20 years, nothing bad's ever happened. So my perception of risk has changed. Or I've been working a 12 hour shift and now we have compounding factors of fatigue. All of those things drive us to make more mistakes. So if we're designing the job, have we taken that into consideration that if somebody's going to make a mistake, how do we ensure that there are enough safeguards that it doesn't cause a catastrophe? And that could be as simple as we're going to set this beam in place Today. Or it could be looking at the design of a structure in whole. So they call it capacity. Is there enough capacity in our system so that when somebody makes a mistake, we don't suffer a catastrophic failure where somebody gets seriously injured or dies on the job? So that's one way that psychological safety influences human or organizational performance is if people are prone to making mistakes or they see a flaw in a design, will they actually stop and speak up? And in turn, will management listen and respond the right way with gratitude to that person for speaking up, not coming down on them because they stopped work?
- [08:49]
C
I guess I'm looking more like the aspect of, hey, that was my friend and coworker who was out on that bridge. As a team leader, how are you handling your team that had to deal with that loss?
- [09:03]
B
Yeah, absolutely. Going to be mental health implications, which is something beyond psychological safety. That mental health and showing our care and concern for our employees, that's really important. And that's part of seeing people as whole beings and not just somebody that's there to turn a wrench for you. And there are many safety programs that have expanded into that realm. Here at Caterpillar, we have an enterprise strategy, and part of that is cultivating a culture of care, and that's thinking about people holistically. Are we demonstrating our care for our employees? Are we asking the right questions? If someone seems off, they've had a change in their personality, do we know how to ask them the right questions to make sure that they're okay? Because once we understand that people are affected by things off the job, those things don't just stay at home. Right. They bring them with them to work, which causes a greater safety risk. So that is essential in safety programs and something that's often overlooked. We look at the physical hazards on the job, and we don't think about all those other human factors that people bring with us. You can't separate it when you come to work.
- [10:13]
A
Yeah, that is a really good point. Just to look holistically at the humans and not just the jobs that they're doing for you. So is there anything else leaders can do then to create psychologically safe teams?
- [10:26]
B
Yeah. What we've learned is that psychological safety is dependent on the leader of a team because people will do or will not do things depending on what they perceive their leader wants or will respond to. And the first thing that a leader needs to do is admit their own fallibility, to acknowledge that they don't have all the answers, acknowledge that they've made mistakes, and when they get called out by somebody on their team to thank them for it. They need to encourage that. And that's hard for some people to have really strong egos. We see the cause of most toxic leadership conditions is because of that ego of a leader who's unwilling to admit that they're wrong to share the spotlight and to elevate other people because they feel like it makes them look bad. So that's one way is admit that you make mistakes. The second is to create an intentional space for people to share their ideas and their concerns about what's working and not working. And I do this with my own team. So I lead a business development team, and we have quarterly meetings where I get my team together and we talk about what's working, not working, and what their ideas are to make it better. Because I know that they've got really great ideas, and it's not all about me. Another one is to spend time in the trenches, sometimes literally in the trenches with your people, to understand their reality. If we are creating business processes, if we're creating safety policies and procedures from the office, we don't spend time in the field seeing how those things are actually carried out and impacting people's daily lives. It could cause the perception that we're out of touch with their reality. So our leaders need to spend time doing the jobs or at least working alongside the people doing the task. And that creates a lot of that connection. It builds trust and understanding of what's going on out there in the real world.
- [12:27]
C
So speaking of understanding what's going on in the real world, in construction, we're doing projects that are 24 hours a day sometimes, especially when weather causes delays or something causes the delay. And now you're working around the clock. How do you manage fatigue?
- [12:41]
B
Yeah, fatigue is one of those things that we can't escape because it's part of our biology. And as I've gotten older, I'm not going to say how old I am, but I've noticed that I can't bounce back nearly as well as I could 10 or 20 or more years ago. And the same is true of our workers. And they're out there doing physical labor. And it's incumbent upon the organization to be considering people's biology. Do we have them working overtime for extended periods? Are we asking them to shift from day shift to night shift and not allowing that transition period? Are we training them on how they should be adjusting their diet? Because you have to eat differently if you're on night shift than you are day shift? A lot of people don't know that because our body is evolved in a way to process foods differently during the daytime, during the nighttime.
- [13:36]
C
My wife tells me that all the time, but I still don't listen. I'm just always on a diet.
- [13:42]
B
Yeah, I don't think I can help you there. But it is something that we absolutely have to consider. And we actually have training solutions to help organizations manage fatigue. And we train frontline employees. Obviously, we work in mining. We work in construction and utilities and manufacturing. There's about 12 different industries that we serve around the world. And fatigue is one of those often overlooked human factors that can be detrimental, especially if you have people doing hazardous work.
- [14:09]
A
So if you're looking at your team today or even at the company level, what are some ways you can evaluate whether or not you have a psychologically safe environment, and how do you know if you're providing that environment to your employees?
