← Construction Leaders Podcast
Loading summary
Transcript23 lines
- [00:03]
A
Welcome to this episode of the Construction Leaders Podcast. I'm one of your hosts, Evan Hendershot, and I'm here with my co host today, Carly Trout of cmaa.
- [00:10]
B
Hi Carly, how are you Doing well, thanks Evan.
- [00:14]
A
Great. Well, we're happy to have you and we're happy to have our guests today. So you may be listening to this episode in the future, but at the time of publication, Construction Safety Week is just around the corner. With that in mind, we're pleased to be joined by Joaquin Diaz, Ambassador and former Board President for the Board of Certified Safety Professionals and current Division Health and Safety Director for Gilbane Building Company. In this episode, Joaquin will share insights from his doctoral research on near miss, reporting from the worker's perspective, including what led him to study the topic, what stood out in the responses, and what employers can learn to help strengthen safety culture. We'll also talk about how this research connects to Construction Safety Week's theme of recognize, responding to and respect. Joaquin, welcome to the podcast.
- [01:01]
C
Thank you Eben and Carly for having me today. I look forward to having a great conversation about my research and how it ties in the Safety Week as well as wrap up with the conversation around professional certifications.
- [01:17]
A
We're happy to have you. I did give a brief introduction in the start of this podcast, but would you mind just giving the our listeners a little rundown of who you are, where you're coming from and why you're here?
- [01:29]
C
Sure. Thank you. When I graduated high school, I'm going to go that far back because it's important to me. I joined the Marines out of high school pre 9 11, so I did not serve in any combat theater. But during my time in the Marine Corps I learned a lot about leadership. There were certain skill sets that I developed during my time there that helped me in my career in safety and more importantly in my career in construction safety. I've been in post Marine discharge. I got into safety by accident. It was not an intended career but somehow I was pulled into it and I have not looked back since. And that has been 27 years. I've worked for some of the largest companies in the world in a construction safety role in globally. As mentioned, I work for Gilbane Building Co. So I've been able to leverage my experiences in those years towards my career here at Gilbane. Also I've been able to leverage my experiences and my observations in my research. I started to pursue a doctorate in public health during COVID I felt that Covid was a very, very interesting time for construction employers, not just dealing with public health policy, but also dealing with worker safety and how we could enhance worker safety with technology, with things like that, and also how to deal with the now new concern of infectious diseases. With that, I helped my previous organization write a pandemic response plan, and that tweaked my interests and that's why I got into public health. And even today, post my doctorate, I still see the application of my public health degree in occupational health and safety. And so I really look forward to talking about that further.
- [03:41]
B
Great. First of all, thank you for your service and thank you for giving us some background and where you're coming from. So let's dive into your research a little bit. And I guess could you tell the listeners maybe who you interviewed for the research and how you went about gathering responses?
- [03:58]
C
Yes. Thank you, Carly. As I was going through my journey, it was about five and a half years towards the end, we had to decide on a particular topic. And when I worked for a large tech company, we kept having a lot of conversations about near misses and do we have enough reported? Why are we having such a wide gap and what we believe is occurring on the job site and what we have been reviewing in our data. And so I really started to dig into why that was, starting with looking at quantitative data. A lot of research is out there that deals with the programmatic benefits of having a robust near miss reporting program and the impact that it has in reducing the number of injuries and illnesses that occur on a construction site. And with employers knowing that and with employers developing programs, we still weren't getting enough near misses reported on a daily basis. So that led me to think that maybe there's a field disconnect. Maybe people that are doing the work in the trades don't understand what a near miss is, or maybe they're feeling pressured to not report a near miss or whatever. So wanted to really dig into that. So my research is what's called an interpretive phenomenological study, meaning I go in and I interview people to gain their lived experiences, to truly understand what they go through with near misses. And I wanted to get it from a field perspective. So we interviewed 15, I should say I interviewed 15 workers of different traits, electricians, carpenters, cement masons, what have you, across four projects from central to southeast Texas, mainly in three parts of the state, San Antonio, Houston and Galveston.
- [06:12]
A
Yeah. So what were the general findings of your research? You obviously mentioned that there were some pressures not to report near misses, but did you find any specific pressures or did you find any specific issues that arose when you were doing these 15 interviews.