- [14:24]
B
I ask the same question all the time to potential customers. How do you know? How do you know people are reporting things? Are they reporting the minor incidents that, if left unchecked, could evolve into much bigger things? Usually the recommendation is to get a third party to come in and ask some of those questions to understand the cultural implications, because people are likely to open up to somebody outside. They'll tell you the good, the bad, and the ugly. And we also want to know the good stuff so that we don't do away with that. But asking them about those processes, near miss processes, incident reporting processes, asking them anecdotally about times where they saw something and didn't speak up and why. I can think of specific times where we've gone in and talked to an organization, and they're like, oh, we have a no blame culture. We want people to report everything, which sounds great. The management is saying that we go to the field and we ask them, what's your incident investigation process like? And they said, it's a firing squad. Literally. That's the words they use. They're like, they call us in. They say it's no blame, but we're on one side of the table, and leadership's all on the other side. They're asking us what we did wrong to cause an incident. That's another aspect of that human and organizational performance way of managing safety is to not start at the person and work your way backwards in a linear fashion to understand what caused an incident, but look more broadly at what was happening in the environment in terms of things that the organization controlled, like the schedule, how much overtime they've been working? Did they have delays in the project that caused added pressure that maybe made people work more quickly than they were used to working, so maybe they were taking shortcuts and risks. It's a broader look at what is happening within the environment that might have caused an incident. Because when we start at the person and work our way back and we stop there, it automatically assumes that person was guilty and that human reaction to want to blame something or someone after an incident, it's natural, but it's not right. And that will devolve your culture and erode psychological safety versus treating that person like an expert to understand what went wrong. So we can fix things in the organization and doesn't mean that they don't have any accountability in it at all. But we have to look at a broader level if we want to learn and improve as an organization.
- [16:53]
C
Yeah, I wholeheartedly agree and this topic is very dear to my heart. We had the alliance for Suicide Prevention and Construction on this podcast last year. We talked about suicide as a mental issue and psychological issue. That is one of the biggest industries that plagues this construction. So I'm curious, what role does Caterpillar play in the realm of psychological safety within construction?
- [17:18]
B
Yeah, we help organizations understand where they are currently. So as Carly asked, we have assessments that we can conduct formal assessments where employees provide anonymous feedback on how things are going from a cultural standpoint, which includes psychological safety factors. We we also look at how well they feel cared for by the organization. How do leaders respond to personal issues? Do they know how to have those conversations? And then we have solutions where we upskill leaders to demonstrate care, show that safety is a value, have those sometimes challenging personal conversations with their team members. So safety services here at Caterpillar, we're a full service consulting and training organization that happens to be owned by Caterpillar. So we apply our 50 years of experience to help organizations deal with some of these things that are really challenging. And they, as we've been talking, that needs to go above and beyond the typical things that people consider safety management. We still need to deal with trips and falls and lockout, tag out, rigging and all those technical side of safety. But it's these other things that are more about developing that resilient mindset and having leaders proactively and positively manage safety and build ownership from the employee workforce so that we do actually send everyone home safe.
- [18:48]
A
Justin, I think we have time for just one more question. And sometimes we asked our guests if they could look in their crystal ball and see what the Future holds. You mentioned that this is fairly new for the construction industry, that you've just heard about it more in the past three years. So maybe look five years down the road. And what do you think the industry will be doing going forward in the future?
- [19:10]
B
I think it's evolving right now and it really has a lot to do with today's workforce. What I've seen change in the past four years is that people are less loyal to a company that doesn't show that they. They care for the employee. And that absolutely has implications in safety. If people don't feel like the company cares about them, cares about their safety, is listening to them, is involving them, they'll go down the road to a competitor for a dollar more an hour. And this is especially true in the labor ranks, but it's true in management as well. And I think those companies that are listening and they're evolving their safety management philosophies to include things like psychological safety, like building ownership from the employee standpoint, changing mindsets, leading positively and proactively. I think those are the companies that are going to come out on top because everyone's struggling to find enough employees and keep them. And those that have the best culture are keeping the employees. We hear it every day. And so I think that's where it's going to go. It's going to be a more holistic approach at safety. It's going to include mental health as well. And I think those groups out there that are focused on suicide prevention are doing incredible work and it's very much needed. So we're all in this together, and the more we focus on the person, we think of them holistically, the better we're all going to be.
- [20:41]
C
You're not going to hear any arguments from us, that's for sure. So after hearing everything you told us, Justin, there is that definitely a lot more we can do to ensure psychological safety on the job sites. I noticed you have a short assessment in your email right underneath your email signature. It says to see if leaders within your organization inspire safe behavior. You can take this short assessment. And you talked about assessments earlier, so I want to make sure we get this website out there that's catcat.com safety and you can find lots of other assessments and workshops there. And hopefully you too will be a little bit more conscious of psychological safety on your next project. Justin, as always, we thank you for enlightening us and for your time on the podcast today. On the next Construction Leaders podcast, we'll be joined by the CEO of Building cybersecurity to hear about something none of us want to talk about or think about but all of us should be listening to, and that's technology on construction projects and how security is vital to the success. Make sure to download or subscribe to the podcast and follow us on social media @cmaa_hq. Don't forget to leave us a review with your thoughts on today's episode, and let us know what you'd like to hear on an upcoming podcast. On behalf of cmaa, I'm Nick Soto with Carly Trout. Thank you for listening.