- [06:30]
C
Great question, Evan. And let me back up just a little bit. As I was developing this, I had to come up with a conceptual framework for how I would draft my questions to get the responses that dig deep into those experiences. So I use what's called a theory of planned behavior. And the theory of planned behavior has three elements to it. One is volitional control, meaning a person believes that they have control over a specific action or behavior. A subjective norm is how this behavior is viewed by others and then attitude, person's feeling and evaluation of the behavior. So reconstruct constructed the framework of the interviews from those three concepts which within the theory of planned behavior and within that developed three research questions that had to be answered with this. The first one is what are the lived experiences of Texas based construction workers regarding the reporting of near misses? And going into it, a researcher will have their own inherent biases. We think something especially me with 27 years in the industry, I'm assuming and I can't ask questions based on my assumptions, but I'm assuming that people are going to answer a certain way. And what I found is that there is a lot of emotion around safety on the job site from the tool, from the trade perspective or the tools. Okay. And there's a sense of being a watch, a guardian of the fellow worker. And what I found is basically they felt it necessary to support near misses, but they did not always report them. So they understood. And that was one of the assumptions that was broken from my perspective is that workers know what near misses are. Although they couldn't recite a direct definition, they had a general idea. And asking them, when you think of a near miss, what is it? What is one without a technical definition, what do you think one is? And they all responded fairly similar. Something that could have happened, something someone could have been injured or whatever. Some very similar answers. But they also felt that all near misses that did occur did not necessarily need to be reported. That if it was addressed then they could fix it then and there. They also felt that, and I heard this comment a few times, is near misses happen so often that we don't want to bog down our employers with reporting a near miss every time one happens. So there's missed opportunity there from an employer perspective to really learn why there's a high frequency of near misses occurring and the opportunity to develop some form of intervention or program change to really address those. The second research question had to do with if they encountered any barriers when they experience a near miss or Witness a near miss. And another assumption that I had is, and you mentioned it, peer pressure. Right. Is there pressure to not report near misses? And what I basically found there is that the barriers generally are self imposed. If there were very minor instances where a supervisor attempted to tell a worker, don't worry about it, we'll take care of it, that was the exception, not the norm. The norm was we need you to report near misses. And in some cases, what some of the workers stated is that if somebody attempted to interfere with their ability to report a near miss, then in spite, they would report more, not less, which I found very interesting. Another assumption, and I hear this a lot with safety professionals throughout the industry, recognition is a motivating factor to reporting their misses, incentive programs and what have you. And what I found in my research, now granted this is a small section, this small group, 15 people. But what I found out of those 15, pretty much unanimously is that they really don't care about the recognition. They don't really care about the incentive. What they care about are the results. When they do report it, they does the employer act upon it. And that was more important to them than getting a gift card or a T shirt. The other part was whether or not workers had been reprimanded for reporting near misses. And we found as I was going through all the data, hours and hours of interviews and conversations, that reprimand was very few and far between. There wasn't a whole lot of reprimands for reporting their misses. So at the end of the day, and keep this in mind, these are varying employers, big, small and medium. And so what we found is that reprimand for reporting did not really occur. Neither did reprimand for not reporting. So very interesting dynamic to me in dealing with pressures and things like that. The last research question, and I'll wrap up your question, is what are the lived experiences of Texas based construction workers? Because I had to limit it to the region regarding the importance of near miss reporting. So how did they feel? Did they feel that it was important to report near misses? Did they feel it was important to investigate near misses? And overwhelmingly, yes, the feeling of these workers were and their misses were important. They would have conversations with their families and friends and community members about some of the experiences that they had and they felt that those conversations added a lot of value to how they looked at safety on the job and communication and accessibility were a factor. To go back to, I believe Carly asked a question earlier about who I interviewed. I would say 80% to 90% of the workforce were Latino, from Central American and the Caribbean islands and some from Mexico. And they felt that there was a sense of honor and taking care of each other, that there was a sense of community. But they also felt that employers fall short in how they communicate near misses, meaning that there's so many varying definitions of what a near miss is. And I looked at OSHA and I looked at National Safety Council and I looked at the American Society of Safety Professionals. Everybody has their own spin on what a near miss is. And the workers see that and they feel that they understand what one is, but they couldn't provide a true technical definition of what one was. So I think that as an industry, we have to nip that in the bud and have a solid definition that is transferable from job site to job site that people understand.
- [14:19]
B
So this is all very interesting, not just to get the responses of whether or not someone reported a near miss, but the why behind it. So we really appreciate you going into all of that, I guess. I have a question that's twofold. Do you think the employers and the safety leaders on the project would be surprised by those findings? And secondly, what do you hope this research, how do you hope it influences safety professionals and project teams when they approach worker engagement in the future?
- [14:50]
C
Those are two very good questions. I think the first part of it is, yes, I was surprised and I've been doing this a long time and I've worked for global organizations in my career and I've been in a leadership role for a good portion of my career. So I was surprised. I thought I had a very complex understanding of near misses and how often do they occur and all of that. One of the requirements of this research project, I had to do research that hadn't been done before. And part of my literature review strategy was to really find where we looked at the worker's perspective with near misses. And as I mentioned earlier, there is a lot of research on near misses from a programmatic perspective, from a return on investment perspective, from an injury reduction perspective, from a culture enhancement perspective. But the gap was the not understanding what the worker experiences. So what I think occurs from this, another requirement for this research is that we had to express what the positive social impact impact would be for this type of research. And so I had to put in some recommendations. And I think one of that is to do a larger study across bigger regions to understand is this a common thing. I've worked in a lot of states and countries in my career, so the question is, is this transferable, this type of experience Are other workers throughout at least the country experiencing this same situation? So there is a need to do a larger study. I also think from a public health practice perspective, we have to standardize and use multilingual definitions and reporting pathways of near misses and help workers understand. We don't care how many you report throughout the day. We'd rather learn with others, focus our time on learning from these events so that an injury and incident does not happen in the future. So the more we get, the better we get at this. That was, to me, one of the bigger things that in summary, I came up with part of this research and truly integrating near miss data into safety performance criteria, looking at near misses as positive indicator, not a negative indicator. To me, it shouldn't be lumped in within incidents. It should be lumped in into something else, a good catch program or some other form of measurement so that we could take that data and really collate that data into meaningful change.
- [17:50]
A
Yeah, I think we'd be remiss if we didn't talk a little bit about Construction Safety Week before we go. The theme this year is Recognize, respond and respect. How would you say this research that you've worked on ties into this year's theme for Construction Safety Week?
- [18:09]
C
That's a very good question. Gilbane served as chair for this year's Safety Week. Stephen Carter, who's the global head of health and safety for Gilbane, really helped to set the vision for how we look at Safety Week this year. So the first part, recognize, we recognize there's a gap and how we look at near misses, how workers look at near misses. So there's a definite connection there. Respond. I think gathering the information that we did from interviews of these workers helped us to respond to the issue. And then as far as the respect, I think the key thing there when it comes to respect is to respect the voices, to respect their perspectives, to respect their perceptions of near misses and near experiences and really take that energy and create interventions or programmatic changes that really respond to those perceptions and perspectives that we didn't have before. So that's how it all lumps in together. I think the three R's of Safety Week can be applied in a lot of different ways. Even outside of near misses, it can be applied to how you look at safety culture, how you look at a caring culture, how you address hazards and how you address your program and what you want to do with your program. So I do see a big connection between this research and Safety Week.
- [19:44]
B
So for our listeners who are looking to improve their Safety practices in their teams, on their projects. What are one or two simple changes that you would recommend them making right away to get started?
- [19:57]
C
I think we have to listen more to the workers. And I have seen the gap just in my career before this research. There's always been a gap between how leadership looks at safety and how the trades look at safety. And doing this research kind of capitalized on my thoughts about that gap. So I think we have to look at programmatic efforts from a lived experience perspective, really dig into why hazards are happening on the job and what we can do from a more collaborative perspective to make changes. The industry is changing. The technology that we have available at our fingertips has changed. The safety professional needs to change along with it. They need to widen their perspective and transition away from rules based thinking to a people based thinking thinking. Really think about why we're doing this job. And this job is not about OSHA compliance or rules and regulations or policies. This job is really about how do we prevent people from getting hurt and what do we need to do from a people perspective, using recognize, respond and respect as our foundation for that approach.
- [21:23]
A
All right, I think we're gonna take things to a close here. So we'll ask you one final question. Since you're coming from and representing the board of Certified safety Professionals, we should maybe ask you about professional certifications and what role do those play in helping safety leaders build credibility, advance their knowledge, and of course, most importantly, create safer job sites.
- [21:47]
C
Regardless of what certification one pursues, whether it's an STS or a BCSP or even outside of the bcsp, any other certification like me, I have two from outside bcsp, cihqep, and then of course the csp. Early on in my career when I first got my csp, I was one of maybe a few hundred globally that worked in construction that carried the csp. As time has gone on, employers recognize the value of having CSPs on their staff. It doesn't mean they're better than any other safety professional that's not carrying a csp. We're not saying that at all. What it demonstrates to me as a CSP holder is one, it demonstrates competence in understanding management systems and understanding the philosophy around safety. So that helps with competence and it also shows discipline, the ability to do work, to go home, study for hours on end as you prepare for the exam, and to go into a high pressure situation to take an exam and pass. It shows their level of discipline and the ability to handle that type of energy going into an exam. But again, I think the person has to look at what their comfort level is and maybe push a little bit beyond their comfort level and demonstrate that competence and demonstrate that confidence and getting their certifications.
- [23:31]
B
Well, great. And I noticed you do have several letters after your name from certifications and now you can add the PhD right after your research.
- [23:38]
C
Yes. Thank you.
- [23:40]
B
Joaquin, thank you so much for joining the podcast today. Safety is obviously a really important topic to everybody in construction, so we appreciate you for one doing this research and also coming on the podcast and sharing it with the CMAA audience. So thank you again.
- [23:55]
C
Thank you Evan and Carly for having me. I really appreciate it. The CMAA does a lot of great work for the industry itself and I'm glad to be a part of this journey.
- [24:06]
B
We appreciate that. And as Evan mentioned for our listeners, if you are listening to this podcast as it drops this week, May 4th through the 8th is Construction Safety Week. For more information, visit www.constructionsafetyweek.com. be sure to join us for the next episode of the Construction Leaders Podcast. As Evan and I talk to three program management experts within the public transportation sector, we'll dive into the advantages of full life cycle scheduling and how to encourage its use within the public agencies. As always, be sure to subscribe to the podcast so you don't miss that upcoming episode and you can follow us on social media. Maahq, we'd love it if you could leave us a review there. Share your thoughts on today's episode and any ideas for future episodes. On behalf of cmaa, I'm Carly Trout with Evan Hendershot. Thank you for listening.